• Analysis of The Beatles' White Album

Heavy Metal

• Metal In Theory
  
  • This is a great website, the equivalent of (and possibly even better than) Rap Analysis.
  • Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (Song)
    
  • Metallica - Master of Puppets
    • He notes that the entire band seems to shorten a particular note, changing where the beat actually hits, every 5th(?) measure.
      

Misc

The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema

- They use a lot of unmelodic riffs of secondary instruments to create a slightly weird and interesting overall sound. The idea reminds me of how you can do the same thing when playing chords on a piano; Bach does that at times in that piece I learned from the Well-Tempered Clavier: he'll be on good chords, then have an off-balance, weird sounding chord, then he'll switch to another solid-sounding chord
Example: The trumpets in Stacked Crooked that play when the woman is going "ooooooooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh"

- They use the same kind of poetic, "I have no idea what you're talking about" lyrics that the Beatles did so well, except with the Beatles 1) I could clearly make out the lyrics, and 2) I got a feeling that they were really saying something, but it was in code, whereas with TNP, 1) I often can't make out everything they're saying, so I just start to ignore the lyrics, and 2) when I can make out what they're saying, it sounds like they were just reaching for poetic-sounding language rather than actually having a message they're trying to convey. I think both methods work.