Your Final Round rankings from SpinTunes 20 Champion Ironbark:
Read on for Ironbark's reviews!
Congratulations to the finalists on four very fine entries. Quite a sombre batch of songs, and unlike last SpinTunes you don't even have a photo of a wintry library to blame. (I was initially planning to outsource this round's voting to my 5-year-old niece, but that would've involved explaining Palestine and euthanasia. We drew some dinosaurs instead.)
I thought this was a pretty nifty challenge. It created far fewer weird circumlocutions than I was expecting, just a greater sense of purpose behind each word. Good stuff. I wish I'd had time to give it a spin myself.
Cheers to all of you for the music you've shared over the last few weeks. And thanks for putting up with my sleep-deprived ramblings. I'm much happier writing music than writing about music, and I am thoroughly looking forward to having no opinions for a while.
But before then, let's crank that handle one last time.
Stacking Theory - Goodbye Baby
The saddest possible sequel to your round 1 song, unpicking all its hard-won hope. I like how the opening verse mirrors the protagonist's despair with its bare, flat language, all the vividness of life reduced to 'it's so bad'. Satisfying contrary motion in those choral sections, and strong use of dynamics as usual. You're painting with very dark colours here - it's hard to read the 'rope tied shorter than the fall' line as anything but suicidal - but the gentle backing, with those simple warm arpeggios, shows the sun shining on the other side of the window. Like the protagonist, I'd have appreciated more insight into this 'hurt behind the way I feel'. It's like walking in on the final scene of a tragedy, with the chorus lamenting and bodies across the stage, and part of me wants some clue as to how we got here. But maybe it would dilute what you've captured, that moment when the end of a relationship is the end of the world, and nothing else exists. And that final image of the endlessly crashing wave is bloody great. (P.S. The first couple of listens my ear latched onto the word 'voice' and I tried to read this as a song about the referendum, but that didn't really have legs beyond 'we should all give up', which didn't seem very Gizo.)
Hot Pink Halo - Mimeograph
It's a melancholy song about moments of connection fading away to nothing, yet still the most cheerful entry this round by a long chalk. No one (overtly) dies! I love the sepia sound world you've created. The piano, rather than providing a supportive bed for your voice, is mostly off doing its own thing, commenting from the sidelines. In fact, apart from the harmony vocals, there's not really anything trying to hold this show together. But it somehow holds together - the various parts of the song feel like they're orbiting around an invisible centre. It's a really interesting sound. Wonderful images: the mimeograph pushing through the same old mistakes, the overlapping rounded shapes, phantom notes in the sun. Justice dictates that I should write reviews of similar length for every song, but I'm at the point where I'd rather appreciate this for what it is without completely pinning the butterfly down. I like this song a great deal.
Tunes By LJ - Watermelon
This is an unlikely animal: a slinky, halting groove in 6/8 that's also a poetic meditation on the conflict in Palestine. First of all, hats off for creating something so compassionate out of what has for many (me included) just brought a sense of helplessness. I like how your lyrics collapse history into a single moment, where mazes and bomb shelters and old buried civilisations flow together, all the while keeping your eyes on those in harm's way, born into a generations-old trap with no apparent exit, hoping that this isn't the day the world explodes. And behind all this, the tragic irony that it's the human instinct for faith - the final hope and the last thing to die - that drew these battle lines and keeps the fires burning. That's one reading, at least; the lyrics feel rich enough to support others. Musically, you keep surprising me with how much weight your core musical style can bear without breaking. Delicate, beautiful tinkles of piano to show bombs falling from the sky shouldn't work, but it does. The nature of this round's challenge means you must have thought hard about every word, so bringing Christianity into the equation with 'water turns to wine' feels deliberate. I'm a little torn on that line: I think I see what you're saying, but there's a whole messy story to unpack there, in a song already dense with complicated history. And the song title will probably just confuse anyone unaware of the symbolism. But this is a masterful piece of work, my favourite of the round.
The Dutch Widows - Finish On A High
It always takes me a moment to warm to this song. Then reliably, about halfway through each listen, it all just clicks together, and I'm fully on board until the end. Not sure why that is, though maybe bumping it up just a couple of BPM would bring me on board earlier. Excellent song though. The backing vocals are lovely - kudos to your son and his girlfriend - and the clipped endings you give those '-air' lines add real character. As with last round's song, there are moments where your timing and emphasis make it quite hard for my brain to swallow the meaning of what you're singing, e.g. the 'we are capable' stanza. But your round 1 entry impressed me with how well you fit word to melody, so I'm assuming the slight awkwardness of these later songs is a deliberate choice, and can certainly be justified by the subject matter. Either way, this is the kind of song that easily absorbs any clumsiness, that encompasses the messy compromises and various mundane degradations of being human, that stays honest and clear-eyed and knows when it's time to say goodbye. It's a grim, beautiful and oddly uplifting thing.
GFS - Belated Eulogy (SHADOW)
This must have been a hard song to write, but it's your strongest lyric so far, I think. Each verse brings something new and pushes the story forward. That melody box waltz feels like a lament for stolen childhood. There's a strange click in the choruses between beats 2 and 3 that might well be intentional percussion but to me comes across as a clipping problem, and the final chorus, with voices, guitar and treated vox all competing for similar frequencies, could maybe use more presence in the bass as a counterbalance. Otherwise another strong production. Good song.
Jim Tyrrell - A Word (SHADOW)
Impressive variety to your music this contest. I love the sparse, moody backing here, hushed city noir. An updated Inferno, with you as a growling, pissed-off Virgil performing a weary autopsy on the world. I think the hipster stuff will probably date the fastest - hipsterism has largely died out in my neck of the woods already. And that verse is the closest the song comes to punching if not down, then maybe sideways. (Annoying as you find them, those hipsters are fellow victims and will be thrown into the meat grinder along with the rest of us when the capitalist machine deems us no longer useful. Hey, I think I've caught your cynicism!) An enjoyably bitter tour of our modern hell.
Micah Sommersmith - Indistinguishable (SHADOW)
I've had a while to enjoy the nimble craft of these lyrics. (I can hear Poe's decomposed corpse murmuring his approval.) Excellent now to hear them set to music. There's a nicely brooding quality to the opening stretch and I thoroughly enjoyed all the musical twists in the latter half, with rapid harmonic changes mirroring the narrator's shifts in mood: rousing yourself up into a major key to brave the unknown, then those inventive modulations over lungs and tongues as realisation dawns - very satisfying. Full of drama and musically elegant. It'll be fun to sit down at the piano and figure out exactly what you're doing when I get a moment. Lovely stuff.
Siebass - Shin Spoons (SHADOW)
Ha ha. Top work. And far better written than it probably needed to be, too: some of these lines are intriguing enough to warrant their own songs. My only complaint is the brevity. Just as I figure out who you're imitating, you're off to the next victim. But that's what the replay button's for. (You realise you've now volunteered to do this every SpinTunes, right?)
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