RB3: "Sunday Morning" Expert Drums FC (DLC)

This fantastic song opens with a pretty long snare roll. If you've ever listened to Tragic Kingdom on CD, or even just streamed it in full elsewhere at some point, you probably already know that it normally fades in that way. The ending to "Sixteen," the previous song on the record, bleeds directly into the start of "Sunday Morning," so the intro snare roll is normally barely audible for the first several beats. In Rock Band, "Sunday Morning" stands alone, so we lose the crossfade and instead bring a little more attention towards that opening drum roll. Or at least, somebody at HMX did, because they authored eighteen slight tempo changes just in the snares. For the most part, shifts up or down of two to five BPM for a couple beats aren't gonna mess anything up, but you actually probably do want to slow down for the second measure -- there's a flat drop of ten BPM starting on the fifth beat of gameplay. It's deceptively easy to miss a note at the start from negligence, but hey, at least that roll does come right at the beginning. Just restart, no real loss. Anyway, past the intro, this song has that typical No Doubt punchiness that makes it really engaging and enjoyable to drum along to even if it isn't terribly complicated. 1:53 and the outro (4:09) are probably the only real potential miss points once the ball gets rolling. But let's not confuse lack of difficulty with lack of quality. There's little switch-ups and fills at what feels like every turn here and it would be pretty disrespectful to just say it's mostly easy and move on. The song has these little idiosyncrasies here and there that just make it, like how the bass goes into triplets when turning around into the verse 1 (0:34), only for the drums to intercept the triplet feel next go around for verse 2 (0:55). Then the pattern moves, as drums and guitar trade syncopation instead between 1:57 and 2:05. Gwen Stefani famously steals the show a little bit during the bridge, which I can't really fault her for, but it is a shame that the instrumental goes overlooked at 2:52. I mean, that easily could have been one of those legendary "less is more" guitar solos if the band wanted it. There's really only a handful of notes played so loosely, but juxtaposed against such a tight and impactful rhythm section, it absolutely rips. I don't know, man. To me, this is a damn near perfect song.