Composer Reacts to Watchtower - Instruments of Random Murder (REACTION & ANALYSIS)

[@_Helm_]

wrote a big comment on here then tried to edit it for one typo and it disappeared wholesale. Oh well, the important thing is that you listened to the ol' Watchtower carefully. Bless :)

[@CriticalReactions]

That's a shame. I looked checked my "held for review" folder hoping it landed in there for some reason but nope. Looks like YT just straight up deleted it.

[@_Helm_]

​ @Critical Reactions serves me right for not using notepad first Rewatched and captured some of my notes again. Well, these are different notes. I also caught your Mayday in Kiev reaction on the VOD, glad to see you enjoyed that one as well. So, all in all: This band is tight. They worshipped Rush. Their early base is a combination of Rush, 'New Wave of British Heavy Metal', early speed and power metal of the times, and objectively what came to become thrash music. They are so tight then they allow themselves to be really loose. They sound like they're almost falling apart yet they never do, mainly because of the great feel of the drummer. There was no other drummer in metal like this one at the time. The influence on that side seems to be half the punk rock 'I'll play my way through anything I don't care' attitude and the other half seems to be straight up jazz and electric fusion but I really think this band cut their teeth on playing Rush together first of all. Any Rush-head can hear it. Another says Chick Corea and Weather Report (probably also in the mix) and I say Rush, Rush and more Rush. There's Allan Holdsworth-like solos on this one, this was very new to metal at the time. The Jaco style double stop bass playing also exploded a lot of minds back then and still sounds super fresh today. This is the first band to really capture that sound that could go from extremely regimented unison thrashing and mathy stuff to kind of soupy kerning chaos like a great fusion band to atonal parallel guitar wanderings at any point... yet the band is never lost, never confused about what they're doing and always has a particular purpose and message to every track (besides having jubilant heavy metal fun, a goal achieved throughout). Those contrasts together made them 'techno-thrash' as discussed, retroactively dubbed 'tech thrash' or 'tech metal' and inspiring a load of bands, anything from Death to Dream Theater to Coroner to Voivod to Metallica themselves to go rise to the challenge. High praise for an unknown band. This style has had a resurgence recently spearheaded by the band Vektor. It's good to know that this style comes from Texas 1983, not from Vektor for many reasons, but you are interested in history intself so that reason is enough. On your Mayday in Kiev you were scrambling to see if they were first, if they're modern, if they're before Dream Theater etc, it's because they *were* that fresh.

[@_Helm_]

To the composition of the riffs and the emotion/lyric connection to the music, this note is my biggest contribution I can make: You very correctly discern how the riffs are half-normal and half-experimental. I think the idea here is that they look at the thrash riff, which is fairly linear and they see the micro-hooks inside the riff and as they play some of the chunky riff fragments, they then unspool other parts of the riff into extra bars, or they truncate a bar, or in any case wherever they hear an opportunity for some riff-recursion, they take it and they extend their riffs with both gestural strength (you kind of *expect* the unspooling it has some geometry to it) and create ambiguous rhythms that could from there go anywhere - and often do! That's why riffs that obviously started at some point as 4/4 riffs end up being "3 and 1 3 and 1+1" like the first riff of Instruments, here or whatever weird grouping. You can trace this 'post-thrash' approach to the linear thrash riff and the exploding of its potential all the way from here to all death metal, Meshuggah, etc. The important thing is: if you listen to this shit over and over and digest it, this album is - similar to prime Rush and unlike the 10,000 bands that picked up their chops from this - super catchy. There's hooks everywhere! Every little gesture and pernicious flourish and bit o' chaos and whenever they quickly wind it back tight for a moment, it's all delicious pop hooks. You were asking 'what is the point of all this rhythm play? did this band play with rhythm forever?', it's exhilarating the same way it would be for a fusion group to hit their changes, hit their accents on a mad run and then explode into open field for their solo spot or whatever. Difference to fusion is that there's a heavy metal singer singing about things that are very intense and interesting and freaky at the same time, holding it all together. This is music for headbanger, still. Try to headbang to this! Imagine being in a live show (with the magic of youtube, you can teleport back to 1987 and catch this band in their prime whenever you feel like it) and seeing this, feeling this energy. This isn't a fusion show, this is a new type of weird heavy metal that demands body physicality from you but tortures and bewilders you at the same time. Imagine going to the show and knowing this music inside-out instead of being caught unprepared, imagine what connection this gives you to this kind of band compared to the slack jawed. This was new, new taste in heavy metal music. Most metal bands could play to their top capacity and present that to the audience and give off an image of power and control. Watchtower were such good musicians but also kind of in their own weird little world aesthetically where this isn't them playing just at top capacity, this is them being kind of humorous and organic with it and they push and pull it, like a fusion band. Did you catch that bit where the whole band stops just for the drummer to play a little cymbal and immediately choke it? It's hilarious! They're *playing around* while playing insane, alien shit. This didn't exist in heavy metal until this moment. Dream Theater are still to come, and they listened to this and said 'yes, but we from Berkley'. The rest of heavy metal wasn't from Berkley. Queensryche and Fates were good players and they played proto-progressive metal as well, but here come some nwobhm/thrasy kids from Austin bringing also the top level musicianship and open mindedness to wander through the extremities of thrash metal to beyond what is normative and expected at all in the scene... In the booklet they pose around a stone sculpture of the shape of the state and one of them is wearing a red CCCP t-shirt. In 1989. Irony or not, it took some real different thinking to present that way in that context where heshers were beating up posers and moshing to Exodus. There is an intellectual air to this, and the Rush element is intellectually relevant as well because they were loners and weirdoes making music for other loners and weirdoes, to give them moral strength. Watchtower are similar in a more fucked up way, but also thankfully in a *less right-wing way* than what prime Rush were about with all that Randian objectivism.

