Sasquatch! Music Festival - You're The Best, Around: Drums

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Sasquatch! Music Festival :: Non-Sasquatch Discussion :: Music Related :: You're The Best, Around: Drums

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Topic: You're The Best, Around: Drums (Read 3,468 times)

Horned Gramma
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Re: You're The Best, Around: Drums
« Reply #15 on Jul 7, 2011, 11:05am »

The hilarious thing about OY is that it isn't really percussion; all the percussion sounds on the two OY records are produced using the Optigan (or the Talentmaker). That's how it ends up sounding all murky and wet. Somehow no less great.

Personally I'm not big on flashy drummers. I've got nothing but respect for Neal Peart but I can't stomach more than a couple minutes of that type of bombast. Proficiency is fine but I prefer style.

Take Primus, for example. Primus has been through three drummers in the last twenty years, and technically Bryan 'Brain' Mantia probably had the best chops but he was undeniably Primus' worst drummer. One of the things that gives a Primus song its stuttering, angular weirdness is the negative space in all that complicated noise. When Brain was drumming for them most of that was eliminated. It certainly effected the songwriting that resulted from his time with the band (Brown Album was the beginning of the end and the hated Antipop is basically unlistenable). I loved Tim 'Herb' Alexander and the work he did on the bulk of their classic albums, and after Brain I didn't think there could be a satisfactory replacement. At this point, though, their current (and original) drummer, Jay Lane, would be high in the running for my vote for 'Best Around'. He has an expansive, almost psychedelic sound that works for Primus SO well, but most importantly he manages to be the backbone of a band that includes Les Claypool.

Zach Hill (Hella) is a cracked-out beast. Sounds like a fucking octopus on the drums. Again, though, that bombast. Instead I'd point to Adam Pierce, who has a similar style but is much more muted. Adam Pierce's project Mice Parade (it's an anagram, isn't that cute?) is a weird kind of experimental pop group which mostly revolves around Pierce using his extensive drum kit as his primary songwriting instrument. He also drums for the Philistines, but Mice Parade's albums to me are among the most interesting looks at what a great drummer can really do. The way the guitar and vocal melodies are made to move and flow with Pierce's intricate, long-form percussion excursions is entirely unique.

Oh and I have to talk about Danny Elfman again, sorry guys. A lot of people don't know this but Elfman is a phenomenal percussionist. His extensive musical education included several months traveling through Africa, where he internalized those wonderfully complex African polyrhythms that Paul Simon was trying to ape on Graceland. This is where my love of chuned percussion comes from -- from listening to Elfman beat the bones on the old Boingo albums. He used to carry this ENORMOUS marimba around on tour that he'd brought back from Africa. You can see it in performance videos, it looked like a complex series of bird's nests hanging from the belly of a fossilized manatee. And it sounded like rain drops in hell. And it's an instrument and a skill set he still puts to use in his current career as a film composer -- as dismal as Burton's 'Planet of the Apes' was, the music was outstanding; walls and walls of different percussion instruments, many of them played by Elfman himself.

Basically a marimba or a xylophone or a glockenspiel is gonna get me every time, when it comes down to it.

« Last Edit: Jul 7, 2011, 11:17am by Horned Gramma »