The slowest rock band ever, according to science
Every rock and roll band has prided itself on their ability to get the party moving every single time its music comes on the radio.
No one wants to make their audience find a nice spot against the wall whenever they perform, and even if there are more thoughtful rock bands out there, it’s not like they don’t have their moments to cut loose every now and again. But there’s also nothing wrong with taking the basis of rock and roll and bringing it to a grinding halt every now and again.
Granted, a slow song is enough to kill the tension in nearly every party scenario, but that’s not always what a rock band should be going for. The greatest artists of all time don’t really think about what their audience is going to think of the speed of the record, and sometimes it’s better for them to start working on tunes that are a bit more downtempo and can act like a slow pulse throughout their runtime.
I mean, there is no shortage of songs by the likes of Black Sabbath that do just that. Sabbath might be known for originating heavy metal with tunes like ‘Paranoid’, but if you look at the kind of dirge-like opening of ‘War Pigs’ or how dangerous it sounds going through tracks like ‘Into the Void’, it’s not like everything needed to be speed metal. It’s slow, but that’s also what makes it more ominous whenever the record comes on.
And while Sabbath left a slew of bands in their wake, not everyone was looking to create rising tension when they performed. Compared to the heavier bands of the day, Roger Waters wanted to create music that took the listener on a journey every single time they played one of his records, and while that might have been interesting, that didn’t make Pink Floyd any faster for fans to listen to.
Even when looked at through the lens of music theory, musical professor Ethan Klein said that Floyd’s music favoured some of the slowest tempos in rock and roll, saying when analysing ‘Wish You Were Here’, “The tempo is extremely slow – sixty beats per minute – so each beat is a full second long. Pink Floyd plays slower than any other mainstream rock band. This can make their weaker material a slog, but in a song like this, the stately tempo is luxurious.”
But beyond the actual tempo, what if there was something more going on than simply writing a bunch of slow tunes? There is no doubt some faster tracks in Floyd’s catalogue like ‘Run Like Hell’, but when looking at the different musical pauses that they put into their well-known tracks, it’s never about them trying to compete with the likes of Led Zeppelin.
David Gilmour even claimed that he wasn’t blessed with fingers that could play extremely fast, but that actually works to their advantage. Since a song like ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ is about them making sense of losing Syd Barrett, the slower tempo actually gives the song a lot more room to breathe. Not all of us know what it’s like to have a friend who loses their mind, but in those few seconds, it’s much easier to have the music sink in than it would have been to hear it at a blazing speed.
That kind of approach might not work on every song, but in an age that’s still concerned with the ‘don’t bore us get to the chorus’ approach’, there’s something refreshing about revisiting Floyd’s music every now and again. The mainstream might like a certain type of song, but if ‘Money’ taught us anything, it’s that sometimes creativity means taking your time a little bit more than you usually would.
