Here are rankings from Evermind:
Read on for Evermind's reviews!
General Advice:
Bass guitar treatment - My favorite technique for keeping the dynamic sound of a bass guitar while keeping the low end intact at all times is to use a multiband compressor (such as the free ReaXComp in the ReaPlugs package) to compress everything below 125-200Hz aggressively (adjust crossover freq to where there are only bass notes, no fret noise or pick or pluck sounds, 8:1 ratio is a good starting point) and then apply much lighter compression to everything above the low end (somewhere between 1.5:1 and 4:1 depending on how much you want the bass guitar to feature in the song) so you get all the character of the bass guitar and it feels dynamic without the low end ever dropping out.
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Stacking Theory - Slowly Disappear
I like the concept you've chosen, relating trash on the sidewalk to growing old and discouraged. It's a universal struggle, everyone ages, very relatable.
The song is very minimalist, a very on-grid instrumental with spoken word; we go almost two minutes before we get anything more than one chord every two bars and beat poet style poetry. We have some ear candy periodically to keep us going before we get to anything with real substance but not enough to keep my interest. I think this song might be a lot better paced if you gave the tempo a big bump, but you might lose the melancholy feel of it.
some really great bits of lyric like this one: "that was built for the days that we worshipped CRTs / a clean line defines where the screen used to be"
You could have compressed or limited the vocals a little more, sometimes they get a bit loud suddenly and it's jarring.
Sound treament wise, the piano seems a bit artificial and it takes away from what wants to be a more intimate feeling song. I can highly recommend grabbing a copy of "Isolation Piano - Tubes and Tape" from Pianobook for free, along with the free sampler engine DecentSampler. You might also try treating the piano with something like a subtle filter LFO or phaser or flanger to make it feel more dynamic. You might also try some saturation, like with the wonderful and free ChowTapeModel.
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Hot Pink Halo - Gold
Your concept is exactly the sort of thing I had hoped to see out of this challenge. Two things that I could not even venture a guess at connecting without your explanation; after the explanation, it makes perfect sense why they're connected. Moreover, you've made a compelling statement about how those bigoted against immigrants often benefit from the culture and labor of those immigrants.
The vocal cadence is very centered around downbeats. Everything hits the downbeats, and when there's a lot of syllables to get through, you use the offbeats too, but it's very much four-on-the-floor for the whole song, it feels very static and devoid of groove.
Lots of pitchiness and timing issues with the vocals.
Buzzy fret noise from the bass, such as at 0:58. If you're pressing your finger halfway between two frets, you have to exert a lot more force to get the string to solidly contact the fret. If you are right behind the fret (as in, slightly off the fret toward the headstock but finger not touching the fret) you can exert enough pressure to keep the string from bouncing off the fret and making that buzzy sitar-like sound with far less effort.
Bass guitar kind of disappears from the mix at times. See General Advice section for fixing this.
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GFS - Falling Down
The concept of rain personified is a kind of interesting one, but incorporating all challenges cumulatively as well is ambitious!
I can see that you wrote verses 1 and 2 to follow a common form and rhyme scheme, but then you abandon those in verse 3.
This seems to maybe follow the same pop formula as Vertical Vision, but it doesn't suit this song as well; for instance, the overly breathy and vibrato vocals with heavy use of vocal fry feel overly dramatic for this song.
The hi-hat rolls feel extremely chaotically panned, I find it distracting. I don't mind the trappings of trap music in pop, though, that juxtaposition is kind of cool. Maybe slow the autopanner down a bit.
Audio dropouts at 1:20 and 2:01, this can happen during rendering when your CPU is overstressed (which from your song bio sounds like it was the case). I think I remember you run a studio so you probably already know this and this is an artifact of rushing to meet the deadline, but in case you don't (and for the benefit of others who may read this) bouncing tracks with lots of plugins to a new track and muting or taking the original track offline should drastically reduce the CPU usage and help prevent dropouts like these from occurring. You can also reduce your CPU usage by using effects buses (may be called "aux" or "send" effects in your choice of DAW) instead of an instance of the same plugin on multiple tracks (may be called "insert" effects).
