ST21.2 Reviews - Micah Sommersmith

Reviews! I got 'em - finally! Thanks for your patience.

Stacking Theory - Sea Change

I love the hazy atmosphere you create here. The various musical elements all work together quite nicely.

The lyrics work well but feel a bit slight - when you repeat "that I haven’t got" four times while descending a half step each time it feels to me like you're just stalling until you get to the chord you need to get to; similar with the repetitions of "you are my sea change" at the end. In a song that's not particularly long, these repetitions take up a lot of space.

Mandrake - Chaotic Thought Process

There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in the instrumental here, it’s a very engaging listen.

I wish that the lyrics were less clinical and more visceral. In your song bio you describe pacing the kitchen because you’ve run out of plastic wrap. That should be in the song! It’s a great specific, concrete detail that illustrates your state of mind more memorably than straightforward lyrics like “i think theres something wrong with me” and “i wish i didnt overcomplicate everything”.

iveg - Kara Lost the Keys

This song is definitely catchy, and the many key changes are handled well, but it’s also too mean-spirited for me to enjoy coming back for repeat listens.

Glennny - No Fool At All

The mandolin sounds great. The electric guitars sound great. Do they sound great together? I can't decide. It's a little like wearing a bolo tie with a motorcycle jacket. It's most jarring in the bridge into the solo, where the shimmering mandolin riff is juxtaposed with the overdriven guitar.

Otherwise, both musically and lyrically this is a really good song. Your voice sounds fantastic, the melodies are solid (especially the wordless head melody) and the lyrics are compelling.

My only definite complaint is with your treatment of the title lyric: "No" is a key word but it's set on an eighth note pickup with a reduced vowel so every time I hear "I believe I believe / I’m a fool at all". The simplest solution would be to shift "I'm no" an eighth note earlier so that "no" lands on beat four.

Cavedwellers - Don’t Take It Lightly

Your lyrics are thoughtful and engaging, and the way you tie together the wedding in verse 1 and the funeral in verse 2 is both intellectually satisfying and emotionally affecting.

The guitars and vocals are immaculate, as is to be expected from a Cavedwellers song, and the brass is an unexpected and delightful surprise; there are some killer horn lines throughout.

What stops me from engaging with this song as much as I want to is that the transitions from section to section feel very abrupt; it’s a lot to have key changes combined with changes in instrumentation, percussion pattern, and energy level, and it pretty much all happens at once on the downbeat each time. I want more percussion fills or some kind of lead instrument mini-solo leading up to the downbeat to prepare me for the big change that’s coming up. (If the jarring effect is intentional, I think it’s undercut by how smooth and easy to listen to the song is otherwise.)

Phlub - In Memory

I love these lyrics; I’m sure there are specific meanings behind many of the images you chose that I’m not exactly catching but mostly for me they capture the way our memory makes things hazy and ambiguous and incomplete. You’ve also got a compelling and memorable (heh) vocal melody which helps the listener make sense of the dizzying key changes throughout the song. I wonder if you should have jumped up an octave sooner; as the verses descend in pitch you’re scraping the bottom of your usable vocal range but maybe that was an intentional choice (and maybe unavoidable that you’d hit an edge somewhere; the first line alone spans an entire octave without any key changes!)

Instrumentation: I hear mandolin, bass, and hand percussion, and lead guitar at the beginning (that has some kind of weird buzz going on on the G?). The minimal instrumentation works pretty well though I wonder if having a melody instrument in later parts of the song would help the listener navigate some of the key changes when you’re not singing.

Siebass - Turn the Key

That chorus is definitely catchy, though my wife suggests that “inspiration” might not be the best word for the Such Great Heights influence… so if Ben Gibbard takes you to court, make sure she’s not in your jury.

That aside, I did really enjoy this song - the lyrics are compelling and full of vivid imagery. Where I struggled most was with your voice, which comes across, to me at least, as strident and tensed, like you’re shouting everything - which I’ve felt about songs of yours in the past as well but which seems particularly ill-suited to the tender lyrics. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of concrete advice to address this, other than to relax a bit and maybe explore more of your lower vocal range, as you sounded nice and loose and comfortable at e.g. 0:50 when you sing “if we’re so inclined”.

