SEVEN bridges to nowhere
Confound them!
The language of song structure clearly demarcates the roles of each constituent part. Verses are places of poetry, of storytelling, of words, where Bob Dylan can embody entire swathes of humanity or Death Cab for Cutie can talk about glove compartments. Choruses are best with company, inviting people to sing and dance together, or, in the case of any given boygenius member, make lonely people cry together in shared isolation. Bridges, poor bastards, are redolent of architecture, of utility. A rather unmusical etymologist might suspect bridges to be merely transitory, with any permanent dwellings belonging to social outcasts, ugly trolls like and/or Anthony Kiedis, whose smacked out opus shall not feature among the SEVEN songs I’d like to force inside your ears despite the fact that it does precisely the thing I want to explore in the guise of a clever little songwriting double entendre: it ends with a bridge!
(I’m not sure why I’ve chosen 2026 to be my year of Kiedis strays; for balance, here’s Eugene Robinson of all people actually thinking a little bit harder about this walking pile of unapologetic issues than I’ll ever bother to).
Onwards! Upwards! It’s all upwards from here! Scroll downwards to see!
[*gag* Spotify *gag* playlist is at the bottom]
mewithoutYou - “Nine Stories”
An owl propositions a walrus escaped from the circus with a bottle of matrimony wine, and perhaps a night of interspecific lovemaking of doubtful logistics. Walrus is too busy wishing to be tied up and shot to indulge, and so informs the owl that there’s better parties up in heaven, so fuck off and die or whatever. Owl, rejected and dejected, says fuck you too pal, I’ll see you in hell.
A standard repartee, you might think, but it comes out as pure poetry in a final bridge for the ages:
[Walrus]: “If the weather ever withers up your vine
Jacob knows a ladder you can climb
If that old thorn is still buried in your side
Jacob knows a ladder you can climb…”
[Owl]: “Well if your Pacific rivers all run dry
Their clouds will fill my loud corrupted sky
And if the pleasures of your Heaven ever end
That very ladder just as well descends!”
The following two tracks on Ten Stories (which I hereby proclaim a masterpiece, tell your local music historian) pull this very same trick, and are equally deserving of hyperbolic praise. Get this album grafted onto whatever 12-inch diameter of skin can fit it, and get yourself a stylus capable of drawing noise from human flesh.
This is perhaps the purest instance of a simply modified pop structure to grace this list, stand by for gradual dissolution of the thesis statement.
El-P - “Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala)”
Like almost every track on I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, “Tasmanian Pain Coaster” sets out to achieve a lot. Two characters meet on a train platform, and they’re coolly drawn and set off against each other in an instant by El-P: “Bumped into this kid I knew / he often had walked strange / so I ignored the blood on his laces so this cat could save face”. This encounter quickly spirals into a world built from words, a grimy New York sketched from the paranoid rantings of the second person, charged as he seems to be with PCP-assisted mania.
The ambition is clear, the storytelling vivid, yet the depth that’s established can only really be gleaned from album’s end. The fact that you don’t need to invest in or understand the story at all speaks just as strongly of El-P’s craft; the beat is a glorious patchwork of samples, littered with charged sub bass, a strong hook, some extended instrumental sections to flex the nuance, and a fucking bridge feat. The Mars Volta, oh hey what up?
They only jump in for one repeated guitar melody mirrored by a lyric that serves as an ellipsis to El’s frenetic lyricism (“Your future’s uncertain here now / the plot smears on the wall”), but the way the bridge acts as a satisfying conclusion to the bombast while winding down and clearing the space for Things To Come is masterly.
Aphex Twin - “Windowlicker”
I don’t imagine I’m opening any eyes here. My associates of associates who associate with Gen Zalpha tell me that the kids are RDJing real hard, but apparently they’re into his neoclassical piano bent or something? That’s cool and all, but, for better or worse, my first exposure to Aphex Twin was Grandmas Boy (2006), when about 10 seconds of “Windowlicker” played and had me all What The Fuck Was That?, and no fucking piano trill has ever done that to me. It still impresses me now. How is that vocal sample in the verses so emotive and memorable through its four chopped up notes? Does the arrangement before the bridge leave space for the distorted synth to have such a large and unexpected impact when it hits?