[@_Helm_]

Speaking of lyric, I want to answer your question about what the relation of this sort of subject matter to the composition and riffery is. I will give you two examples, one from each track of how I feel this music to answer explicitly this. At the end of this track where it goes 'And... Perhaps... Strike... AGAIN!' and then you get the unison coda. How does that sequence of lyric and then music feel? I feel like I am stumbling, running, trying to escape, I am watched or stalked, things are running into me perhaps, I am getting struck from many directions... I abruptly come to an exit or I come to an end. Paranoia, geometric confusion and then the relief of silence, a dreadful aftertaste. I got all that from that bit, and it is because I am connecting to the lyric as the music happens and especially how the aftertaste of the lyric lingers and colours abstract instrumentality in something like this. Why would a metal band mine these emotions? We are in 1989 at the edge of the cold war. This music is relevant to us, again, now in 2023. Second example, in Mayday in Kiev, I urge you to relisten to where the lyric goes on about "At home, TASS reports no danger; nothing to fear as deadly elemental isotopes spew into the biosphere!" Where he belts that, pay attention to this abstract geometry of the music, these are deadly isotopes spewing into the biosphere, my dude. Sure, they're fun, quircky thrash riffs as well, but try to suspend your disbelief and travel back to strange 1989, you have never heard anything like this before in your life... you are coming to this from Iron Maiden or whatever, you will have to use the same parts of your brain to create pictures out of these riffs and lyrics the same way you had to for Rime of the Ancient Mariner or whatever. For the 16 year old listening to their vinyl reading the lyrics and closing their eyes, Iron Maiden transports this young soul onto a fateful journey in the open sea ... but here, this band, the 16 year old is confronted with other imagery tied to similar music... in those note runs they can hear clandestine communications between vassal states, they can hear the flow of information, data and lies, they can sense the mad, chaotic but deterministic path of History. The record is filled with those mental pictures that are elaborated upon with this rhythmic scaffolding. This is music that is meant to be memorized to the point where the lyric and the riff are together and when the lyric is not speaking, the riff is speaking, they're all talking about the same thing. I explain this is such detail to invite you, as you listen to heavy metal and also discern the lyric to get to the point of familiarization with the material where the dialectic play between them, the theatre is obvious even when the music has very little overt theatricality to it, even in very complex, abstract techno-thrash like this. Complex, abstract concepts may require complex, abstract musical scaffolding to best describe the feelings and moods that relate to them. Music is supposed to be fun, metalheads are supposed to headbang, but there is a complication. Something is unspooling. Something just isn't quite right. Inside all the headbanging is the rattled brain, struggling to feel, struggling to discern what vector does this world inexorably throttled to? What is that fire that must be fought with fire? What does it mean 'we are safeguarded by threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction?'. Why do we go 'two steps forward, one step back'? How can one survive their own alienation? They say war is the fall of reason, the end of existence. These questions, these feelings linger on this recording from 1989. This is what I want to convey about how exciting this sort of stuff was at the time, it wasn't just techy riffs, it was this amount of density and chaos and pop sensibility an top of these aesthetics, these lyrics, these meanings. It was a completely new statement and thus a Texan techno-thrash band, the first of its kind quickly changed into the first progressive metal band proper, a band that inspired and counter-defined thousands of bands as a metric of what is possible in heavy metal music.

[@CriticalReactions]

@@_Helm_ Thanks you so so much for taking the time to type this up, especially after losing your last comment. I was interested in the whole history lesson of it all -- where they came from, who they influenced, what listening to them in '89 was like -- but your breakdown of the lyrics was solid. In a lot of ways, your descriptions remind me of Genesis in that the music isn't there to set a stage as much as being in the moment just as much as the lyrics are. They tell the story alongside the lyrics in real time so it's less about taking the feeling of the music and more about seeing what the music is doing **at the exact time** as the lyrics.

