Tendrils, Colours, Dogs and Farts ... Arvo Part

Okay, so we've had a couple of literal takes on the falling theme. All well and good. But Heavy Soil ain't just about what it says on the tin, you know.

(You've read the tin, I presume? If not, you know what to do.)

So, let's have a listen (shall we?) to music that embodies – rather than simply referring to – the concept of descent.

(The Concept Of Descent. Prog-rock album-title, in the bag.)

For our embodiment of descent, then, a bit o' the contemporary classical, courtesy of the allround superb composer Arvo Part.

Download Arvo Part's Wallfahrtslied mp3 via YouSendIt

(Yes, it has the syllable fart in it. Grow up.)

Listen to those gossamer strings – vibrato-free, icy sonic tendrils. The way they seem constantly to strain wanly against the chords in which they find themselves bound, the melodies making futile sequential bids to rise, but being dragged ever deeper by the unremitting bass.

This is a beautifully conducted and performed recording – each entry impeccably timed, each phrase tapered with masterful control.

There's an elemental quality to the music ... earth and air ... wonderfully colourful orchestration.

Nowhere is the subsiding nature of the music better illustrated than in the passage beginning at 3.26 – built around a descending chromatic scale (series of semitone drops).

In the end, though, I suppose descent is escaped (though hardly triumphantly) – as the violins (with agonising slowness) climb to dog-whistlingly high reaches, settling finally on a faint, unwavering unison. But, what the hell. It's mostly about falling.

And wouldn't this just make cracking film music, eh?

Buy Orient Occident on Amazon

Andrew Lloyd Weezer

Weezer's Pinkerton is a brilliant album. Some people debate its preeminence, focusing their adulation instead upon the band's debut 'blue' album.

To them I say, 'I respectfully yet emphatically disagree with your point of view.'

Heck yes.

Falling For You (download mp3 via YouSendIt) is all about the guitar solo from 2.10, and the accompanying extra-matured-cheddar-cheesy sequence of key-changes, which could almost come from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

IN A GOOD WAY.

... All culminating in a lovely interrupted cadence (/key change) at 2.35 (translation: you were expecting triumphant and happy; it goes sad and wistful). The beauty is that these are such hackneyed musical motifs and devices. It's almost banal. But – crucially – not even slightly so in this context.

It mentions cellos, too, thereby notching up several bonus points.

Weren't Weezer so much better before they went compression-mad? Why the hell doesn't Rivers Cuomo write songs like this any more? Songs that teeter majestically on the upturned drawing-pin balanced on the hairline division between irony and intense self-revelation.

Buy Pinkerton on Amazon

Blithe Pop From Ben Kweller

Ben Kweller is going to do us the favour, today, of kicking off a new theme – falling – with his song of the same name:

Listen to Falling by Ben Kweller (live) free on last.fm

My first encounter with Mr Kweller was at a gig back in my student days. I went along to see Mull Historical Society – who were, frankly, dire – and this chap was supporting. He came onstage wildly strumming a guitar and doing his best country & western yowl.

As one, the audience – stunned into silence – turned their horrified gaze in his direction. A unilateral WTF.

Just as the jeering threatened to begin, he made a seamless transition into breezy-extrabeat-bopalong 'How It Should Be (Sha Sha)'. Mischievously superb.

Not only accomplished in terms of the musicianship on display, his set was also witty and varied. Exactly the opposite, then, of the headliners.

'Falling' was on the EP Phone Home CD that I bought at that gig ... And subsequently reappeared on Kweller's debut album. A lovely, simple, airy pop song.

(His second album, though, is a bit pants. Stick to the first, I recommend.)