Can be from any genre. Mine is when an acoustic guitar comes in towards the end of a song and totally changes or reframes the mood/energy (see “Money” by Widowspeak)
I don’t know how to describe it or have the music theory knowledge to understand why it’s so satisfying, but the outro for Tank! (Cowboy Bebop opening song) is just so good and I can’t explain it.
I like it when a chorus gets built up more on each repetition, either with the addition of more instrumental parts, new harmonies or background vocals, or a beat change that brings up the intensity.
Similarly, I like when that same effect happens within 2 halves of a chorus. Example of one I heard recently is the chorus of the song “Breathing” by ELLEGARDEN. The 2nd half adds a higher vocal harmony + a picked lead guitar line that open up the sound a bit and just give it a nice little emotional boost.
I love a good “stickedibum”. Which is a song ending in 4 quick drum sounds. I can’t quite explain it, but for example the four very last drum notes on Alive by Pearl Jam is a stickedibum.
I love when the track goes completely silent for a single rest after some buildup and then punches back into the full chorus. If that “gap” in noise is part of the melody itself it’s even cooler. It makes the following sound so much more impactful, even if the actual volume hasn’t increased by much.
Yeah, that’s one of my favorites too! Got any good examples you like? One of my favs is “Ivory” by Polyphia. It hits right towards the end of the song and always gets me good.
Music that is REALLY stereo. I recently-ish got a pair of open back planar magnetic headphones, which sound bloody brilliant. So wide, so open, so crisp! It’s almost like VR for your ears with certain tracks and albums.
So ye! Songs that really lean hard on having fun with stereo, or just really well engineered music in general. I was FLOORED when I listened to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral for the first time with those things, so much fine detail and incredible audio engineering in that album. I’d honestly consider it one of the best engineered albums I’ve ever listened to, and I’m saying this as a huge Steely Dan fan.
Another go to for me is Pond’s Man, It Really Feels Like Space Again. Psychedelic music just hits so incredibly well when I use those headphones, and this album in particular just really takes me through a friggen journey when listening to it.
Lucid Dreams by Frans Ferdinand was one song that stood out to me, at least it was the first one that did after I got my first pairs of nice headphones. It’s the 7:55 minute version, and the part starts to build around 4:38
All Along The Watchtower blew my mind when I listened to it through headphones for the first time. I’d heard it hundreds, if not thousands of times over the years, but either in pubs and clubs, or through fairly crappy equipment where you couldn’t hear the effect.
I got myself a pair of half decent headphones, and decided to try something different to the usual fairly modern punk and rock that I like, and it just happened to be in the playlist.
In a similar vein i really like the pink floyd vamp. Its on (i think) 50% of the songs on dark side of the moon. Its Gm7 and C9 back and forth on great gig in the sky but there are a few variations. For example Em and A7 on breathe or its used here and there in “time” with F#m and A.
It ties alot of their songs together and sounds amazing.
I like it when the vocalist announces what’s coming next, like yelling “GUITAR!” right before a guitar solo or “bring back the horns” right before the brass section kicks in or “sing it, girls” right before the female backups echo the refrain.
I really like this one for certain genres like Funk or RnB that are generally more energetic and spontaneous when performed live. Helps the recorded material feel a little more alive.
I quite enjoy it when songs sneakily build up, starting out with a mellow rhythm and after a few minutes, you find yourself in the middle of an epic solo on top of this thick carpet of rhythm, and it’s all very much over the top, but it works, because of that slow build-up.
I don’t know you or your general taste in music but if you ever want something a bit more modern yet als doing the ‘start slow until you made a wall of sound out of it’ thing, I highly recommend you check out the band Motorpsycho! Pretty much every album they made in the 90s and early 2000s have always at least one great song which will build and build and build up to a great crescendo. Their other stuff is absolutely great too! Their song Vortex Surfer got played for 24 hours on new years eve (I think it was 99 to 2000) on a Norwegian radio station.
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