I dunno, man. But I do know two things:
1) If you haven’t seen the official Director’s Version video linked above, it is sensational.
2) If you love this song, love elaborate dance choreography, love weird cinema, and aren’t too fazed by a a variety of disturbing pieces of content typical of a Gaspar Noe film, you’ve gotta watch Climax! (2018).
Intronaut - “Milk Leg”
DON’T pay any attention to this track’s title OR the hospital-grade sterility of Intronaut’s most recent album OR the hideous prick who’s handling the sticks on this track. DO lose yourself in the distended arse-end of this recording, all bass and space. Habitual Levitations seems destined to remain Intronaut’s lost gem, an album that traded in some portion of their screaming intensity for dad-weed strength ruminations on the hypnotic power of the polyrhythm and lost the support of the moshing masses along the way. Bugger them, bugger that, bugger me senseless, extend that bridge out into a limitless smear of smoky horizon, yes boy.
It bears mentioning that our song structures are beginning to get cloudy here. Variations on a verse are still a verse, and small transitional passages aren’t necessarily bridges. Don’t lose too much of your life trying to pick apart the mechanics of prog metal, there’s plenty of YouTubers that’ll do it for you, and you’ll get to keep more friends than them if you abstain.
Fat Freddy’s Drop - “Blackbird”
Look, there’s a bit going on here structurally. You’re going to hear two horn solos separated by an entire verse and chorus, and neither of those is the bridge. If there ever was a band that moves at the speed of molasses, it’s the one named after a particularly choice batch of Aotearoan LSD. Questioning such things doesn’t help. One must accept that we can’t know everything in order to transcend. The bridge is unequivocally the bit at the end that never fails to make a half-stoned crowd bop that little bit harder. Rest In Power DJ Mu.
clipping. - “Say The Name”
I like to imagine fans of Hamilton stumbling across “Body and Blood” or “Enlacing” and getting their limited love for hip-hop shook the fuck up. When clipping. are on to a winner, they’re up there with the best in the genre, and the production pairing of William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes often takes the spotlight on their best work. “Say The Name” might not be Diggs’ finest lyrical moment (that pair of horrorcore albums had their fair share of kitsch), but the way the beat is gradually enlarged through additive elements until it morphs into a song-ending bridge is one of the beatmaking boiz’ finest moments. Here’s a version where it seems like Diggs is fresh out of bed and some other bloke comes in smashing some live drums at the end. Kalimba alert!
cLOUDDEAD - Physics Of a Unicycle
Given cLOUDDEAD’s hip-hop credentials alongside a “chorus” that only occurs once, one might hear “Physics Of a Unicycle”’s second half lurch from harmonious musings on the brilliance of the Wright Brothers and unicycles into a dub-laced series of bars about nuclear weapons, war planes, and God’s tendency to lie, and be tempted to label it a beat switch. Fuck you, it ain’t. It was 2008 and that term might not have existed. Don’t waste your precious time arguing with me, just familiarise yourself with these cult heroes and then go check the new doseone.
If it’s not abundantly clear by now, I’m a descriptivist, so this exercise might not even have been accurate, let alone educational. Nevertheless, the structure of SEVEN demands that I must follow through, make shrewd determinations, tell you what to think and how to think it. Adherence to structure makes the construction of clarity inevitable, and clarity is something we all desperately want and need, whether we think the 1970s’ explosion of progressive music was a net win for humanity or not. I’ve got righteous judgments to share with you regarding exactly this, and they seamlessly link up with everything written and shared above. I’ll just have to begin a new paragraph in which I can share these thoughts, a final paragraph, perhaps the last paragraph written by real human fingers ever. Here it comes.
Teenage me was definitely amongst the moshing masses you mention who didn't really get Habitual Levitations and thought it didn't sound enough like Mastodon or Tool, but I do recall Milk Leg being one of my favorite songs off the album for what it's worth, probably kept the CD in my collection a solid year or so longer than it would've been otherwise
Gotta check some of these others asap, Fat Freddy's Drop sounds cool as hell
Pin the coda on the Milo!