Thursday, November 26, 2009

Apparently the Davidson Honor Code doesn't apply to post-rock...

Get this: I'm sitting here listening to some more My Education, the artist featured in today's Song of the Day post, and I get to the fourth track ("Mother May I") from their most recent release, Bad Vibrations. Having listened to it in the past, I always thought that the chord progression sounded familiar, but I never could quite put my finger on where I'd heard it before. Today, the eureka moment came. "Mother May I" (from 2008) has the same exact chord progression as "Thirteen Robins Road" by The Evpatoria Report (from 2008 as well). Now, these two obscure post-rock bands don't matter to anyone but a handful of audiophiles like myself, but the fact of the matter is that there's some stealing of intellectual property going on here. To me, this is just about as obvious as the Coldplay vs. Joe Satriani plagiarism incident. However, where blame is to be placed is unclear, as both songs were likely recorded around the same time.

Below, I've uploaded both tracks so that you can observe the similarities for yourself (@ about the 11-minute mark for "Eighteen Robins Road").

My Education: "Mother May I" [from 2008 album, Bad Vibrations]















http://www.box.net/shared/d4ye5brt6m


The Evpatoria Report: "Eighteen Robins Road" [from 2008 album, Maar]
















http://the-evpatoria-report.bandcamp.com/track/eighteen-robins-road

EDITED @ 7 PM: I mistook the Evpatoria Report songs, citing "Dipole Experiment" instead of "Eighteen Robins Road" as the contentious piece. I have cleared up this issue.

3 comments:

Darius Gerulis said...

you mistaken the songs.
the Mother May song ripped off the chord progression of Evpatorias Eighteen Robins Road (From Maar), second part (around 11 minutes in the track), not Dipole.

Steven Hummel said...

I stand corrected. Thank you.

disconcerted said...

Not really that similar to my ears. They both have similar bass notes in the progression and are picking at notes rather than strumming, but then many songs have the same I'm sure.

Joe Satriani's an absolute idiot for following that up and I hope he fails - not that I support Coldplay, just that I don't like people thinking a vague melody belongs to them even when changed and put into a different context.

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