I’m not exaggerating when I say that this song has been lodged in my head since I first heard it a little over a month ago. Entire albums have come and gone from my radar without as much as a blip, but the shuddering lock’n'pop rhythm of “Gilberta” somehow manages to trigger an involuntary replay function in my brain. So, in the interest of scientific inquiry, I’ve decided to lay out the basic components of this Jumbling Towers track that make it so infectious:
1. The drums are the key. Sure you can embellish percussion with a million permutations of complicated time signatures and the clatter of well-endowed kits, but if you build your entire rhythm track around the metronomic thump of a kick drum and hand claps it’s empirically unpossible for you to fuck it up. It taps into our caveman instincts, reminding us of our ancestors’ time spent around the wooly mammoth bar-b-que pit, oblivious to the concept of a wheel. Plus, the bluntness of the beat clears up enough space in the music so that the tracks other components are free to do more interesting things.
2. The bass defies expectations. The thought of a grimey slide bass lick with hammer-on/hammer-off punctuation is something I’d normally recoil from in horror; instead, I’m strangely intrigued. It’s funky, but it’s not funk. It’s a lumbering riff, but it progresses deliberately, almost militaristically. It’s this tension between slop-funk and borg-like discipline that makes the bass so persuasive.
3. That Robert Fripp nastiness that claws in around the 2:00 minute mark is nice, plain and simple.
And this is only the B-side. The A-side “Kanetown City Rips” I wrote about back in February. Jumbling Towers are celebrating the release of their new single tonight at the Firebird. Locals Exercise and the Hibernauts are opening. If you’re in St. Louis tonight, you won’t want to miss this.
“Gilberta” and the return of Jumbling Towers
Jumbling Towers – “Gilberta”
(from Kanetown City Rips)
I’m not exaggerating when I say that this song has been lodged in my head since I first heard it a little over a month ago. Entire albums have come and gone from my radar without as much as a blip, but the shuddering lock’n'pop rhythm of “Gilberta” somehow manages to trigger an involuntary replay function in my brain. So, in the interest of scientific inquiry, I’ve decided to lay out the basic components of this Jumbling Towers track that make it so infectious:
1. The drums are the key. Sure you can embellish percussion with a million permutations of complicated time signatures and the clatter of well-endowed kits, but if you build your entire rhythm track around the metronomic thump of a kick drum and hand claps it’s empirically unpossible for you to fuck it up. It taps into our caveman instincts, reminding us of our ancestors’ time spent around the wooly mammoth bar-b-que pit, oblivious to the concept of a wheel. Plus, the bluntness of the beat clears up enough space in the music so that the tracks other components are free to do more interesting things.
2. The bass defies expectations. The thought of a grimey slide bass lick with hammer-on/hammer-off punctuation is something I’d normally recoil from in horror; instead, I’m strangely intrigued. It’s funky, but it’s not funk. It’s a lumbering riff, but it progresses deliberately, almost militaristically. It’s this tension between slop-funk and borg-like discipline that makes the bass so persuasive.
3. That Robert Fripp nastiness that claws in around the 2:00 minute mark is nice, plain and simple.
And this is only the B-side. The A-side “Kanetown City Rips” I wrote about back in February. Jumbling Towers are celebrating the release of their new single tonight at the Firebird. Locals Exercise and the Hibernauts are opening. If you’re in St. Louis tonight, you won’t want to miss this.