The Living Deadbeat

Last night a friend of mine told me that Muse is a heavier band than Nine Inch Nails, or at least that Muse can be a heavier band, when Matt Bellamy puts his mind to it. As a NIN fan I was offended, but arguing the point proved to be surprising difficult. How exactly are you supposed to define ‘heavy’; is it simply a measure of album production, or does it derive from multiple factors, such as lyrical content, song keys, etc..?

It seems to me that defining ‘heaviness’ in terms of distortion levels is pretty useless. I love countless bands who ramp up the distortion now and again, but who I would never consider as ‘heavy’ bands. A good example is Brand New. Brand New pile on the gain for segments of some songs, but they’re very much an indie band and whatever dark songs they have are mostly done in a stripped down fashion.

‘Dark’ is a useful word in this discussion. Nine Inch Nails is a pretty dark band by most standards. Trent Reznor has released very few upbeat songs over the past 20 years, and the names of his Halo releases hint at their bleak content: Pretty Hate Machine, Broken, The Downward Spiral, and so on. To me, ‘heaviness’ is more than simply turning it up to eleven. Throwing more distorted guitar into the mix on a Katy Perry track will not make it ‘heavy’.

I’m very hungover so this is argument is not nearly making as much sense as I would like, but I hope I’m getting the point across. Muse may, on occasion, knock out a heavy song, but they don’t sound like a heavy band to me. Matt Bellamy whines quite a lot and his voice doesn’t lend itself well to heavy songs. I’m not saying they’re a bad band, but calling them a heavy band is quite a stretch, and claiming that they’re a heavier band than Nine Inch Nails is just ridiculous. If Matt Bellamy ever writes something even nearly as dark as The Downward Spiral I’ll be extremely surprised.

This post is going to read as all kinds of ignorant, perhaps, even, as the uneducated jabberings of a know-nothing rube, but I hate watching old movies because the music in them absolutely stinks. I’ve just been driven away from Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie on account of a typically awful soundtrack that was laden with shrill soaring strings at every turn. Sometimes it genuinely seems like there was some kind of law back in the day that required every bright outdoor scene to begin with some startling, ear-piercing violin progression, as if that’s the sound that sunlight makes when it’s recorded on camera. It’s just too much to bear.

There’s a lot about old movies that I dislike but can tolerate: the lousy picture quality; the over-use of wholly inorganic sets during outdoor scenes; the totally unnatural speech patterns and accents; the staid, uniform beauty of the most of the actresses; the obsession with the bullshit romantic entanglements of the over-privileged. These are all ticks and idiosyncrasies that I can endure in isolation or in combination with each other, but when some archaic violin soundtrack is lashed across this then it all becomes too much for me.

Obviously this is a gross over-generalisation, and obviously I know of strong counter examples, but 2001 is really the only old film I know of with a soundtrack that I consider worth listening to, and that’s full of classical music and not the typical high-pitched fare.

Blake Schwarzenbach was the singer and guitarist for the (now defunct) bands Jawbreaker and Jets To Brazil, and he’s currently the frontman in the band Thorns Of Life. He writes great songs and you should probably look into him if you like indie/punk/alternative/rock music.