Pig musicology part 1

Hotly on the tail of my last post, I've remembered that I've been meaning to write more posts about one of my great loves: music.

There really are a great many topics to cover here, but for the first foray, I thought I'd write about bands and their influences. I'm always intrigued where I can hear a music figure that sounds like its player (and in the case of most bands that'll actually be the person who has written at least some of the music - quite the converse of 'classical' composition) has taken on board something else that they've listened to.

This can end up with the musical idea (or the sound/s used to execute that idea - think of guitarists playing specific guitar/pickup/amplifier/speaker combinations to achieve a certain sound) either drawing on and reinterpreting a certain style - which is where a great many of the developments of Western music have come from, versus slavishly following an existing template in a way which fails to surpass the original in any sense.

When I get excited by bands, it's usually because they fit that classic realm of sound which is *just* familiar enough to be slightly accessible, but different enough to maintain my interest in what they're doing. Sometimes this can take the form of being able to hear their influences, and how they've decided to rework them to fashion something new. You can take a band like Biffy Clyro and examine their first album, which their press info at the time said was influenced by Far and Mineral. Yes, I can hear both of those bands, but the resultant songwriting is also something reasonably individual. Fast forward to the point at which they recorded The Vertigo of Bliss and you have a far superior beast, as it's a band that's reworked itself and pushed its own development down certain lines, becoming substantially more than the sum of its parts.

There's another band called Sucioperro who hail from the same parts of Scotland as BC. We played on a lineup with them last Summer and I also watched them supporting Dive Dive quite recently at the Railway, Winchester. Try as I might, they're not a band I can enjoy, because their sound and their songwriting is pretty much identical to BC. There are whole choruses where you can overlay BC vocal lines, and that's no good if your ear is looking for something to interest you based on the music being a little different, a little familiar. I can't listen to what they're doing and enjoy it because I've heard the original and it sounds better. The same goes for a band we played with a couple of times called Cats & Cats & Cats. They were okay, but I couldn't really get into what they were doing with any enthusiasm because the songs were close to being carbon copies of Explosions in the Sky welded to Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies. So much so, that while I was listening to them with the rest of the band, we'd get to a new section and all be saying to each other "oh, now the Explosions bit...". Both of these bands are considerably more popular than my band, so what do I know, anyway.

Coming to that, I guess I could be accused of being in a band that's fairly indebted to several other bands, but I genuinely believe that the longer we're playing together, the less we sound directly comparable to other bands that we like. I guess that, stylistically, we're within a certain bracket, but the idiosyncracies we've picked up along the way (and sometimes it'll be just one or two of us in the band that start to get into something that the rest of the band then doesn't really ever hear - take me an Dave listening to Faraquet and taking on a little of that jazziness, for instance) are what keeps it fresh and interesting to be involved with. I suppose as long as it keeps evolving off on its own little tangent, I'll still want to be making music this way.