pre-grunge songs that have the quiet verse / superloud chorus /quiet verse structure

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― underpants of the gods, Friday, 6 April 2007 10:51 (eighteen years ago)

HI DERE PIXIES

― Noodle Vague, Friday, 6 April 2007 10:54 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, just about everything from The Pixies.

― NYCNative, Friday, 6 April 2007 12:54 (eighteen years ago)

Ramble On.

― chap, Friday, 6 April 2007 13:06 (eighteen years ago)

"Here Comes The Flood" by Peter Gabriel

― Geir Hongro, Friday, 6 April 2007 15:14 (eighteen years ago)

(albeit in a completely different way than with grunge)

― Geir Hongro, Friday, 6 April 2007 15:14 (eighteen years ago)

Is it not public knowledge Cobain's claim that he swiped all his best tricks from the Pixies?

― libcrypt, Friday, 6 April 2007 15:15 (eighteen years ago)

Greg Sage - Wipers, non?

― factcheckr, Friday, 6 April 2007 15:26 (eighteen years ago)

I remember Sting bragging once that The Police did the quiet verse/loud chorus structure a lot before Nirvana, although I guess reggae verse/springy pop chorus is kind of a different animal.

― Alex in Baltimore, Friday, 6 April 2007 15:31 (eighteen years ago)

it all started with "Sun God" by Squirrel Bait. even mark arm will tell you that.

― scott seward, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:00 (eighteen years ago)

the AMG thing on sun god is pretty good! :

"Sun God" is one of the standout tracks from Squirrel Bait's self-titled debut. It's a powerfully dynamic song that would influence many alternative bands and prove to be a precursor of the metal, pop, and punk fusion that would later be known as grunge. "Sun God" showcases the band's dynamic muscle, opening with rather gently picked guitar and building drums into a somewhat sparse verse, where singer Peter Searcy delivers his vocal with an emphatic rasp reminiscent of Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. Drummer Ben Daughtrey displays considerable chops, combining dexterity and speed with an indulgent flair, tossing in mini-fills, and creating a more polished metal vibe to the recording. The tempo is swift, with tension building throughout the verse. The lyrics are minimal, simply describing the sun's spirit-lifting effect: "I feel the power of the sun on my back/So good that he is God/My life, as my mind's ticking away." The chorus releases a torrent of distorted guitars, drums pounding straight-ahead, as Search lets loose a passionate sandpaper yowl, drawing out the repeated line, "Ticking' away/Ticking' away/Tick-tick-ticking' away," sounding eerily like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. The middle section features an instrumental workout, walls of guitar pausing occasionally for Daughtrey to showcase his skills behind the drum kit, letting fly with several speedy fills before returning to the quiet intro heard at the beginning of the song. In hindsight, "Sun God" is striking in its obvious foreshadowing of what was to become a major change in music. An influential hybrid of pop, hardcore punk, and metal that would ultimately only be heard by a few independent rock fans, perhaps due to Squirrel Bait's brief, two-album career and minor-label distribution, but would go on to spawn a huge mainstream and commercial trend some five years later."

― scott seward, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:02 (eighteen years ago)

Grunge being influenced by Pixies isn't exactly news. Grunge being influenced by The Police and Peter Gabriel though... :)

Also, lots of 70s prog to thread.

― Geir Hongro, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:04 (eighteen years ago)

And btw. weren't there about a Zillion late 80s powerballads who had this exact structure too?

― Geir Hongro, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:07 (eighteen years ago)

Black Sabbath - Iron Man
Minutemen - Retreat

― John Splith, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:16 (eighteen years ago)

also, Spiderland by Slint and i suppose a load of other hardcore/emo/math/post-rock/whatever stuff from that time. why do people associate the technique with grunge all the time?

― John Splith, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:22 (eighteen years ago)

uh, cuz of Nirvana

― sexyDancer, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:32 (eighteen years ago)

Black Sabbath - Iron Man

wtf, the verses on that song are RAGING

― Alex in Baltimore, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:51 (eighteen years ago)

spiderland isn't pre-grunge. squirrel bait were pre-grunge. pre-pixies even.

― scott seward, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:52 (eighteen years ago)

I can't think of any specific songs but there's got to be a handful of Hüsker Dü songs that fit the bill.

― NYCNative, Friday, 6 April 2007 16:52 (eighteen years ago)

I'd say Led Zeppelin II was pretty much pre-grunge. (Pre-"Crunge" too.)

― Myonga Vön Bontee, Saturday, 7 April 2007 16:32 (eighteen years ago)

Yeah, "What Is and What Should Never Be" in addition to "Ramble On." Part of why I always found it odd that the Pixies always get credit for that trick. Besides, like Geir said, most rock ballads do something like this: "More Than a Feeling," "Here I Go Again," "Nobody's Fool," etc.

