Although I am not an official judge, I try to offer my own reviews when I can. I apologize that I wasn't able to do so in Round 1.
Since I don't have to rank anyone, here are my reviews in submission order, with shadows at the end.
Melody Klein - Etude No. 15 - Virtual Descartes
This is my favorite song of yours that you’ve submitted to SpinTunes. The lyrics are spare and carefully chosen with a few really striking turns of phrase - “Code entangled in itself” being my favorite. “Separate the facts from the senses” - also great.
The instrumental texture thickens and builds similarly to in other songs of yours, but here it serves to highlight the growing frustration that Virtual Descarte feels at chasing his ideas in circles. This is especially true when the incessantly repeating three-note figure comes in around 4:00; it never quite fits in with the rest of the music; it gets twisted and distorted sonically, but rhythmically it continues without changing; it can’t be resolved to the rest of the music just as the philosophical problem at the center of the lyrics can’t be resolved. Finally it’s abandoned, just like Virtual Descarte abandons his quest for logical certainty. The ending reminds me of a quote from GK Chesterton on the conflict between faith and reason: “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
Richard Shakespeare - Push (Sisyphus The Insurance Clark)
Putting Sisyphus in a modern office setting is a great choice. In this song, though, the lyrics feel overly sketchy and don’t quite add up to something satisfying, especially regarding the part of the myth most people don’t know much about: what Sisyphus did to earn his punishment. The verses feel more like a list of characters than a coherent story or chain of events. We have eight characters in this song and, except maybe for Sisyphus himself, I don’t care about any of them because I don’t know who they are or what they’re doing.
The chorus is where we get to the emotional part, both because we’ve got vivid language (“I’ve still got cases left to push”) and because the melody opens up in a really cool way. You undercut that with your performance though, as the word “shouts” should be the climax of the song, but your voice is pulled way back when you should be belting that note out. I suspect that you suspect that your voice isn’t up to the challenge you’ve put before yourself. On the other hand, your backing vocals are spot on, so maybe the issues with the lead vocal stem more from a lack of time than a lack of talent. (The many excellent touches in the instrumental backing also suggest that you’ve got plenty of the latter.)
Star Bear - Nothing
Your central thesis - that we are more hardened to tragedy now than we were in the past - is debatable, I think, but your presentation is devastatingly effective, because your rhetorical device is dead simple and you apply it consistently throughout the song. Your choice to devote eight lines to each specific tragedy in the first three verses (with many lines that really hit home, like “Stay on the line. Please stay on the line.”), then in the last verse to pile them on one after another, is also a good one. Because you go deep into each tragedy at first, the listener recognizes that each tragedy of the last verse has that same depth as well without you having to spell it out for each one. One feels that the list could go on forever, and you’ve only stopped because you yourself are experiencing the numbness that you describe in the song.
The weakness of the song is simply that it is under-rehearsed. Your printed lyrics differ from what you sing in a number of places, indicating that you are adapting them as you record. As a result you haven’t quite settled on the most natural phrasing, or edited the lyrics to enable that phrasing. This is especially evident in the last verse where you sing “Year two thouSAND three” and “nineteen seVENty-four”, but it does the most damage to your song in the couplet that begins “The saddest story you’ll ever hear” - the next line is sung in a variety of different ways throughout the song. As the core idea of the song, the listener should be able to latch right onto it, and that’s hard to do when they’re never sure exactly how it’s going to be delivered.
Dented Bento - Og Go to Safeway
A very silly song, that derives much of its humor from the juxtaposition of caveman grammar with modern innovations like minivans, cans of Sprite and “solid credit”, turns out to also be a sly satire on modern masculinity. Og sees himself as the “mighty hunter” keeping his clan from starvation, when really he’s a guy in a minivan spending money he doesn’t actually have to buy food that someone else prepared, all - let me guess - while wearing khaki shorts and a polo shirt. And to top it off, he didn’t even do a good job at it: wrong food, unhealthy food, not enough food. Back in the minivan, Og.
Like “A Man is a Clam”, this song’s treatment of gender is hardly progressive - Og is basically every sitcom dad from the past thirty years - but the stereotypes exist for a reason, and it’s hard to get too worked up when you’re having this much fun listening. The title hook has spent more time in my head this week than any other melodic fragment from this entire fight.
See-Man-Ski - Ellie
It sounds like your piano lessons are paying off: the piano here is gorgeous, as is your vocal melody and the other subtle instrumental touches. The piano fills in the pauses between the vocal line perfectly, never taking up more space than it needs to. Add to that your source material, the mere mention of which is enough to make a certain generation of moviegoers weep, and you’re playing heartstrings like a harp, baby.
