Hi, everybody. My name is Ixie, and welcome back to my channel and my series where I'm breaking down the composition of Mare Denom. This video is breaking down Sleeping Beauty, Thomas, and Renholder, all of which I think are really interesting tracks, and some of which I think get overlooked a lot. So starting with Sleeping Beauty. Sleeping Beauty is in C sharp Mixolydian, or Rock Major, straight up. Here's the major scale. Here's Mixolydian. The different note is here. Instead of this note, it's this note. This is called the 7th, because 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and this is called the flat 7, because it's just a little bit lower. So this gives it like kind of a bright major sound, but with a bit of an edge. The meter, or time signature, it varies throughout the song. That's actually one of the things I appreciate most about this song is how they're constantly keeping you on your toes by changing up the timing, changing up phrasing, and making sure you don't go to sleep. I thought this was really cool. A lot of their songs are in 6.8 or 4.4, and now we have kind of an odd time signature alternating between 7 and 6 beats. The song is about the fantasy, basically being delusional, thinking that you can rescue someone from themselves. So there's definitely some things happening in the harmony that I think support that idea. One is the chord progression itself. Even though this chord progression fits very neatly into mixolydian, it sounds a little bit weird to my ears. And that's because I keep hearing this interval called a minor 9th, which sounds like this. This is basically a spread out minor second or half step. It's very, very dissonant. There's a point where a minor is actually singing the minor 9th. And so there's kind of a feeling of relief I think when we get to the G sharp minor chord because that note is in the G sharp minor chord. Also, this chord being minor, we're kind of used to hearing that beat major, which is a shame I think because a minor 5 chord, you would find that by counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in your key or your scale, and then building a chord on top of that note. Usually it's major, but oh my gosh, minor 5s are beautiful. Keep your 5s minor kids. So I just wanted to establish that the sound of this chord progression is a little strange because of this. And in contrast to that, there's kind of a low guitar playing kind of a melody and it's going... So this is the third of the key, which sounds very warm and very major. That's what makes this key sound so major-ish. And then it kind of closes in down to this second. Really, really pretty. So this is a little bit more pleasing to our ears. So I like that kind of contrast. So let's look at the verse and Maynard's vocal melody. He is singing in Mixolydian. It sounds really, really good and kind of bright, like I said, kind of warm, bright, which I think does lend itself to the topic at hand. There's something a little bit romantic about it. It feels personal, it feels kind of heart-centered. But he's singing the flat 7 a lot. And the flat 7 is the one note that makes the scale not major. Makes it mixolydian. So he's like, so there's the flat 7. And that hook I can magically heal you, which keeps coming back, is starting and ending on the flat 7. Then in the pre-chorus, the guitar and the bass are playing together kind of in probably octaves, but they're just playing this melody. This is also in Mixolydian, but it doesn't have like a root. It doesn't really have anything underneath it to keep it grounded. So it sounds kind of lost and disconnected. It doesn't have like that. So that's going to produce some very sparse sounding harmonies in the pre-chorus. Later it is singing over it in a really pretty melody that fits very nicely into Mixolydian or Major. It's just kind of, it's avoiding the flat 7 now. So it just sounds very innocent. Later it is singing the 2 against 3, hemiola pattern. Now this whole pre-chorus is in 6.8. So now we don't have a measure of 7 anymore. Now things are feeling like they have a very conventional, metrical stress of 1, 2, 3, 4. Which then is interesting in contrast to the first chorus, which has a time signature of 4, 4. So I'm kind of highlighting I think of the chorus as Maynard's melody, Sleeping Beauty. So he's not saying very many words. So he's holding them out and he's becoming a lot more like another instrument in the production. The main notes, though, in that melody, I think are these. When he sings BU or sleep. So that's the third, in that major third, in the fourth. And there's a relationship between those two notes that's important. I'm not going to go too far into it, but it does tend to sound kind of holy to our ears. Lots of associations with the plagal cadence and church music. So there's an innocence and a purity to this. So if you ever felt like, ooh, I love it when he sings that feels good, that might be why. The second verse stays in the 4, 4 time signature. So that's a new feeling that we've had with this particular part of the song. So the second chorus is one of my favorite parts, or