Enough with the 60s and 70s — let’s jump into the 21st century with some Animals as Leaders. The tune is “Odessa”, with Navene Koperweis on drums.
I’m analyzing a bit of a deep cut from their (somewhat) oft-forgotten second album, Weightless (2011). I wasn’t tuned into Animals as Leaders when it came out, and while I suspect it got the attention it deserved when it was first released, it seems to be overlooked now. I guess it doesn’t have the excitement and spectacle of the debut (as badly produced as it was), nor the more famous trio we’ve had for the last six years. It doesn’t help that this particular album lineup was so short-lived.
Weightless is the only AAL album that Navene is on, with him leaving the band in the spring of 2012 when he looked to pursue different interests (and was replaced by Matt Gartska). If you read the comments on videos of Koperweis playing live with AAL (especially “CAFO”), there’s a small but noisy debate concerning who the best drummer for the group is:
And I mean no disrespect to Navene — I clearly enjoy his playing. It was just odd for me to see this argument since current AAL drummer Matt Gartska is so… deified? If you want some transcriptions of Matt’s playing, I recommend going to his website. He’ll make more money off you buying sheet music than he would from your Spotify minutes…
Anyway, what I’ve picked apart from “Odessa” concerns a building section that precedes the guitar solo, constructed around an menacing, catchy, syncopated riff. It’s probably one of my favorite moments of the entire AAL discography, and best of all, it’s much less complicated than it sounds. Give the section a listen:
For a while, I thought the riff was built around changing time signatures, specifically an 8th note pattern of 5 + 5 + 7 + 7. Once I started transcribing, I realized it’s entirely in 3/4. Listen to the China cymbal, you’ll hear Navene hitting quarter notes. Lo and behold, 5 + 5 + 7 + 7 = 24, which is divisible by 6, the number of 8th notes in a bar of 3/4. Did somebody say “quick maths?”
The riff is still pretty jagged, so the sheet music starts with the melody written in bass clef to help give you a sense of how it all lines up over the bars:
I can’t say if “implied time signature change” is a phrase that any music theorist would use. I suppose “syncopation” works just fine; there is no need to convolute things like drummers do. Even still, I’m sure someone has heard the track and thought, “Whoa, sick polyrhythm brosef!” Blecch.
I also included the rest of the tune after the big build: the guitar solo, and then the outro. The most exciting measure is perhaps the bar of 13/16 in the solo, which is felt as 4 + 4 + 5; really, just 3/4 with an extra 16th note.
The time signature for most of the outro is a bit ambiguous — backbeats and crashes seem to come in at random. The guitars can help us figure it out, and they sound like they’re playing 8th note patterns of 9 + 12. While those notes add up to 21, there’s not an obvious way to group them here, as we did with the building section:
Because Navene is playing steady quarters on the hi-hat, part of the pattern has him playing offbeat hi-hat notes before it lines up again with the start of each phrase. It’s… a bit challenging to count.
Most confusingly, the melody might actually include bars of 12/8, but the drums seem to be playing bars of 6/4, primarily because of the steady hi-hat quarter notes. It’s the same number of notes, but different groupings. Nothing about the drums makes me think they’re in 12/8, so it’s anyone’s guess what the band counted it in.
You can notice that at 3:33, Navene seems to imply a 2 & 4 feel on the 9/8 bars.
This outro seems like the opposite of our big build section; the time signature changes here are not obvious, but they are truly there.
The pulse is a little easier to get a handle on during the last 30 seconds of the track; 5/4 with some bars of 3/8 tagged onto the end of each phrase.
