Delivering The Bass To The People, Part I

The Swan's Antelope post got me thinking carefully about bass playing.

In the quiet, careful tone of Young Marble Giants' Collossal Youth there's bass playing that's inventive, percussive, rhythmatic, and more. As a bassplayer, there's so much on this album to learn about occupying the space where drum machines and the ticks and thack thack thacks of measured, passing time normally exist in perscussion.

A band like the Ex can show you how to get the same sorts of effects on stringed instruments in a vital, aggressive setting, but Young Marble Giants are so gentle, understated, controlled. If I learned, years before finding YMG, melodic bass from early New Order like the Factus 8 songs and early Cure like Faith and Seventeen Seconds, and I learned about the spooky diminished 5th from November's Coming Fire, then later on (not in the passage of time in the real world, but in my own evolving discovery) Young Marble Giants taught me all about the subtleties of rhythm and percussion on the bass. For the two or so of you who wuld know the references, Ex-Chittle's "These Are The Beautiful Dogs" and The Forty One Rivers' "Dog Dot Duck" have basslines impossible without the influence of Young Marble Giants. Muted picked ticking for the win.

I have a CD of their only album on Pias America Classics. It's been hard as hell to find, but it's now seeing reissue with bonus tracks on Domino. It's beyond amazing. And sounds good on a playlist with Factus 8 New Order and Antelope both.

~Arum

N.I.T.A. by Young Marble Giants

Credit In The Straight World by Young Marble Giants

YMG performing in 1980 on YouTube.