at least the transition into it, because we've been in 4, 4. Now we go into 6, 8. So it feels incredibly slow, I think, in contrast to the 4, 4 groove. Because we're counting usually the 4, 4 groove as those are the quarter note pulses. And then when it moves to 6, 8, the quarter notes and 6, 8 are quite a bit slower. So then it goes. So there's this really cool feeling of all pulling back. The other thing, though, is that 6, 8, I think sounds a little bit more whimsical and playful and a little bit more.romantic and yeah, get a little bit more like fantasy. So I think this really makes sense because things are starting to come to a head. It seems like he's really trying to grapple with this reality that he cannot heal this person. Here, the bass changes to a more supportive pattern. I really love this note, the E, that's a flat three, and it sounds really, really good. Listen. That's so great. Then after that, the bass kind of starts doing its own thing and that foundation is lost, which is interesting because this is the part where he's singing poisoned. So this is like a whole new concept that he's introducing lyrically. So that feels kind of in step with me. The chorus repeats, but kind of in the background while Maynard comes in, overdubbed, singing that hemiola pattern from the pre-chorus. So this is an interesting kind of combination of these two ideas. They're kind of countermelodies, but the original melody is really affected. Way back in the mix, lots of effects very wet and it feels like that part of him is like fading away or this other part is winning. So they're kind of setting you up to think that it's just going to keep repeating, sleeping beauty, but then they really defy your expectations. The song appears, I'm not sure, but it seems to move to the key of F sharp. So first it's just it's F sharp and then A. Now these are two major chords in this case. So we have and then this one and that kind of sounds dramatic because they're two major chords, but they're related by a minor third. There's a chromatic motion that has to happen to switch between the chords. So it's they have a relationship, but yeah, it's like a fraught relationship. It's cool. All the chords in this progression are major and it's really clear because the guitarist, probably Billy in this case, is playing the third of the chord. And I think that makes it sound like overly bright. I think that supports the feeling of fantasy and delusion. Like it's just too bright. It's too good. It's too major. Still feels like we're centered in F sharp here, but the drum groove completely changes. I'm not actually sure what time signature I would choose for this if I were to have to note it. Either way, we start to get these like kind of rock back beats. Okay, so that's a completely different sound than anything we've heard so far. But they cycle in like threes or sixes. So it's not even phrasing. So it still kind of catches you off guard a little bit. But on top of that, there's a guitar with a really interesting tone. It makes it sound like to me like a carnival. There's a delay on it too. And the skill it's playing also sounds kind of wide-eyed and like delusional to me and kind of overly happy, like a creepy smile, approximately. This seems to fit really nicely over C sharp. So let me just write a chord progression in C sharp. That would make sense to me. That is not what happens. The bass and maybe the rhythm guitars are still staying in that other chord progression of F sharp A F sharp B. I mean E and then B. Okay, so listen to what this sounds like. Now this essentially makes the guitar in some kind of conflict with the chord progression but it still works for a couple of reasons. One, we all like dissonance here, right? We think it sounds cool. But second of all, a lot of these notes in the guitar are creating major sevenths with the bass. So major seventh here, I'll play an octave higher. This one's a minor ninth so this is going to sound pretty weird. This is major seventh. This is a major seventh and then this is also major seventh. Well, I don't know. There's different ways to look at this but maybe this is a good example of bi-tonality. Because this melody sounds really rooted in C sharp, I think that's part of why it just very seamlessly goes back down to C sharp. And there's a nice kind of break in all of the production so that Maynard can just kind of sing these notes by himself before the drums come in, brrrr with a fill, and it all kicks back in. In that space, Maynard sings poison. With it just, yeah, it just feels so like somewhat joyful poison. Not necessarily his delivery, just the the harmonies that are happening at the moment. And the very last sleeping beauty, Maynard kind of gives up and just kind of tumbles down, sleeping beauty, and then lets the band finish off the song, which they do very abruptly on an A sharp. I mean, ending there is like ending the sentence in the middle of a- and now Thomas. Now this is a track that I have to admit I kind of overlooked a bit. And I'm really sad because it's really, really cool. Especially the second half is like amazing. I