Is there an album ruined more by machine-gun drumming than MBV's Ecstasy & Wine?

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Almost every single song on Ecstasy & Wine has the machine-gun drumfill every 4 measures. Take that out, and I think this album would be much more highly regarded than it is.

I can just barely tolerate the kind of drumming where there's a big stupid fill at the end of every phrase, followed by a triumphant crash cymbal. But if the aforementioned big stupid fill is just lots of 16th notes on the snare, or, if the drummer really wants to go crazy, a few toms are thrown in as well, I just can't stand it.

Just to clarify, I don't hate the machine-gun drumfill by itself, if it's used with a sliver of taste. It's the every 10 seconds regularity of it that I hate.

Eric's Trip's drummer is guilty of this as well.

― Zachary Scott (Zach S), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 07:42 (nineteen years ago)

Oh boy, I was just going to say Eric's Trip.

― NickB (NickB), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 07:47 (nineteen years ago)

I'm also thinking of Grant Hart on 'Makes No Sense At All' - is he the progenitor of this style in a noise-pop sort of context?

― NickB (NickB), Tuesday, 27 June 2006 07:49 (nineteen years ago)

Bloc Party occasionally cross this very fine line.

― Cracks (Crackity), Wednesday, 28 June 2006 22:19 (nineteen years ago)

Bloc Party has enough going on in the foreground to distract you, though. But yeah... Hart is a major offender and maybe the inventor.

― Johnny Fever (johnny fever), Wednesday, 28 June 2006 22:23 (nineteen years ago)

I like the way this sounds in noise-pop...

― unnamedroffler (xave), Wednesday, 28 June 2006 22:45 (nineteen years ago)

x-post But Grant's drum fills in "Makes No Sense At All" feel like important parts of the composition, sort of the opposite of a pregnant pause. It's a place where the machine gun fill helps push the song forward the way a plain ol' pause wouldn't.

― Josh in Chicago (Josh in Chicago), Wednesday, 28 June 2006 23:32 (nineteen years ago)

Ecstasy and Wine isn't really an album - it's a collection of singles and b-sides.

I'm going to defend the drumming. They guy's a fucking amayzing drummer. He drummed in a supercharged Keith Moon style that was totally beyond what most bands of that style were capable of. Why not represent that on record? I love that period of MBV and partly it's because of the drumming. The current standard for drumming (in the indie-rock genre) is that the drums are well played butlack personality, or they are big and thumpy in the style of the The Fall. Just the fact that this thread exists is evidence enough for me (love it or hate it, you can't ignore it etc).

― everything (everything), Thursday, 29 June 2006 00:18 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, I have to say I kind of like the single-mindedness of Colm's drumming around this point -- I half-remember seeing someone describe it as being "like a bag of bones thrown at a chair," which is good. Maybe part of the issue is that the guitars are all so blurred together that you don't always get much sense of tempo -- the rhythm of it fades a little -- and so hearing Colm racing along in the background sounds really propulsive: it's making the whole song go "fast," even when the other instruments feel almost neutral, tempo-wise. (I think I've always liked things where guitars play very little rhythm or long, vague riffs, and the drums push along way faster than anyone wants to hear guitars strummed.) The other thing ... well, there's a certain boneheadedness to that machine-gun fill, which actually kind of helps, if you ask me -- MBV of that era just coming out of being a super-jangly pop band, and those fills sounding kind of gleefully single-minded. Very happy, really.

Though that aspect worked much better toward the end of the Conway period (say, "Another Rainy Saturday"), when the vocals had the same quality.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 29 June 2006 00:58 (nineteen years ago)

I shouldn't say the guitars on that one all blur together, but even as of The New Record By they were doing that thing where one guitar was just a sheet of noise, and then in the opposite speaker was a nice polite jangle.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 29 June 2006 01:00 (nineteen years ago)

It's only the early stuff where MBV's drumming bothers me. It's excellent on Isn't Anything. I always hear about how powerful the drummer was during the live shows, and listening to Isn't Anything, it makes sense. On Loveless his drums are triggered and he's buried underneath six feet of guitars, so it's kind of a non-factor.

Nabisco, I can see your point about Colm's drumming being the propulsive element in songs filled with "long, vague riffs". My problem with the songs on Ecstasy & Wine is that there are a billion different ways to be a propulsive drummer, but he uses only one way, consistently, from song to song.

It would be like an album in which the guitar used the same phaser effect on every single song.

― Zachary Scott (Zach S), Thursday, 29 June 2006 03:16 (nineteen years ago)

one year passes...

On Loveless his drums are triggered and he's buried underneath six feet of guitars, so it's kind of a non-factor.

omg they killed the drummer. totally true. no wonder i don't get this music.

― tipsy mothra, Saturday, 5 January 2008 06:34 (eighteen years ago)

i have never heard machine-gun drumming mbv. i started at loveless. (kind of like starting at the third v.u. album -- it's cool, but you don't know what it used to be.) but so probably i'd love machine-gun drumming mbv.

― tipsy mothra, Saturday, 5 January 2008 06:37 (eighteen years ago)

Loveless would be so much better without any percussion.

― ledge, Saturday, 5 January 2008 10:45 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah machine-gun drumming is great (though it doesn't really belong on Loveless).

― Curt1s Stephens, Saturday, 5 January 2008 18:25 (eighteen years ago)

it puts the punk in their amped-up-Strawberry-Alarm-Clock routine

― Curt1s Stephens, Saturday, 5 January 2008 18:25 (eighteen years ago)

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