It was 1999, Napster was about to crack open the world music, Loud was on Friday nights on Much Music, and Machine Head appeared on TV and crushed me.
By this time I was already experienced with Metal. I was playing electric bass now, and I had a handful of metal albums to work with. There was something about Machine Head’s song From This Day that was infectious. Even though it had vocal rapping during the verse, the song had a catchy riff and chorus. They had a deep hook in me.
I regret not buying the album Burning Red back when I was interested in the band. It was produced by Ross Robinson and he was a hot commodity in the music industry around that time. It seemed like every album he worked on went straight to the top. The same year he did Slipknot’s debut album. Before that, he did Korn’s first two album and Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill, Y’all$. Yah… Robinson was a big deal.
I never shared the song with my friends because rapping fell out of style. or that reason I never talked about Machine Head. Let’s talk about it now!
Machine Head – From This Day
The first thing I noticed was the fashion when I watched this music video again. Remember Limp Bizkit’s clothing from the last article? Borlands one-piece skeleton suite seems tame compared to Rob Flynn’s porcupine hair and orange track suit. The drummer has leopard print hair with wrap around shades and some kind of mesh long sleeve. The guitarist has dreadlocks and is wearing a shinny kung fu suit. The bass player has tattoos and his long hair obscures his face like Cousin Itt from the Adams Family. What a sight to see!
I guess Kung Fu suites were popular back then because Wes Borland wore something similar in the Nookie video. Machine Head was plugged right into 1999 fashion.
The Theory of the Riff
When it comes to metal it’s the riff that makes the song. From This Day has a great opening riff. Songster shows that the song is drop B tuning. This is why it sounds so heavy. A lot of metal bands during that time played in some kind of dropped tuning.
The riff figure is very clever and uses the melodic figure B5, C, B, G, B, A, F repeated in sequences. These are all notes from the C major scale. Because the riff starts on B you could say it has a locrian sound.
What makes this clever is that the B5 chord has an F#. Raising the fourth (F) of C major to F# creates a parallel C lydian mode.
Music theory tells us that the F natural and F# would create a chromaticism in the melody. Because the F# is in a fifth relationship with B, the ear doesn’t notice the chromaticism. It all blends together smoothly into a nice sequence.
Suspension
From This Day does sneaky things to the listener’s ear. After the main riff, the song enters another riff based on a B diminished chord. Then we go into the verse where the vocals are performed in a rapping style. The rapping suspends the listener from hearing more of the melody found in the opening sections.
The chorus follows the notes of the B locrian mode B, D, F, G and adds the F# and A# as chromatics to move the sequence. The ear doesn’t pick up on the fact that the chorus is built on a B diminished chord due to all the leading notes in the chord progression. Our ear was hungry for melody, and when the listener hears the chorus they don’t notice that is done with a diminished chord. These subtle songwriting mechanics and the use of music theory are what make this a great tune.
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