think that this song utilizes some of the mixolydian sounds but also some like metal progressions. And at the very end, it kind of migrates into C sharp Maynard. The time signature is 4-4, but there are still some surprises. So the song starts with this very gentle, unassuming, but a little bit mysterious acoustic guitar, arpeggiating. If I had to name these chords, I would say C sharp Maynard, arpeggio, and then an interesting kind of sparse voicing of a D sharp dominant 7th chord, but you can kind of hear the tritone in there. So it has like a diminished sound. And then this beautiful A major 9th chord. Already they're messing with the timing. It is not clear right away what meter we're in. This could be so many things. It could be 1, 2, 3, 4, but it's not. It goesAnd then you get a clue that something else is going on. And then even that is cycling in I think three against four. So there's just like all these cool poly rhythms and basically this song is really good at making certain parts of it sound like they're not in four or four when they really are, which is kind of impressive. So if somebody didn't know anything about this band and they just heard that kind of gentle acoustic guitar intro, do you think that they would expect what was about to hit them? I don't think so. We get these heavy guitars. Everything is the low end, slow tempo, just like metal. So in terms of pitches, we have C sharp, that's our tonic. And then we go up to the flat three. So that's giving us that dark kind of minor sound of the flat seven, which also is in minor, but then we get this flat five. And that creates a tritone from the bottom note and it's called the devil's interval. So this is definitely heard in metal from all decades. I think Maynard is, it's kind of hard to tell. There's a little bit of a feeling of out of tunis to this part, which I like. Maynard's kind of pulsing on help and it's just kind of unclear if he's like, which note he's singing, and this little like a part feels kind of like tiptoeing and then the B is like getting caught. So yeah, there's a lot of like shock and contrast in this song. You can, like I said, you can never relax because you just don't know what's coming. The song is about trying to forgive somebody, right? So I think throughout the song, you kind of hear the struggle of like, so badly does he want to forgive this person, but it's really, really hard. There's also a lot of vocal processing on Maynard here. He's got a lot of, maybe reverse reverb or some reverb, reverb, reverse, reverb. So he sounds like he has ghosts around him. There's no sense of real harmonic home here. So we're just vamping between A and B and just not really sure like where we belong. And that makes it especially satisfying when we go back to C sharp, because I think all of us are unconsciously hoping that we will get that release. Now I get to the chorus, which is interesting for lots of reasons. And one is that I think the drummer sounds as if he's trying to play the vocal melody. So there's this emphasis on every single one of those words that Maynard is singing. And the guitars are doing it, too. But I think it's a little unusual for the drummer to be playing along with all the other instruments instead of holding down the rhythmic structure. I also love the big rest right before it hits. You'll hear that sort of demented metal progression come back, or maybe. Maynard's vocals here are very him, Melisma's abound. Melisma is singing more than one note during the duration of one syllable. I'm really here when he holds out forgive. He holds out for give for a lot longer than I think we expect. And then ends it with this really beautiful Melisma. I think that emphasizes the word forgive, but it also makes it feel like there's resistance to actually forgiving, because he can't even finish the word. Okay, vocal harmonies, y'all, these are really, really nice. So Maynard is credited here as the vocalist, so we don't have any billies. But he's singing kind of the fourth, and then the third, which is, again, that sort of plegal sound, but the way he's doing it is really cool. So I'm hearing more than just those two notes, but those are the, like, main notes I wanted to pick out in the vocal harmony. Show me the way to forgive you. Okay. I love that because together, the two Maynards are sort of outlining the sound of a dominant seventh chord, which has some attitude to it. Sounds like this. Also, let though he goes up to the fourth before the chord change. Now I move into a new section, let's call it section B, and we get a flat sixth chord, which feels so gratifying, and like, it feels more like relief. Like I've been waiting for this the whole time. And that's probably because I love the flat sixth chord, but I also think it's because it creates a type of harmonic release that you just don't get with things like this. That metal sound. This has some kind of, so you get flat sixth with a quick B before plunging down to C sharp. The flat sixth chord and the one chord have a lot in common with each other, especially now because this is the section of the song that