I don't see how this song fulfills this round's challenge at all.
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Pannacotta Army - Elephant
The "elephant in the room" is a pretty common idiom, so I'm not wild about this take on the challenge, not exactly "unexpected". Going back to our conversation about the challenge, I think if you told me climate change is like an elephant I could put two and two together. You've made an earnest attempt at tackling the challenge, though, so you get *some* points for the challenge.
Your bossa nova esque style suits the subject matter of people being extremely casual and lackadaisical about climate change as well as just being fun and enjoyable.
HUUUUUGE smile EQ on this, low end and high end are both overly hot but especially the low end. This makes the shaker and some sibilances stand out a really significant amount.
Vocal delivery and arrangement are great for the bossa nova esque style you have going.
Performance is great, everything is timed and tuned properly.
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Cavedwellers - Elevator Pitch
My best guess at how you attempted to meet the challenge is to have two vocal parts that fit together to form one by the end of the song. I don't think that an engineer with an idea and a venture capitalist are unrelated, and I don't think the merged parts actually make any sense together. I'll give you a point for the idea though.
Before I listened to this the second or third time, I didn't get that there were two different chorus parts that merge in the end. I don't think either part is particularly satisfying or memorable by itself, and we spend a good bit of time getting to the combined version as it's the final double chorus. You've also sacrificed the repetition that contributes to the hookiness of a hook by making it so the chorus section is not repetitious until the double chorus at the end. I don't honestly have a good suggestion for how you could have done this idea more justice.
Guitars are too loud and drums too quiet.
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Phlub - War Dawgs
I like that you've chosen to juxtapose two things, rather than draw some kind of logical connection between them. I didn't expect a sort of idea mashup for the challenge but it's cool.
I think there's a lot to unpack about dogs being trained for active combat scenarios, and what we get here seems to approach commentary, mentioning some pretty intense and scary things like finding IEDs and dead bodies, and kind of glosses over them. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be its own commentary, but it kind of ends up being default positive and comes across like propaganda.
Shades of The White Stripes in the guitar solo.
Kick drum is anemic and in my left ear. Don't make me tap the "bass instruments go in the center" sign.
The vocal delivery is great. Stellar. Really really works. So is the guitar tone.
Mixing is boomy. Too much low end.
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Jim Tyrrell - Salt
Two peoples' lives diverging and meeting again is not really "unrelated" since they started out linked, and remained linked (considering he ended up in your narrator's songs).
Still, the story is compelling and I like the bit about nothing growing where the admiral was buried because of how much salt is in him. It's a great bit of lyric.
Everything is distant and buried in room noise, which I'm sure you already know. Sounds like a single source in a noisy room, and if that's all you had to work with for this round, I get it.
According to your song bio, you took a live recorded song and layered onto it in a more controlled environment, but this is tough because you're stuck with the sound of the space you recorded in reverb-wise, especially if your mic was not up close and personal with the instruments. Layering on tracks recorded in a different space is a tough ask: things are just going to sound like they're in a different space.
Performance wise, this all sounds good, everything is on time and it sounds like it was a good show.
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Dutch Widows - When the Storm Starts to Rise
Storms and domestic violence are relatively unrelated things, though their connection is not exactly unexpected, even if you haven't heard "garth brooks' the thunder rolls" which already made this connection.
I like that your arrangement changes as you return to previous sections, bringing the overall energy up as we go along.
I'm not wild about some of the pacing of the lines, it often feels rushed because you've got such dense lyrics you're trying to fit into the lines, like "I'm so helpless if nobody else can hear".
The hook and the countermelody are super satisfying.
The tremolo is maybe a little too deep. I'm getting Cri-i-i-i-mson and Clo-o-o-o-ve-e-e-er.
Your vocal delivery is underwhelming on the more intense parts; a song about such an intense and stressful topic demands a bit more energy and emotion than we are getting.
