What the hell is it with a 12 bar blues?

by Obnoxio the Clown

I have no idea why, but I am such a sucker for a 12 bar blues. I’m currently traversing approximately 12,000 songs on my iPod and rating them. Buried in there are a fair old number of blues tunes. Some of these I like and some of them I don’t, but I absolutely love any 12 bar blues.

From my dim and distant youth, I can also remember shipping over to a smoky nightclub every week for the blues night and loving everything, but especially loving 12 bar blues. From the simple, insistent, driving bass, the simple drumming, the discipline of the rhythm guitarist, the wailing inventiveness of the lead to the drawn-out climax of the song, I couldn’t get enough. And the 12 bar songs were always the jewels of the show for me, the other stuff was nice, but really it was just fluff, covering old standards like Route 66 were just to keep the some semi-commercial appeal in place.

So, the 12 bar blues: anyone know why it gives me such a thrill?

Anti-Mood Music

by BenSix

“Mood music” attempts to induce or enhance a particular feeling. By this definition, most fits the bill: lush harmonics for the tired and lazing; euphoria for the dancefloor; black, fucking hatred for Norwegian metalheads. It’s all very enriching, but – comfortably premeditated – it can be terribly bad at creating a mood: once you’ve hit such emotional aridity that the full depths of your consciousness can’t move you to feeling, worn routines aren’t going to shatter the burden.

Anti-mood music jars you from whatever funk you’ve been lumped with. It’s nervy, discordant, and varied and striking enough that it presents a vivid contrast to whatever you’re feeling. It hurls you into a maelstrom of tones from which you may emerge with any emotion. Think My Bloody Valentine at their most conflicted; electro at its most unhinged; Syd-era Floyd, with his paranoia bumping up against blissful, woozy melodies…

One of my favourite such bands is Xiu Xiu, an ever-evolving trio from California. Fretful rhythms burst into rich harmonics as easy as distortion (or both); Jamie Stewart gives an overwrought delivery, and lines which cut through the songs like blades…