― Sundar, Saturday, 7 April 2007 17:27 (eighteen years ago)

i think there's a difference between the squirrel bait/pixies/nirvana thing and the power ballad thing. those power ballads all build very carefully toward those chorus payoffs, with prechoruses or bridges or whatever you want to call them paving the way. the pixes thing was about sudden, jarring shifts in arrangement and dynamics, without seeming to build toward them. which is really just a logical, postmodern response to all those power ballads, probably.

― fact checking cuz, Saturday, 7 April 2007 17:56 (eighteen years ago)

the led zeppelin songs mentioned above, on the other hand, do exactly what the pixies, nirvana, etc., did.

― fact checking cuz, Saturday, 7 April 2007 17:57 (eighteen years ago)

the thing about the squirrel bait song is that it sounds almost EXACTLY like nirvana. so much so that when i first heard nirvana i thought it might be a new squirrel bait album! and squirrel bait were just cribbing from husker du. and, yeah, it's different then songs that just have the soft/loud/soft thing going on. lots of stuff had that before grunge.

― scott seward, Saturday, 7 April 2007 18:08 (eighteen years ago)

the animals - "don't bring me down"
the who - "behind blue eyes"
green - "i play the records"
the jam - "the butterfly collector"
pere ubu - "final solution"
wire - "12xu"
neil young & the restless - "don't cry" (tho "pre-grunge" is probably stretching it here; recorded in 1989)

― Lawrence the Looter, Sunday, 8 April 2007 02:06 (eighteen years ago)

uh dude, this is like WAY TOO MANY songs.

― the table is the table, Sunday, 8 April 2007 02:09 (eighteen years ago)

brick in the wall part 2? at least to me...

― wesley useche, Sunday, 8 April 2007 02:36 (eighteen years ago)

How could I forget, track four on Metallica albums two through four - Fade To Black, Sanitarium and One.

― chap, Sunday, 8 April 2007 03:08 (eighteen years ago)

uh dude, this is like WAY TOO MANY songs.

-- the table is the table, Saturday, April 7, 2007 9:09 PM (Yesterday)

seriously! this is like one of the oldest pop music tricks in the book! does anyone seriously think this was started by Pixies/Grunge/Nirvana or whatever?

― latebloomer, Sunday, 8 April 2007 05:27 (eighteen years ago)

four years pass...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H--_-gPX3Nw

― solitary posts that effortlessly summarize the spirit of ilxor (ilxor), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 13:30 (fourteen years ago)

"Black Sabbath - Iron Man"

The inclusion of this song on this thread is mind-boggling.

― Thraft of Cleveland (Bill Magill), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 14:49 (fourteen years ago)

Fugazi--Waiting Room

― kornrulez6969, Wednesday, 18 May 2011 15:18 (fourteen years ago)

The Steppes - The Sky Is Falling, from their brilliant 1987 debut Drop Of The Creature

― kornrulez6969, Wednesday, 18 May 2011 15:23 (fourteen years ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhs3Rj71gpo

― it's a meme i made and i like (Steve Shasta), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 15:26 (fourteen years ago)

I always thought one of the prototypical examples of the whole quiet/loud "thing" has to be Dancing With The Moonlit Knight?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Spl1cOf-o

― Kim, Wednesday, 18 May 2011 15:29 (fourteen years ago)

Gouge Away has the loud verses/whispered choruses

― excitebikable boy (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 15:56 (fourteen years ago)

(except at the end)

― excitebikable boy (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 15:57 (fourteen years ago)

"Is she really going out with him" Joe Jackson

― Mark G, Wednesday, 18 May 2011 16:09 (fourteen years ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zmhvJpTELc

^ the original 'It's Oh So Quiet'

― immer wieder, ralf & günther (NickB), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 16:19 (fourteen years ago)

"Black Sabbath - Iron Man"
The inclusion of this song on this thread is mind-boggling.

LOL, I know, it doesn't even have a chorus!

seriously! this is like one of the oldest pop music tricks in the book! does anyone seriously think this was started by Pixies/Grunge/Nirvana or whatever?

OTM. It's called contrast. Not just the oldest pop music trick in the book, but kind of a fundamental way to structure any piece of art.

― unmetalled world (wk), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 17:08 (fourteen years ago)

More reps for The Bait and 'Sun God'.

Still love this song

― Jessie Fer Ark (Mobbed Up Ping Pong Psychos), Wednesday, 18 May 2011 17:57 (fourteen years ago)

agreed. the bait were masters of this technique.

― candlecart, Wednesday, 18 May 2011 20:40 (fourteen years ago)

I always thought one of the prototypical examples of the whole quiet/loud "thing" has to be Dancing With The Moonlit Knight?