The vocals are pitchy at times.
The low strings (cello?) have too much low end to be panned to the sides as they are. they also sound a bit nasal, which may be the sample library you used or may be EQ treatment. It also feels kind of artificial for some reason I can't put my finger on.
The rumbly thunder sfx throughout the song muddy everything up. They should fade out quicker, or be ducked out of the way of the actual song.
There are "pumping and breathing" artifacts from overzealous compression or limiting, noticeable especially around 0:58 - 1:05.
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Glennny - Platypus
A platypus is really only one thing, but a duck and a beaver are two things that are sort of connected via platypus, so sure, why not?
Some lyrical choices seem made solely to make rhymes that are perfect or close to perfect at the cost of making sense, like "some call you a quack" and "I've got a feeling I can't dissuade".
One of the "do do do"s at 0:13 sounds off-key and at 0:17 they are off-time. Time stretching or punch n roll recording might help, or you can turn to a tool like Vocalign or Reaper's ReaPack's Align Tracks.
Bass guitar kind of disappears from the mix at times. See General Advice section for fixing this.
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pfjr - falling down
I wouldn't have guessed the connection between the pothole and the house but the connection you've drawn feels somewhat tenuous.
Feels a little too tell and not enough show, lines like "Tired of feeling used and abused / I'm crumbling away at the edges" pale in comparison to much stronger lines like "No woman I know would live in this house"
Audio stutter at :26.
From :35 to :42 or so the panned acoustic guitars aren't well aligned and it's distracting.
Kick drum feels anemic, there's not much weight to it.
You've got a bit of waver in your vocal delivery. Considering it's a song about metaphorically falling apart that's not terrible, but you don't really *sound* like you're falling apart other than that, so it doesn't come across as intentional.
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Tunes by LJ - Morning Water
Water moving through the body and processing grief are pretty unexpected to relate to one another, and it works.
The smoothest song involving peeing that I've ever heard.
You mention in your song bio that your lyrics are meant to convey a vibe primarily, but there is definitely progression here. Water in the morning, booze at night, urinate the next morning, we go somewhere!
I award you Highest Dynamic Range. You're not afraid to have quiet sections, and your chill style allows you a lot of room for that.
The performance and production is mostly immaculate but that sidestick sticks out really far and some of the plosives in the vocal stacks don't quite hit at the same time. Not enough to ding you any points, but worth mentioning.
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Sober - Cheap Wine and Expensive Beer
Reminds me a lot of your song Kintsugi from a few Spintunes back, though with enough differences that it is its own song.
I don't think wine and beer are at all unrelated, but you have at least connected and compared the two things, so you get a point in the challenge category.
I think the choruses are strong, but the verses kinda feel like you're reiterating the sentiment of the chorus in more words while clarifying you don't mean any offense to the people who like cheap beer (a real concern in the country music crowd to be fair) or expensive wine. I think there's more to be explained about why you (or at least your song's narrator) thinks expensive beer is worth it but expensive wine isn't.
All that said, it's an enjoyable song and drinking songs aren't really designed to be complex masterpieces with deep and nuanced sentiments. They're meant to be fun and easy to sing loudly and drunkenly when the chorus comes along, and your chorus nails that.
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Jealous Brother - Guitar Picks and Nail Clippers
I personally relate guitar picks and nail clippers (the guitarist for my band in high school used nail clippers to trim guitar strings and ruined all the nail clippers in my house) but I think it's fair to say the average person would not likely see much of a relation between those two things and I am judging accordingly.
However, I don't think you've really connected the two in any significant way. If I swap out "nail clippers" for something else like "paper clips" nothing is lost from the song. While there's one line of the song where it is mentioned that the narrator's wife complains that the narrator never cuts his nails, I'm not seeing a connection to anything from that.
I like how you illustrate some details in subtle ways, like "I heard we had a fight".
I like the structure of the song and the little instrumental in-betweeners. Some good contrast and dynamic range between sections.
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