is in C sharp minor. So this song has taken a turn just because the scale changed. That sound. Now it's, so Maynard is vocalizing. I don't think he's singing lyrics, I'm not sure, maybe he is, but it just sounds like beautiful runs down over and over again with lots of, you know, the melisma sound without actually having a syllable. Very chant-like. These always sound like ribbons falling down to the ground every time. That's how I picture them. Quick little interlude before the next and final section, which is the acoustic guitar apesios coming back. So we already know because of the first time this happened that anything could happen next. We cannot relax. Beautiful electric guitar comes along. I think maybe it could be a slide and playing F sharp and B in C sharp, I think. Wow. Like that could not be more beautiful. This part is so epic and very heavy and I think part of that is how the drummer is treating the meter at this point.So, we're still in 4-4. The drummer has been accenting some really interesting beats. And lots of accents on the eighth notes, instead of the quarter notes, or even 16th notes, so quicker beats basically. But now he's just letting us feel the weight of this groove, which is very, very slow. I would guess 50 beats per minute. It feels like the thing, this, whatever this is, its mass is even bigger, so it can't move as fast. It's just like, there is no tempo too slow for me. That is a challenge. I challenge all music. There is no such thing as too slow a tempo, especially in rock. I love it. The guitar riff and the bass down, way down low. So, they're just doing the flat three back to the one over and over again. It's very stationary sounding, very dark, very minor. But that rhythm is also interesting, because it's kind of creating some kind of movement against the really slow steady straight 4-4. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. I love that contrast. Mainered sounds. I mean, there's so many interesting things happening with his voice here. So many different layers of his voice sound like they're talking very percussively. You can hear the consonants. Other sound very like whispery or chanting. It feels like he's trying to summon something. Then, the guitar and bass start hitting the fourth degree. So, that's really nice. That gives us a bit more of a harmonic foundation. And the fourth is a great place to go before you go back to one. So. And if the song couldn't get any better, mainered starts singing reconnect. It is so gorgeous. It's just the minor scale. Minor scale is really good. I think the production of this part is just really, really well done. From the drums to the guitars to all the vocal layers, those percussive consonants, the languishing notes, sort of desperate plea to reconnect and the way he follows himself down ghosts of himself kind of following him. It's like both an angel and a devil embodied him. And now, Renholder. I love Renholder. It is one of my favorite perfect circle songs. It was written by Billy and Mainered, but it sounds like it came from another world. And it's called Renholder, apparently, an homage to Danny Loner, who worked with a perfect circle and Nine-inch-nails. And I definitely think we can hear some nods to Nine-inch-nails in this song. So, that could be part of why I like it so much. But they rearranged his name. They re-de-loner. And then they reversed it. So, this track is also in an odd time signature. It goes from six to eight and alternate. And I think of it in three, four, and then four, four. That's probably the easiest way to note it, like on sheet music. But you could also just count it one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Or in smaller groupings. So, what gives this song its otherworldly sound? I think it's a lot to do with the sounds, just the guitars, the way they sound a little out of tune, all the delay. And there's all these cool effects on the piano and on Maynard's voice. So, very ethereal. The drums are really interesting. Josh Fries is drumming here, but he's not playing on a kit. Or at least he's not credited as playing on a kit. It just says percussion. At some point, I feel like I could hear maybe some very gentle symbols being hit with maybe brushes or something. And maybe a snare with the snares turned off basically. You release them and then it's just like a more like a tom, which sounds very tool-like. I have to say, Danny Carey does that a lot, but the scale and the harmonies are a huge part of it. So, let's start there. One, we have sharp four. And those are the only notes that we're hearing in the guitar in the intro. So, we're missing a bunch of notes that add a lot of color and orient us. We're missing the third, we're missing the sixth, we're missing the second. We do have a fifth, which is really nice, but we only have this sharp four creating the tritone. And I think that's the main thing that makes the sound so weird, is that. Without it, it might sound like this. Just really pretty. Songs in A, I cannot name a scale. If you know what this scale is, if you keep watching the video, I will play the whole scale as it