[@cbn6635]

Watchtower virtually singlehandedly started the whole tech metal genre, and were years ahead of their time. Ron Jarzombek is like the mad professor of guitar playing; a genius musician. 👌

[@ambassadortourettes753]

This band’s span of influence into technical metal is rarely acknowledged sadly 🙄

[@cbn6635]

Probably because they were years ahead of their time? 🤔

[@liliIiliIilil]

Check out Spastic Ink next, which was the guitarist's band after this band broke up. It's like a way crazier continuation of this sound.

[@jarunia17]

Oh fuck yeah, what a classic

[@neil_song]

Interesting thoughts on this song, the gimmick of alternating between simple and complicated ideas very rapidly is often found in this band's output. I personally adore it, but I can see why it can be taken as annoying or disjointed. The players are very capable with their instruments, but I agree that the comparatively simple vocals are vital to the band's unique sound as well. You mentioned that it would be interesting to see how Watchtower would further their sound in later albums, alas this song here is taken from their second and last full-length so far, though they did a more guitar-heavy EP much later in 2016 (which is still awesome IMO). Watchtower are of fundamental importance to the Prog Metal genre because they were massively influencial in the early days. They were likely the very first band to combine speed/thrash metal with a very technical rhythm section, their first recordings in this direction being as early as 1983 (!). Due to this, they have been cited as major influences by much more well-known bands such as Dream Theater and Death. One more interesting thing about this second Watchtower LP specifically is that it was recorded in 1989 in West Berlin under the Noise Records label. In the mid-to-late 80s this label released records by Voivod (Canada), Watchtower (US), Celtic Frost and Coroner (both Switzerland), all of which are considered milestones in the development of different sorts of Progressive Metal. Of course these were times of high tension before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War atmosphere contributing to the music as well (see: Watchtower's "Mayday in Kiev"), so there is a really neat common historical and geographical connection here too.

[@ryanschindler923]

Ah nice, Rob Jarzombek is insane, truly the mad scientist of metal and guitar. He's done other bands like Gordian Knot, and then his crowning achievement IMO is easily Blotted Science, which is insane tech prog instrumental metal but considered some of the best instrumental metal around. Rob is a guitar player's guitar player. To put in perspective, on the first BS album the last two tracks are a double track where the first one is the song played forwards, and the second track is the same song played backwards lol.

[@jonathanhenderson9422]

Awesome to hear these guys on the channel. Back in the mid-to-late 80s it was mostly these guys, Fates Warning, and Queensryche spearheading progressive metal, but Watchtower were really at the forefront of what would influence all the later technically proficient prog bands like Dream Theater, Atheist, Death, Cynic, etc. One band that really took this style as a blueprint was Spiral Architect on their A Sceptic's Universe. Really nice to revisit them, and I can only imagine how mind-blowing this must've been in the 80s; they were so ahead of their time. One slight note on the intro; Iron Maiden WERE rather progressive for their time, especially with the longer tracks on Powerslave, Somewhere in Time, and the conceptual Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. They were undoubtedly an influence on Watchtower and Fates Warning.

[@rijntje73]

If you like Watch Tower's specific style, I recommend Spiral Architect and Twisted Into Form. A bit more technical and modern, but still very similar in vibe.

[@cbn6635]

Both brilliant bands and definitely inspired by Watchtower; good call! 👍

[@kevinmadden3396]

He reacted to Spiral Architect a couple of months ago...

[@breidablikmusic2501]

"There's a lot going on in there...". Understatement of the year :) "Control and Resistance" is a classic and highly influential album, but also quite a challenge to listen to. I am pretty sure Death used this album as a template for their more progressive albums ("Human" and onwards).

[@HeikkiHeiskanen]

Oh yas, watchtower, lets get weird :D

[@MrLopputulee]

This album was a jaw-dropping experience in 1989. I bought without knowing what to expect. Still sounds great.

[@vladradulescu6113]

I think you're ready for Atheist

[@robertwillingham1965]

Their first album (Energetic Disassembly) is incredible and features their original guitarist Billy White and vocalist Jason McMaster. A bit thrashier with some hardcore/punk influence, but still beautifully chaotic. The title track is a good place to start.

[@_bats_]

I would love to hear your thoughts on some classic Helstar. Sort of a similar vein to Watchtower. Not as proggy but still lots of really cool layering of riffs/ideas in a similar sort of tech-thrash heavy metal mold. "A Distant Thunder" is a great album but "Nosferatu" is their crowning achievement. Also, unlike Watchtower, which features guitar work by a single sort of mastermind, Helstar had a tag-team of two virtuoso guitarists, so there are more ideas that more explicitly involve the two guitar players interacting with each other.