Does "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight" have a verse and chorus in the traditional sense though?

― Hongroe (Geir Hongro), Thursday, 19 May 2011 10:36 (fourteen years ago)

OTM. It's called contrast. Not just the oldest pop music trick in the book, but kind of a fundamental way to structure any piece of art.

― unmetalled world (wk), Wednesday, May 18, 2011 10:08 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

OTM. it's ridiculously easy to find examples of this. but that's not what was significant about kurt's songwriting style. the "grunge" thing under discussion isn't soft/loud/soft pop dynamics, it's the post-hardcore combination of that familiar strategy with deliberate, shrieking noise. therefore, yeah, squirrel bait, husker du, the pixies, nirvana, etc. dino jr, too.

― contenderizer, Thursday, 19 May 2011 13:11 (fourteen years ago)

^this is a lot closer to what I'm hearing; I always felt like ppl credited Pixies w/ the formula, but I feel like Pixies were rarely as formulaic or diagrammatic as quiet-verse/LOUD-CHORUS suggests (unlike Nirvana ca. Nevermind). This is why I brought up Gouge Away, which for most of the song subverts the 'formula' by offering loud verses and quiet choruses (& also subverts another technique that the Pixies did legitimately lean on--the three-bar figure--by making the main figure five bars instead)

did Huskers du much with this technique?

― excitebikable boy (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:22 (fourteen years ago)

No Geir, it doesn't. That doesn't stop me from thinking that it's the same trick though.

― Kim, Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:30 (fourteen years ago)

(if u thought i was geir before...)

in the solo acoustic demo Black Francis cuts before the Purple Tape that was included as disc 1 of Frank Black Francis, Black Francis calls Caribou the song "that's supposed to sound like Husker Du"...Caribou kind of demonstrates what I'm talking about: it's never really quiet, in that the loud noisy end part is not played at that much greater volume than verses. Quiet/loud doesn't work. Whoever did the Pixies write up in the SPIN Alternative Record Guide (I think Weisbard...?) suggested 'cooked/raw' which I like a lot more. S Reynolds used 'luscious/haggard' which I totally love. Nirvana was quiet/loud, and I think Pixies pointed the way for that, but I don't they really hewed to that dynamic themselves

― excitebikable boy (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:35 (fourteen years ago)

(oh u were actually talking to geir lol)

― excitebikable boy (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:37 (fourteen years ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtsmuVA0m7c&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aht9hcDFyVw

― brio, Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:37 (fourteen years ago)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w-_Vtttrfc

― brio, Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:41 (fourteen years ago)

lol. Yeah sorry, I'm on mobile and didn't bother to quote.

― Kim, Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:41 (fourteen years ago)

Keep thinking about the Zombies "brief candles" in relation to this thread.

― Trip Maker, Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:45 (fourteen years ago)

oh shit - missed this:

it's ridiculously easy to find examples of this. but that's not what was significant about kurt's songwriting style. the "grunge" thing under discussion isn't soft/loud/soft pop dynamics, it's the post-hardcore combination of that familiar strategy with deliberate, shrieking noise. therefore, yeah, squirrel bait, husker du, the pixies, nirvana, etc. dino jr, too.
― contenderizer,

still fun to have an excuse to listen to suspicious minds this morning

― brio, Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:46 (fourteen years ago)

it's all good Kim, I just forgot Geir posted right above the post I responded to

― excitebikable boy (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 19 May 2011 14:47 (fourteen years ago)

No Geir, it doesn't. That doesn't stop me from thinking that it's the same trick though.

It's a similar old trick, that has been around since the baroque era. And that trick is all over Genesis' catalogue. The quite-verse-loud-chorus-build is still rather typical of grunge era songs though.

― Hongroe (Geir Hongro), Saturday, 21 May 2011 22:39 (fourteen years ago)

The Ballad of Jerry Curlan - Angry Samoans

― m0stlyClean, Monday, 23 May 2011 23:48 (fourteen years ago)

three years pass...

Beyond the Realms of Death-Judas Priest

― Prince Kajuku (Bill Magill), Friday, 11 July 2014 21:05 (ten years ago)

I Want You (She's So Heavy)

― LimbsKing, Friday, 11 July 2014 22:08 (ten years ago)

more than a feeling

― brimstead, Friday, 11 July 2014 22:18 (ten years ago)

The Ballad of Jerry Curlan - Angry Samoans

superb call

pre dating Squirrel Bait's mighty swirl.

'Refrigerator Heaven" The Freeze

― Jessie Fer Ark (Mobbed Up Ping Pong Psychos), Friday, 11 July 2014 22:30 (ten years ago)

Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass - Without Her (1969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP5eNQJpIjc

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Friday, 11 July 2014 22:53 (ten years ago)

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