The Pannacotta Army - No For An Answer

Sonically, this is a gorgeous song; the guitar and light percussion carry the listener along gently and the arrangement swells and ebbs subtly in a very satisfying way. The melody is not flashy but your voice is gorgeous and understated. The music is rewarding without making any demands of the listener.

I can’t say the same for your narrator, who won’t stop trying for the affections of someone who clearly isn’t interested. I get that this is a classic trope in popular music (and art in general), but for me it’s a pretty tired one, and you don’t offer much to complicate it.

Tunes By LJ - Modulate Me

Man, that guitar is tasty, and it fits perfectly within the effortlessly cool vibe you are so good at creating. This song is a pure delight to listen to, as long as I ignore the lyrics, the central metaphor of which does not hold up to scrutiny at all.

Sober - The First Will Be The Last

Barn-burning picking, a classic bluegrass vocal melody, playful modulations, excellent, excellent, excellent. Those choral backing vocals add to the sense of mysticism I think you’re going for, and your lead vocal has gotta be approaching the far reaches of your range in both directions.

Lyrically, the second verse is a highlight. Not only do the animals fit in with the bluegrass/old-time genre (turkey in the straw, etc, etc) but they have the feeling of omens or portents (I’m reminded of a verse from the Indigo Girls’ “Deconstruction” about foxes in the yard), and affinity with animals is a tried-and-true way of illustrating the addressee’s seeming mysticality. I wish the other verses had more of that concrete language. I do love the circular structure of the song as a whole and the mini-circles within verses where the second line is repeated at the end (except for the fourth verse where you repeat part of the first line instead), but some of the space is used up with repetitive lines like “In my day I’ve seen some things / I’ve seen glories of days in the past”; and the penultimate line “You’ve a way of impressing the cosmos and time” feels both too on-the-nose and also not very eloquently worded. Give me more concrete imagery please!

GFS - Ready

Thematically, this song treads similar ground to your Round 1 entry “Vertical Vision”: the narrator is done with whatever was holding them back in the past and is ready to move on to better things. Don’t get me wrong, it still makes for a great song, and if anything the treatment of the theme is even more effective here than in Round 1.

I love how you use the metaphors of a song in verse 1 and a movie in verse 2, and you carry them through into their respective choruses. We don’t learn anything about the specifics of the narrator’s life, but the use of concrete metaphorical imagery, in combination with the anthemic music, communicates the emotional core of the song and lets listeners insert themselves and their own experiences into the song.

My only real complaint with this song is with the bridge; it feels half-formed and brings down the energy level without much payoff. My advice would be to either spend some more time developing it or accept that not every song needs a bridge!

The Dutch Widows - A Moderate Alligator

A fun story and a nice chill listen. Both your verses and choruses are pretty lyric-dense; I think you’d benefit from having a lyrically simpler and more memorable chorus to balance out all the story-telling in the verses. Perhaps you could adapt the title hook from the outro for a chorus; you can still do the great looping, building outro but that way it would have a bit more connection to the rest of the song.

Ominous Ride - Drift Asunder

For me, the essence of the Ominous Ride sound is the vocals - specifically, the way you arrange and mix them; I’m not sure what all is involved but it seems like at least some combination of multi-tracking, octave doubling, and some kind of reverb or other effect. I love it. It’s great, and this song is no exception.

A result of that distinctive sound is that your music feels very stylized and deliberate; the final producit is clearly not what one would hear listening to you sing “in real life” unamplified and unfiltered. Again: I think it’s a super cool sound! But in this song, the guitar playing, especially the lead guitar work, sounds very much like an actual human being sitting and playing guitar. I could walk into a bar on live music night and hear that guitar playing; the vocals not so much. The result is a weird sort of cognitive dissonance that pretty consistently kept me from fully appreciating everything going on in this song.

