At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor

is this the comfort of being afraid: Much of what I have written in my previous analysis of At The Drive-In’s “Non-Zero Possibility” (they do like hyphens, don’t they) applies actually even more to this song, what with the disharmonious chords and awesome guitar lines – I am especially thinking of the “Banked on/Memory” part. This song, certainly their biggest hit, was the first song I heard and learned to love by At The Drive-In and it was the chorus that hooked me up in the first place. The song actually displays a curious structure: Aside from the chorus there is little that objectively connects the parts. We have what we can call three verses between the chorus parts, but they show no resemblance whatsoever, neither musically nor in terms of the sung phrase lengths. The first verse is in ¾ unlike the rest of the song; the lyrics here are spoken rather then sung. The second verse contains what is arguably the most awesome guitar riff of the song and proceeds with increasing entropy on Omar’s guitar, over a descending chord progression by Jim that repeats over and over. The final verse then brings us a stumbling drum pattern with an extended descending melody running in octaves, played by Jim, complemented by a repeating riff played by Omar that at four bars is only half the length of what Jim plays; during the later half of the melody this creates some interesting dissonances and illustrates my point from the other analysis mentioned above, showing how At The Drive-In combine different melodies/ licks in unusual ways creating new “Gestalts” that are as a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. This is also certainly the most difficult part of my arrangement as I have tried to have the running eights in the bass played by the left hand, the melody in octaves in the right, and Omar’s part divided between both hands. In a way, this song barely provides an angle of analysis: The lyrics to me certainly seem like what you could call a collage, juxtaposing loosely related ideas and words that seem to be used for their immediate “color”, that is their effect, sound and association, rather than in a strictly semantic sense: It is hard to claim a literal meaning in phrases like “hallow vacuum, check the oxygen tanks”. This is of course not to say that the song is meaningless or that it does not have a theme; I think of the theme of this song as being a vague reference to alienation and distance, probably with a generous helping of drugs – very much a tale of alienation if you will. The title brings the first moment of confusion: Wouldn’t a one-armed scissor defeat the purpose and thereby defy the very definition of what it means to be a scissor? How is a one-armed scissor not a knife? Are we talking about a knife? I read on the internet that At The Drive-In say a One-Armed Scissor is a cocktail of Red Bull with Vodka, but I don’t see it bringing us any closer to the song’s meaning and I think it’s intended just like those movies with an open ending, where the artfulness actually consists in the fact that it is open for you to interpret. With all this said, I still think drugs are probably a good guess; if we think about At The Drive-In’s heavy drug abuse it would seem hard to believe that drugs wouldn’t at some point invade every aspect of their lives. On a musical level, however, another observation is in order: If you ever saw a live performance by At The Drive-In, you may get the erroneous idea that they are high on coke, banging out whatever sounds their guitars can create and that half of what they do is chaos: While transcribing this song I found the version played on Later with Jools Holland where Omar has thrown away his guitar during the latter half of the song effectively not playing for the last chorus and the end of the song! So while you may be right about the coke part, transcribing this song has made me realize again that what sounds so chaotic live must actually have been put together very carefully: There is an incredible lot of immensely ingenious musical ideas and details hidden – from how Omar’s awesome riff blends with the rest of the band to the last verse with its intermingling guitar voices. So while I agree that At The Drive-In’s music is in good part about the energy and just rocking out, I hope that with this arrangement I have been able to sort of strip away some of the loudness, distortion and chaos, and put a spotlight on the musical skeleton behind it.