Tuesday Tunes
I mentioned it last week, there is now a playlist with every song from every Tuesday Tunes Blog, it’s called Tuesday Tunes on Spotify (because that’s my primary portal for music discovery since GrooveShark) and the link is nestled amongst the others at the end of this blog. As I continue to build the blog up I’ll add new songs to it. If you follow the playlist, you may even get a sneak preview into the songs i’ll be featuring in the upcoming blog.
For the sake of regularity, the 7th of each month will be the day Luthiery Log goes up. For those outside the know, I’m building a guitar, and Luthiery Log is where I chronicle my rise to power. So look forward to the 7th of each month.
I’m also looking to attend more gigs this year, having already been to the Auckland Folk Fest and Ninja Sex Party / TWRP. But I’m unsure how much value a post-mortem for gigs will be. Maybe I’ll try a couple and see if they feel good. Anyway, song time.
The Song(s)
Song: ‘The Cult of Dionysus’ and ‘NYC Girl’
Artist: The Orion Experience
Album: Cosmicandy - 2007 and ‘NYC Girl - EP’ - 2011, both released by ‘Sweet!’
Method of discovery: Spotify Discover thinking I’m a Hippie, then a Socialite
Research: Cathy Arnold, of PopMatters, described the debut album as follows:
Cosmicandy is an ice cold fruity cocktail in the middle of a summer heat wave.
I think that’s a fair description. The album invokes thoughts of music from the 70s with production values from the future. I had to go deep into google to find that quote too, as in, four pages deep. No one goes that deep anymore. There’s not much on the band that I could find beside the lead singer lending his name to the band, Orion Simprini, which sounds like a child mispronouncing Lion Symphony. Now I want to see one of those. They also put on a show with Costume Designer Andrea Hood, which looks like it was fun judging by Orion’s smile.
Dionysus is the Ancient Greek God of wine, theatre, fertility, and all around having-a-good-party-time. His Roman equivalent was Bacchus, and the Egyptian was Osiris. ‘The Cult of Dionysus’ embraces this attitude lyrically, wanting to rekindle the ‘lust for life’ by suggesting all sorts of drunken sexual activity. It’s not exactly a ‘new religion’, with Dionysian worship starting maybe as early as 1500 BC.
NYC Girl lists some of the places in New York that i’ve never been, but have seen represented in several movies and TV Shows: Brooklyn (Nine-Nine!), Queens (King of), Staten Island (The Other Guys), Harlem (Die Hard with a Vengeance) and the Lower East Side (Men in Black).
Personal thoughts:
Man, these are just boppy good times. There’s a bit of mythology, clever lyrics, great musical devices. This is just very well produced without being cookie-cutter radio pop music. No instrument feels out of place or wears out its welcome. The vocals blend together perfectly, and are tighter than Terry Crews’ Pecs.
Theory: ‘Dionysus’ centres around the persistent Bass and the metronomical drums, carrying the momentum everywhere except the bridge, and the chords are only structurally present. The Verses do hover around vi-I-IV-II for the verses, and are pretty stable with the changes. The chorus speeds up the changes with IV-iii-vi-I, only hitting the 1st and third chord the first time round, and concluding with V-II. The bridge is the solitary calming island in the pounding sea of the song, much more stable, hitting the three primary stable Chords first, cementing the key centre with IV-I-V-vi-III.
NYC is a slower feel, and though the Bass is still more active than only hitting root notes, this is much more a band ensemble, strings swelling in and out, the vocal line is backed up by the guitar harmonising the rhythym … rythm … [furious googling] … rhythm. It’s a rarer song that had the same progression for the Verses and Chorus (vi-iii-IV-ii-V). But don’t worry, the Pre-chorus that separates them provides more variety, first going through IV-I-III-vi-I, it starts the same, but ends the second time on the Dominant (IV-I-V-I-V), and the last time ending with a major/minor shift in the final two chords (IV-I-III-VI-[II-iv]), which gives the song momentum to head back to the chorus. The Bridge goes through IV-V-vi-I twice before finishing with IV-V-vi-II-iv-III, and the whole song ends on a downer of iv.
Give it a go: If you want to hear some new stuff that sounds like it’s turning 50.
Give it a miss: If your religion forbids the musical worship of false idols or lovely women.
[links]
Wikipedia: The Orion Experience, Dionysus
Spotify: The Cult of Dionysus, NYC Girl, Tuesday Tunes
Sources: Pop Matters Article, Andrea Hood
Socila Media: Twitter(The Orion Experience, Orion Simprini), Facebook
Other Music Links: Soundcloud, Bandcamp