[@MissLoonasSpeech]

I second your recommendation of Helstar, but describing them as similar to Watchtower might cause wrong expectations. Even though "A Distant Thunder" might be their most technical/"progressive" album, also featuring some nice audible bass-playing, it doesn't sound anywhere like "Control and Resistance" (at least to my ears), but much more traditional. I think way back then, Helstar were classified as US Power Metal. As regards "Nosferatu", I love the music of the concept part (first 6 songs) and the last song plus the preceding intro, whereas the songs in between ("Benediction", "Harsh Reality" and "Swirling Madness") are IMO not only weaker than the other songs on this album, but also weaker than any song on the two predecessors ("A Distant Thunder" and "Remnants of War"). Helstar had indeed two great guitarists and the solos in the concept part of "Nosferatu" might be the best. The instrumental piece "Perseverance and Desperation" features nearly throughout its entire length constant guitar soloing/harmonizing (ok, there's also a bass and a drum solo at some point) which seems to be heavily influenced by classical music.

[@_bats_]

@@MissLoonasSpeech I mean, to practiced ears there's a fairly big difference, but for someone who has trouble distinguishing between major genre descriptors, I don't think the more subtle distinctions between tech/prog thrash (Watchtower) and fairly technical USPM (Helstar) are going to be all that significant in the grand scheme of things. Mostly I just wanted him to check out Helstar because that band rules.

[@Gabobow]

Watchtower is so incredibly underrated, literally the first ever prog/technical metal band EVER, probably the most ahead of their time band ever in metal, along with Meshuggah i'd say

[@robertwillingham1965]

If I remember correctly, before 1982, bottles of pills didn't have a seal beyond the lid. The bottles usually came in a box that was not sealed either. After the Tylenol murders, tamper-evident packaging appeared everywhere. I think about this song every time I struggle to open a new bottle of medicine!

[@CriticalReactions]

That's interesting. It makes sense given how many things today are getting tamper-proof containers despite not having them in the 90s but it's something most people just don't think about.

[@muskett00]

#Artfromtheheart

[@sagebooker]

a kind of 80's heavy metal vibes, as far as I'm concerned... especially the voice and the drumms

[@kevinmadden3396]

Would be fairly difficult to react to a newer album, since they never put out a follow-up! They put out a single in 2010 (The Size of Matter) and then a series of singles in 2015 (compiled in 2016 as "Concepts of Math - Book One" - a play on the idea that the follow up to Control and Resistance was supposed to be called "Mathematics")...and supposedly Concepts of Math - Book Two is going to happen at some point, but Watchtower does nothing quickly.

[@CriticalReactions]

Dang, that's a shame. I'll have to keep an eye on them for CoM Book 2 though.

[@MissLoonasSpeech]

"Concepts of Math: Book One" is a follow-up in my book, even though it's just an EP: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fpCcqpiQh6imZrs An album in a similiar vein of Watchtower's "Control and Restistance" is IMO "Life Cycle" (released in 1988) by the German band Sieges Even. The difference is that while the music on "Life Cycle" is also very technical Thrash Metal, it still sounds more "traditional". One thing I like about both bands are the interesting and luckily audible bass-lines. I hope I won't have to wait for "Concepts of Math: Book Two" as long as I had to wait between the release of "Control and Resistance" and "Concepts of Math: Book One", because I'd be 75 by then.

[@kevinmadden3396]

@@MissLoonasSpeech I had that Sieges Even disc, (and Steps) but could not take the vocals. They are really bad!

[@MissLoonasSpeech]

@@kevinmadden3396 I know that vocals can make or break a band and I can understand why people don't like the vocals on those albums, but since I didn't mind them, I can luckily enjoy both albums. Did you ever check out the successors "A Sense of Change" and "Sophisticated"? Both of them sounded different from the first two albums and also from each other and the same goes for the vocalists who also both were definitely better than the one on their first two albums. The one on "A Sense of Change", Jogi Kaiser, sounds often rather jazzy (likely due to the fact that he was a Blues and Jazz singer).

[@_Helm_]

love to see the classy Sieges Even celebration, without any of the old 90s tensions about copycatting. Finally recognising it as a valid flourishing of a new style and a very fun, catchy and uinque album to enjoy. Love to see the good dialogue and the unearthing. Golden shovel digs us out of the shit award! @@MissLoonasSpeech

[@Malefication]

I think you forgot to mute Discord for this video! That or I'm starting to hear things...

[@CriticalReactions]

That's a possibility. Streamer Mode is supposed to activate automatically when my recording software is open but maybe it didn't this time. I'll be sure to double check in the future 😅

[@Ronnie_McDoggle]

more watchtower!!!