Hey kids, welcome to another exciting edition of “Fuck Yeah Science”, with me, your host, Dr Deuteronemu 90210, here to show you that not only is science a thing, it’s also a FUN thing! Now, if you’d like to start your educational CD (or whatever you youngsters are listening to music on these days), Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light, you can listen along to it as an accompaniment to the lesson.
Everyone playing the album? Great. Then let’s begin.
First, let’s take a look at PHYSICS. Physics is a particularly awesome science, dealing, as it does, with many things, the most relevant to today’s lesson being the parts about how much stuff weighs, and how it moves. Put very simply (not to mention technically inaccurately, but don’t worry, your parents all signed the disclaimer so I’m not getting sued any time soon), very heavy things move very slowly. Apart from, say, stampeding elephants, or Slayer.
For example, listen to the tunes on this album. The riffs are languid, almost chilled out, but are in fact very, very heavy indeed. Earth have made an artform out of being slow and heavy, and this is why they’re so revered in the stoner/doom metal scene. Now they’ve moved away from their roots into less aggressive but more tuneful territory, they’ve lost none of that heaviness that made them quite so special. They’ve just altered the balance so the heaviness rests differently, putting pressure on different parts of the musical spectrum. To fully appreciate the heaviness, the album should be played at very high volumes.Next, we’ll cover ASTRONOMY and ASTROPHYSICS. Imagine a planet – for the sake of relevance to the teaching materials, we’ll call it “Earth”. It’s the one we’re on, and yes, it’s very, very heavy indeed. Even the Engineering students couldn’t pick it up using levers and fulcrums and stuff, and those motherfuckers can do CRAZY shit with those babies. If you’ll pardon my French. Which is next period, if you were wondering. So, we’ve got this very heavy planet, and it’s rotating as it moves through space. Now, listen to the drums on this album. That, kids, is what a planet revolving as it travels through space sounds like, when translated into rock music. Which brings us neatly onto GEOLOGY, which is perhaps the most relevant here, as it’s basically the study of Earth. Listen to the music; listen to the way it progresses slowly, so very slowly – it’s working on geological time. It takes AGES and AGES for the layers of the Earth to build up, and that’s what it sounds like.
Now, the next two we can cover together, I think – CHEMISTRY and PSYCHOLOGY. It’s a well-documented fact that the creative force behind Earth, Dylan Carlson, has been through a lot of what we grown-ups refer to as “shit”, much of which was a result of CHEMISTRY. Now, taking a PSYCHOLOGICAL approach, we can see that he’s been through some very dark times, but has emerged at the other end. But he appears to have brought something through with him… there are some very dark presences represented in the music, which I would rather you didn’t mention to the guy who does the Religious Studies show, if that’s all the same to you. He still hasn’t forgiven me for the audio course I did last year on numerology in the works of Tool. Of course, the best of all the sciences, and the one I think is most key today, is MATHS. Don’t groan; maths is great. It’s not all logarithms and triangles, you know. No, MATHS is what gave us fractals. And fractals can best be expressed by listening to this very album. On the surface, like its predecessor, The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull, it’s quite simple and pleasant, though ominous, like the music to a horror film set in the desert might be. But the closer and the louder you listen to it, the more a complex web of details is revealed. To the guitar, bass and drums set-up of the previous album, Earth have now added cellos, allowing a whole NEW world of deceptively simple complexity to thrive under the surface. Now, you’re probably not old enough to have seen the film Blue Velvet, but it begins with a pleasant suburban scene, before the camera descends through the ground to show us a chaos of insects madly feeding on each other in the darkness. That’s also kind of what this is like. But, and this is where the not-entirely-accurate fractal analogy comes in, on any of the levels you travel through on the way down to the bottom, it makes perfect sense as music. It can be listened to just on the surface, or it can be concentrated on, and you can have an entirely different experience. However, due to the last show, where I warned you about the dangers of drugs, I should probably skip the next part of my notes, and head straight to the conclusion.And the conclusion is that SCIENCE is ace. I think I’ve shown that quite adequately by using its systems, methods and techniques to prove that the new Earth album is really rather epic and, indeed, fab. I strongly advise that you skip lunch for the next few days so you can use your lunch money to go out and buy it. It’s brilliant – SCIENCE says so, and SCIENCE never lies.
Right, time for me to go. Tonight’s homework is up on the screen now- it’s “ILLUSTRATE WHY COLDPLAY ARE SHIT, USING NO FEWER THAN TWO VENN DIAGRAMS AND A SCATTER GRAPH”.
See you next time on “FUCK YEAH SCIENCE!!!”
-Dr Deuteronemu 90210, with the disclaimer “this edition of FUCK YEAH SCIENCE should in no way be used to replace a child’s real education, apart from the stuff about the album being ace”-