Otherwise, there’s a lot to like; the vocal melody is solid, the lyrics, while certainly nebulous, are easy on the ear and add to the atmosphere you’re creating.

chewmeupspitmeout - you don’t belong to me

I complained last round about the rigid-sounding electric piano; this song also has repeated quarter note piano/synth chords but they sound much more natural and human; I don’t know if you actually did any humanization to it or if the synth patch itself is just less robotic sounding. In any case, thank you!

What I will complain about this round is the drum machine hi-hat (or egg shaker, or something) sound that comes in at 0:16 and continues for most of the song. Maybe it’s just a me problem and everyone else loves it, but it’s so clearly not played by a human while also not exploiting the advantages of programmed percussion to do anything interesting. And it’s so prominent in the mix while not giving any sense of forward momentum.

The lyrics are great. The melody is good. The synth arpeggios are lovely. That damn hi-hat though. Sorry!

Hot Pink Halo - Shape Shifter

For performing artists, maybe especially for singers, it’s hard to separate the artist from the medium from the artwork - our tools are our bodies, our medium is the breath that keeps us alive, the product is our voice. It would be tempting to contrast this with the situation for visual artists (like, let’s say, printmakers) - after all, you get the ink from a store, the press sits on your desk, and the finished product can be sent off to hang on a wall miles away from you. But throughout this song (and other songs of yours as well, I think) you resist this separation: the art works on you just as you work on it; it’s a part of you and you’re a part of it. We cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

Of course, the “I-you” language combined with the physicality of the lyrics - pushing, pulling, coming alive, screaming, tracing edges with fingers, etc. - means there is also absolutely a sexual charge to this song that I’m not used to in SpinTunes entry. Not a complaint! I think there’s a real tendency for us (SpinTunes people / hobbyist songwriters / nerds / etc.) to shy away from even obliquely sexual content in our songwriting - or to couch it in humor/irony - whether due to embarrassment, personal aversion, or just feeling like mainstream music is already oversaturated in it and there are other things to discuss. But it’s a part of the human experience! And it’s fun to sing about!

Anyway, this song is great.

The Popped Hearts - Hey Jane

This song is fun and sweet and if it doesn’t put a smile on your face, you’re a monster. The instrumental is super catchy and nails that pop-punk sound, and the lyrical details are perfect at dropping the listener into a specific time and place. I wish the vocal had more energy and a little more focus - I don’t need you to sound exactly like Tom DeLonge but to me there’s a mismatch between the tight, poppy, upbeat instrumental and the kinda laid-back vocal.

nightingale’s fiddle - Chicago

Bold contrast. In the chorus, I’m not sure that the harp is up for matching the intensity of the vocal but it’s a cool concept. I do love the way you handle the key change, with the vocal shifting up a half-step and the seventh and root of one chord becoming the fifth and seventh of the next. I wonder why the verses are in D-flat instead of C-sharp, which seems like it would make for an easier transition to E (with fewer pedal changes) but I may not know what I’m talking about.

Of course we’re not really talking about a person, but you’re committed to the metaphor, and I can’t help but wonder, if the narrator knew immediately upon starting the date that this guy was an asshole, then what was he like at the beginning when they first saw each other that made her so into him? I guess there are certainly people who can charm one minute and turn terrible the next, but we’re not given enough details for it to be convincing to me.

On the other hand, if you discard the metaphor, or at least don’t insist on maintaining the metaphor throughout the entire song,you probably have some interesting things to say about the Museum of Ice Cream. I think I’d like to hear them!

Jealous Brother - Time Has Its Orders

First off, reading the end of your song bio I recognize the all-too-common urge to couch any explanation of your work in apologies and disclaimers, to which I can only say: get over yourself! It’s a good song and it’s possible (though it may take practice) to talk about it without curling up into a tiny ball and dying of embarrassment!

