intro inspection

Nominated by the Phil Zone as this year's topic. Seconded by Our God Is Speed. Ratified by the  throng. This year's theme is: Great Intros.

Can't be the clearing house for non-blog-owning entities just yet, owing to commitments over the holiday season. For now, a few suggestions of my own.

Lovely darkly shimmering bit at the start of this Roxy:

Aerosmith had a penchant for the unusual or dreamy-eerie intro:

  

There is a dubby-metal thing going on at the start of these near-contemporaneous MTV faves by Guns N 'Roses and Def Leppard: 

 But this time around, though, not going to stick to rock, or even hand-played music. 

 The Drum and Bass Intro could be one of the worst things ever, especially during the Intelligent Era -  every bleedin' track came with a long drawn antechamber of synth-pads and atmospheric flatus. Always for the same (excessive) number of bars too - such that you could look at the vinyl on the 12 inch and see how far it was before the track got going, the grooves looked different. 

But there were killer ones too, proper tension builders, and others that walked a line between daft 'n' deadly: 

 

(That is Japan's "Nightporter", that intro).

Many more from the world of dance to come I'm sure.

But for now, in closing, and before anybody else nabs it - from 2001, Osymyso's "Intro Inspection", a mash-up made of 101 intros....

 

 

 

drummage #6

That Sorrows song, "Take A Heart", the drumming touches a little on this thing I always picture as "rim of the crater"...

"Rim of the crater" = that circling, panoramic sweep thing drummers do. Involving the toms, right? The slower it's done, the more crater-ific...

E.g. "For Your Pleasure" -- at moments throughout, but especially from 2.20 onwards (when the "ta ra"'s start fading to the horizon).

Paul Thompson says his hero is Jon Bonham, but on that track he's nearer Jaki Liebezeit.

Well I was going to play Can's "Quantum Physics" next but it is not to be found on YouTube.  Indeed the rest of Babulama is blocked.  "Quantum" is a case of  cosmic crater. But it also has something insectile about it...  chittering and thorax-y.

Liebezeit-fan Steve Morris's most crater-y moment is probably this:

Roxy Is A Band - at The Observer, a piece by me taking issue with the Ferry-centric view that sees Roxy's music as a radical break with the hairy 'n' heavy Underground sounds of the early Seventies