I find myself entirely unable to map a 1:1 correspondence between events in this song and events in the movie: Did Ellie die in the storm? Did the storm destroy the house? Did the storm lift the house? Did he die in the storm? But in the end I don’t really care: the emotional content is there clear as day and it’s a fantastic listen.
rackwagon - Please Like and Subscribe
Relatable. Extremely relatable.
There’s a lot to like about this song, but unfortunately it falls into its own trap: it’s a solid, well-crafted song in a round where there are a number of truly brilliant songs, and this isn’t one of them.
The orchestrations are a great touch, although synth brass is always a risky proposition. The electric guitars in the chorus are tasty, but I want even more to lift the energy level in the chorus. The melody is good in a lot of places, but - and maybe this is just a pet peeve that’s specific to me only - when you sing “touch the sky when i can leap and fall completely” the rhythm is perfectly straight quarter notes that just happen to be shifted to the off-beats. The syncopation is used as a crutch to disguise a rhythmically and melodically boring line, and it just comes off sounding awkward.
Mandibles - The Jester King
Given the band’s pedigree and experience in classical and early music, I’m highly amused that you set your song lyrically hundreds of years ago… and sonically squarely in the 70s. (Then again, that was 50 years ago, which might as well be ancient history, and you’re also well within that stylistic tradition of setting lyrics far in the past.) No complaints here on that front!
Cybronica’s voice is well-suited to the style, though I suspect your training and awareness of vocal health issues prevented you from going full Janis Joplin. Lamentable, but understandable. As mentioned, the lyrics fit with the stylistic preoccupation with centuries-old forms of warfare, and are well-crafted throughout.
The decision to spend the last full minute of the song repeating the chorus hook was the correct one, and I wouldn’t have minded it going even longer. That said, the plinky piano in the coda doesn’t add much to the energy level - perhaps if it had been a lead synth playing the same lines it would have been more effective.
The Dutch Widows - Demolition Order
The energy in this entry is infectious and the concept is excellent. I love the twangy guitar that comes in at 0:25, especially its li’l pitch bend. The low-register laconic delivery of the lead vocal brings the energy down a bit and the tendency of the verse melody to follow the root note of each chord gets a bit old (if Ryan were judging this SpinTunes he’d have much stronger words about this). But mostly this is a fun goofy song that puts a smile on my face.
Firefly - Dot Dash Dance
Super fun dance pop. I love the way you turn the Morse code signal into a catchy vocal hook. I love the guitars and the synths. I love the vocal melody in the verses.
Doing the spoken word intro twice is an odd choice that I don’t think adds much; you could get into the actual song faster. Similarly, the spoken “Umpteen times on the radio” section doesn’t add much either and has some truly awkward vocal phrasing, though the “Hear the dance code” part works great.
Hot Pink Halo - Going Really Far
For a song that imagines a racehorse (a famously large, fast, high-energy animal) traveling to space on a rocket (a famously large, fast, high-energy vehicle), this song is remarkably intimate, sedate, and chill. I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing, but it’s certainly an interesting choice.
The gorgeous layers of violins, the very gradual ebb and flow of the instrumentation, and the lack of dramatic transitions between musical sections make this song feel like a nice cuddly blanket. You mention hope in your song bio, but what I’m getting more of is comfort. Still a great feeling.
Given the overall vibe of the song, I think a fade-out ending would have been more effective than the half-hearted “and now we’re done” ending the song currently has. With a fade-out we can imagine Phar Lap just continuing on, on, on, on…
Governing Dynamics - A Traveler’s Journal
Great concept and great lyrics. Nice touch including “the van with the cross”. As in the original story the devoutly religious ones keep on moving - with the added irony that in this telling they should know better - it’s their guy who told the story in the first place!
The overall vibe is mellow, but the fuzz guitar is abrasive and the mix gets cluttered with guitar parts at times - a good example being the “Woke up in a hospital” verse starting around 1:44. I get the feeling that your recording/arranging process is fairly improvisational, and I wonder what results you’d get by planning out the arrangement a bit more and asking yourself what role each instrument is playing in each section.
Sober - The Soldier’s Song
A companion piece to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier”, in first person rather than third and without that song’s easy moralizing. But like “Universal Soldier” it derives its rhetorical power from enumerating a devastatingly long list, one that could go on, and has gone on, forever. The lyrics are expertly crafted with vivid, well-chosen details and a few gut punches (“My story’s just the same throughout all of history” … “The terrors I have seen, the awful tools of hell / By and by I’ll get my due for using them myself”).