develops. I don't know the name of it if it has one, it must, somewhere in the world. I looked at the lyrics. I don't know for sure if these are correct, but the lyrics said the interpretation was, I could know who you are. I could know your mind. I could know who you are out of time. And there's a really cool delay on Maynard's voice so that when he says, could you hear, and it's very percussive. I thought he was speaking like some other language, honestly. He sings, one, flat seven, five, and then flat three. So we have a third now. So he's just singing in A minor here. But against this backdrop, it still sounds very eerie, right? Then this piano comes in, and I'm obsessed with the piano. Really high, lots of decay on it, or even maybe a pad that kind of trails after it. So it has a ghost. Okay, so there's some new notes added to this scale. So we now have a sixth, which is this one. Okay, it's a raised sixth. It's the sixth you would hear in a major scale. We also have a major third. Now, Maynard just sang a minor third. So there are lots of interesting conflicts happening. So after he goes, who you are, who you are, we have. What makes this so eerie in terms of the pitches is how many half steps there are. Lots of points in this scale that are a half step apart, like more than usual. So we have this one, we have this one, this one, and later we're going to have this one. That is gorgeous. So that sounds creepy because it's a half step. And we go from a sixth to a sharp four. And both of those are kind of lost sounding intervals. They're not stable points in the scale. But then it kind of gets resolved with this five to three. So hear that? So nice. Piano plays. And that gives us our flat two. So now here's the scale. Renholder I guess. Then Maynard sings his second line. I could know you.your mind. And he is going to change things up here. And I love it so much. So he starts out kind of similarly. I could know. And then he sings your mind or mind. The way he sings mind, the way he closes that vowel off, but the pitch itself is amazing because this is the sixth. So he's bouncing around between these really lost notes again. Which just it sounds like it has no idea where it wants to be or go or anything. Oh, also there's this nice contrast against the flat seven, which we keep hearing in the guitar. Then Maynard supposedly sings lies. He goes, sings it very similarly to mind. So I'm into it. So he goes from the fifth up to the sixth. And then ends on the sharp four. So he's this is his little area here. Remember that. A violin starts to come in. It's playing very expressively lots of like trills like knee and lots of vibrato. So it's mostly staying in this range. One flat seven six and sometimes five. So it's actually playing one which is more orienting. It continues to sing and then on the sharp four. It's just kind of they're just exploring. I think they're kind of improvising in this weird tonal space, but it is so beautiful. I'm kind of obsessed. I kind of want to try to write something with the scale. And Maynard sings, I will not fall down. And it's actually not clear what he's singing. He's singing kind of in between some tones. He's probably improvising. It's very difficult to reproduce on the piano because he's singing in between notes. But it just sounds out of tune and eerie. Then another piano line comes in that sounds so much like nine inch nails. So this is really interesting. You have a half step, then a whole step, another half step. That sounds that sounds unusual to me. In fact, that same relationship exists in what Maynard was singing earlier. I know I'm putting a lot of sustain on it because I love the way that sounds. If it's confusing let me go ahead and play those without sustain. Violin comes to echo the piano. So there's kind of a call and response. Now about the percussion. Listen to how Josh is accenting things. So Josh is accenting one. There are no chord progressions in this song up until his point. We're just exploring this very rich strange one. All of a sudden we get a G chord and a violin goes. So suddenly we have harmonic movement with the violin and it sounds suddenly very beautiful and homey and like the light is coming out. Suddenly we can see through all this murkiness. It's like whoa. This leads us into the outro which is so cool. Listen to how Josh is playing the drums here. So many different tones and timbers. It also starts sort of accenting. It's like boom boom boom boom. Kind of rhythm. Instead of the very sparse like one, two, three, two. The violin starts to descend the minor scale. So this has a very dark kind of hopeless feeling to it especially because it's going down and underneath that Maynard is trying. He's struggling to sing and he's singing this little pocket. Then we hear a gong and the violin on an A. And what we're left with is exactly what we began with. That is the end of this video. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked it, please subscribe and turn on the notification bell because I have one more video in this series analyzing the last three tracks of the album. Until next time.