Hey folks!
I've been working really hard on this chart for several days now. I'm finally finished with it! To be honest, this is more of a labor of love than a lesson I intended to teach. That said, there are tons of great ideas inside of this song.
The Evil Has Landed is a single by the American Hard Rock band Queens of the Stone Age. I was immediately impressed the Villains album and tour. It was their first release since I had become a fan.
FORM This song is lengthy. There are several segments to it. The form is one of the most important topics to clarify. Most songs have two or three sections that revolve back and fourth. The more common forms you'll see these days are AABA. ABABCB or sometimes plainly A. This last form, "A" is a single piece of music that is repeated until the song ends. One of the tactics of making this successful is having several melodies to go over that progression. This song utilizes that method too. Listen to all the variations that happen over the verse. This song starts with an Intro that never gets repeated. From there the Riff is introduced. The happens constantly through the song. From there we get a the Verse progression. Instrumental, lyrics, solos, even doo doo doos. We get all sorts of melodic content over this theme. Then Riff and Verse again.
At 2:32 we get the Bridge. This is an entirely new theme that has a different tonal center (chord choices) and specific rhythmic idea. For a minute we change chords over that same rhythm, feature lyrics, solos and other textures before returning to our Riff and Verse. 4:22 comes around and we get another musical idea (D) that gets repeated 8 times before moving into our final Outro (E).
All together the form looks like:
Intro R V R V B R V D Outro
A bit more elaborate than most pop or rock tunes.
HARMONY
The Riff is pretty rooted in A minor.
The Verse is all over the place. Several major chords primarily in the 2nd inversion
This method of taking major chords and moving them around is called Planing. This is technically Diatonic Planing because all of the roots of the chords are from a single scale. F major. Diatonic means of a scale. It originated in the Impressionism era of classical music. (It's referred to as a nonfunctional harmony.)
This verse progression is one of my favorite elements of this song. So often in Rock and Roll we hear the bass doubling the guitars with Roots in the bass and Power Chords in root position from the guitars. This breaks that mold. The chords are rarely in Root Position and the bass is highly melodic. (I may have to transcribe that in the near future). It seems as though they really trust their bassist and are confident in their parts.
The bridge has a sequence where the A chord is shape shifting A major to A minor to A suspended to A major. Oddly disorienting considering that the root is stationary.
To be honest, there are so many details in this song that I won't bore you with an essay. Please give it a listen. A great album. Here is the download for the complete chart. As always, be patient, enjoy the process and keep playing.
Christopher
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