Musically, the chorus doesn’t work for me as well as I want it to. The melody and harmony of the verses place this song squarely in a particular tradition, and the chorus feels like it’s coming from a different song. Additionally, the “Sometimes I survive” section feels like a misstep: you cut out the instrumentation, grind to a halt and switch to a low-register, declamatory style, all of which suggests that what you’re about to say is really really important, but it comes across as just another restatement, rather than the powerful summation I think it’s intended as. If the delivery and backing instrumentation were more in line with the rest of the song and the momentum was allowed to carry through I don’t think the lyrics here would bother me at all.
chewmeupspitmeout - Narcissus and Echo
Great creepy atmosphere - I love the combo of the fuzzy bassline and the sparkly piano arpeggios. The thing that sounds like a MIDI acoustic guitar or something and that only appears at the very beginning and very end doesn’t fit with the rest of the sonic landscape; I would cut it.
Your vocals are really expressive - I love the little crack on the word “her” in “Nothing prepared / Her for the despair”, and in the word “underwear”.
The last stanza is a bit muddled lyrically - “genuflection” implies worship, adoration - but he’s seeing “imperfections”. I think you’re trying to make Narcissus a little more complicated but it’s not quite clear what we’re supposed to take from it. It might be cleaner to end at “Narcissus will always be alone”.
Ominous Ride - Allegory of the Echo Chamber
There are some clever rhyme schemes and very catchy backing vocals here. Generally though the lyrics come across as overly preachy and didactic; they might work in an angrier more punk rock context. The offbeat guitar stabs get grating real fast. The drums are buried in the mix and mostly what comes through is a kick drum seemingly playing at random. The song goes on for a few too many verses. I’m sympathetic to the politics of the song but that doesn’t make for a satisfying listen.
FireBear - True Love
When does the full “Princess Bride”-inspired concept album drop?
The energy here is fantastic, the vocals are great, and the melodies are catchy. I especially like the background “As you wish” vocals near the end of the song. I would lose the synth brass.
The lyrics don’t do a lot for me; they consist either of perfunctory synopsis or somewhat out-of-context quotes from the movie. You’re relying on residual goodwill toward the movie rather than making the lyrics engaging in their own right.
Phlub - A Night in Babylon
This is good stuff. The melody of the chorus is catchy and satisfying, and the microtonal modulations provide variety and keep the listener on their toes without being too inaccessible.
I have a pronunciation suggestion re: the word “soundsystem”: there’s already an element of artificiality to all sung pronunciation, because you’re singing rather than speaking, and usually (like here) vowels are elongated and given more emphasis than normal. Schwas are for syllables that are completely unstressed, and that’s not the case for the last syllable of “soundsystem” as you deliver it. Sing it with a short “e” like the word “stem”.
Night Sky - Murder on the Greyhound
The instrumental backing in this song is absolutely great: the saxophones are of course expertly played and everything is recorded and mixed great. The central idea is fun, and a Greyhound bus is a great setting for this kind of seedy story.
There’s some lyrical/melodic awkwardness. Sometimes a rhyme doesn’t match the natural stress pattern of the words; stress the words naturally and you get an unsatisfying rhyme (forGET / SECret), or highlight the rhyme and get an awkward pronunciation (you SEE / DaiSY). Neither solution is ideal.
Other times the lyric feels shoehorned into a melody that results in awkward stress. “Hound’s a haven for tramps and thieves” is a great lyric and a great melodic hook, but when you put them together you get an awkward emphasis on the nothing-word “for”. There are also some lines that feel like they just don’t have enough syllables in them, like “I put my hand out to the sleeper”.
I know you have one person writing lyrics and another person writing music; this setup has produced great songs throughout history, but in this case either 1) the lyrics should be written with more of an ear to how they will eventually be set to music; 2) the music should take better account of the stress patterns inherent in the lyrics; or 3) once a draft of music and lyrics are in place, they should both be edited mercilessly until they are more in alignment. Ideally you’d be doing all three.
Also In Blue - I Know Tom Dooley Done It
Great sound, great voice, great hooky chorus. Placing the story in modern-day New York works great, and the lyrics are rich with details. Musically and in the turns of phrase of various characters, though, we’re still stuck in Dixie, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition. It’s most incongruous when various characters (including the prosecutor!) call for Tom Dooley to hang. I mean, we did call the challenge “Anachronism”, so maybe I can’t complain too much.
Compared to a typical episode of a police procedural, the story here is quite straightforward: the initial suspect turns out to be the killer, as far as we can tell, albeit with the accomplice discovered midway through. This is probably fairly realistic, compared to a more contrived twisty plot, but it does make the nearly seven-minute runtime a bit hard to justify.
Razor Brain - Smokin’ Hot [SHADOW]
There’s some charm here, but you made the right choice in submitting “Og Go to Safeway” as your official entry.
Hanky Code - My Shoe [SHADOW]
All the markers of a Hanky Code classic: dense rhymes, high energy, catchy melody, vocals buried way too low in the mix. They are good! We should hear them!
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