Off Minor — “Monday Morning Quarterbacks”

“Monday Morning Quarterbacks” is the penultimate track from Off Minor’s (one of two major bands formed in the wake of Saetia’s demise, the other being Hot Cross) debut full-length. It is effectively the ultimate track, as the following track is a brief solo guitar rendition of Thelonious Monk’s “Off Minor”, entirely different from the full-band screamo of the rest of the album.

theme

This tune is not quite monothematic, strictly speaking, but is nevertheless in a broadly theme-and-variations form. The first two bars set the theme; here is a rough transcription of those two bars, with repeat signs showing how it is repeated:

Rough transcription of the first two bars of “Monday Morning Quarterbacks”

meter

The first thing that stands out here is the choice of meter: I’ve written ¹¹
₄ because this represents the pulse that is felt and the unit of repetition, although arguably ¹¹
₄ is more of a hypermeter here that should “actually” be ^3+3+3+2
₄ . Regardless, there is a clear 3-against-2 feel due to the dotted quarter notes overlapping the quarter note pulse for the first 9 pulses of each measure, i.e. a ^{3+3+3+3+3+3+4}
₈ feel. The pace is fairly swift, at circa 185 beats per minute, so a bar of ¹¹
₄ is not terribly long.

orchestration

Also of note is the orchestration here. The ensemble itself is typical of rock music in general: the classic power trio. But the way that the power trio is used here is unusual (although characteristic of Off Minor as a band). The bass is here at the forefront of the arrangement alongside the guitar, and the two weave together their own melodies while the drums play a groove that both reinforces the rhythms of the bass and guitar (with the more-or-less ⁶
₈ feel in the snare and kick drum) and also plays against it (with the straight quarter notes in the hi-hats). This particular theme as it is played here is vaguely a call-and-response, with the bass going into its very high register (hence the use of 8^va in the transcription) to respond to the chord-melody of the guitar.

From here we will take a look at a traditional decomposition of this theme into “harmony” and “melody”.

harmony (and melody)

What follows is a reduction of the theme as transcribed above:

Reduction of the main theme of “Monday Morning Quarterbacks”

The first harmonic region here is pretty obviously some kind of A minor chord; here it is labelled as A−7 because the G♮ is played prominently in the bass guitar part.

The second harmonic region is a little bit trickier, as the only obvious part is that B♭ is in the bass. Arguably, this simple and traditional kind of chord-based analysis fails us here, but we can still get some insight from it. One could try to analyze this harmonic region as a G−13⧸B♭, or even as some kind of B♭ power chord with an added ♯4 and a 6? But here we have chosen E°⧸B♭, for two reasons. One is that playing a straight-ahead E° over the reduction melody seems to sound the most similar to the original. The other — perhaps more important — reason is that it makes this into essentially a I – V – I progression. The A−7 functions as a rootless F∆7⧸A chord (or rather, rootless F∆9⧸A), the tonic chord of F major. The E° is the vii° of F major, functioning in the same way as a (again, rootless) C7, the V7 of F major.

Among many other things, this use of what are (virtually) rootless chords could be a contributing factor to why Off Minor often gets the “jazz punk” label attached to them, considering that jazz places such an emphasis on the 3^rd and 7^th factors (as well as extensions) of chords that it draws away from the root’s importance.