The key change is so smooth and your voice sounds so confident and at home in both keys that I had to sit down at the piano and plunk out your vocal melody in both spots to actually believe that you had changed keys. As usual, you have a great melodic sense - I love the contrast you create when, for example, you come up from below on “Right down the line” and “Part two of goodbye” and then come down from above on “No cure in sight”, or when you break up the previously established rhythm with “The eyes see…”

I’m not sure what the lyrics are specifically about, but there’s definitely a sense of loss throughout - and maybe a wake or shiva or some other funeral ritual going on? In any case, the song is so well-crafted musically that I’m content to let the lyrical images wash over me without worrying too much about what exactly is being depicted.

The song starts with a few seconds of silence and what sounds like the very tail end of a guitar chord - I’m wondering if you meant to cut that out and have the vocals come in completely unaccompanied?

Brain Weasels - Intervention

This sounds huge and I love it. I’d like to imagine you took my advice to heart last round because these lyrics flow really smoothly despite being similarly dense. One might argue that you’re not really modulating to E, you’re just spending a lot of time on the VII chord, but since I’m not ranking anyone I actually don’t have to worry about any of that.

I like the weird suspensiony riff at the beginning, I like the gradual build through the “spark of grief” prechorus until it explodes with “You seem to live in my head”, I like how that screaming bridge is interleaved with a repeat of the chorus - that’s a really neat trick that I’m jealous I’ve never thought of.

Two comments on the (otherwise great) vocal performance: 1. The last word of every other line in the chorus (sad, fad, etc) seems consistently off-key to me, and 2. Your consonants are enunciated super clearly, which feels weird to give as a critique (especially from me, a choir director!) but it feels incongruous with the style, especially e.g. when your Ts are super enunciated in “wanted” and “validate” in the chorus.

Jim Tyrrell - The Fall

Musically, this has such a classic pop singer-songwriter vibe to it that I love - I know you’re a student of the past masters (as a bar musician who takes requests, you have to be, right?) so it’s no surprise that you can nail this sound.

I think my only sonic complaint is with the echo/delay effect e.g. starting at 0:48, which is loud enough and delayed enough that I hear it as a separate musical line, but the harmony has changed from when you actually sang it, so it doesn’t fit with the rest of the music. I’d suggest actually composing a separate backing vocal line or cutting it entirely.

As for the lyrics: there are some really excellent rhymes (including the sneaky “got, so” / “not so [sure]”), and everything flows nicely… but zooming out, I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about this relationship. In the ending section, the narrator seems to earnestly want to stay together, but throughout the rest of the song he has nothing positive to say about either his relationship or his partner, aside from platitudes like “you’re what I need” and “this is a life worth living”, which come across as completely empty in the presence of so much negativity. If you’re meaning to portray a relationship that has its issues but is still worth saving, you need either more concrete positive language, either literal or metaphorical. And if you’re meaning to portray a relationship that’s doomed despite the narrator’s best efforts, the closing section just muddles things.

Pigfarmer Jr - Say Goodbye To The River

You tackle a similarly weighty lyrical theme in this round as last round, but the lyrics make more of an impact here, as much for what they don’t say as what they do. You take a specific, concrete metaphor (the river) that you keep returning to, and the rest of the lyrics are effective in their directness.

The melody is easy to listen to but doesn’t stick in my ears very long afterwards, except for the nice jump up and walk back down at “And I don't want to be the reason that you cry”.

Governing Dynamics - Where’s The Fire

Nice extension of the fire imagery, though as is perhaps to be expected, the more you develop it the farther you get from the meaning of the original idiom. I understand "Where's the fire?" to mean "You're overreacting", the implication being that the speaker doesn't believe there's a fire at all. But your narrator clearly sees that their addressee’s drama has a source, and that they may even be underreacting, with lines like “And why so unconcerned” in the second chorus.

In any case, the difference in temperaments of the two characters is made clear, as is the narrator’s awareness that their own risk-aversion may come at a cost.

Musically, this is classic Governing Dynamics… which is to say, I struggle to find much intelligent to say about it. It’s good! The key change into the chorus is pretty jarring, which may have been your intention.