"The General" by Dispatch

Alright it's 1:30 in the morning and I just got off a plane from Texas, let's do this...

The General, a basic guitar, drums and bass song with the same progression throughout. We begin with a simple guitar intro, picking out an improvisational arpeggio of our basic chord progression (BbM-Fm-CM-Gm-Ebm-BbM-Fm). The guitar at first alternates picking and strumming, adding an ambiguous rhythmic structure to the piece, stretching and condensing our 4/4 meter. Upstrokes of the chords make for instability, as the tonic of the chord isn't hit until last. The verse is simply guitar an voice ( a rapid-fire delivery of the words with a lack of real tonal focus makes it more of a story with music). The bass and drums come in line for the bridge which speeds up our progression to double speed. The guitar know only offers an up-down double strum for each chord, and bass grwols out an octave below, while drums kick in on each down-beat. Now we return to our normal harmonic speed for the chorus, with a much gentler guitar and drum section and a downright tuneful melody, contrasting well with the machine-gun delivery of the verse. At the end of the chorus, we have a small turn in minor (Fm-F#m-Gm-CM-Gm-Fm) that's repeated twice before we return to our original progression. This pattern is repeated 3 more times (verse, bridge, chorus, turn) before we repeat the chorus a final time.