ST21.3 Reviews - Micah Sommersmith

Preamble

Stacking Theory - Slowly Disappear

This is the basic idea I came into this challenge with - “Here’s a specific, concrete thing I’ve noticed in the world, and here's a broader aspect of the human condition I’ve also noticed, and here’s how they fit together.” It’s a thing I like about songwriting in general, and therefore it’s a thing I like about your song!

I’m not completely sold on the spoken word delivery. This is the longest song in the round by almost a full minute, and a lot of it is taken up with talking. And at points you sit in kind of an uncanny valley between pure speech and rap - in the football section you emphasize “okay”/”play”/”away”/”stay” as if to say “Look, I’m deliberately rhyming even though there’s no consistent line length and nothing lines up with the music.”

Hot Pink Halo - Gold

Look, you and I both know this challenge might as well have been “Write a Hot Pink Halo song”. I fully expected you would have some thoughtful and insightful lyrics and you didn’t disappoint. And now I know a tiny bit more about Australian history, so thank you for that!

Musically, there’s a lot of great stuff; the chorus is a highlight with the instantly memorable ascending “Gold, gold, gold” hook (and your voice sounds great on the top notes), but the real gold is the choral backing vocals that add so much warmth to the second and third choruses; it’s a pleasure to listen to.

GFS - Falling Down

Your vocal performance displays a lovely combination of control and vulnerability - I love moments like the vibrato on “me” at the end of the first line of the verses, or the scrape just audible in your voice on the very last word of the song “down”. It’s a beautifully intimate performance, which makes me a little confused about your intentions in using the filter on your voice in the verses - perhaps just to make for a bigger, more dramatic transition into the chorus, which it certainly does. But I think I would like to hear your voice more clearly throughout.

The chorus has a very strong melody; both the descending melisma on “falling down” and the downward leap of a seventh on “everyone wants me now” are not only great to listen to on their own but they make for effective text painting as well.

A few weak spots in the lyrics; I would edit “covered fields” to “flooded fields” in verse two as “covered” doesn’t really evoke any emotion, especially compared to the parallel “barren” in verse 1 (plus you'd get a bonus alliteration!). And in the third verse into the chorus, “gotta make sure their profits don’t start falling down” doesn’t sound natural to me. Profits down, yes; profits falling, yes; profits falling down? I don’t think this is something people say, and the use of the word “profits” feels a little too pull-back-the-curtain. Since you already employ the “foundation is cracking” metaphor, here’s a suggested you’re free to take or leave:

our foundation is cracking and everybody looks away
soon the whole damn building will be
falling down

The Pannacotta Army - Elephant

Two climate change songs in a row here in Round 3!

Musically, this is ultra-smooth and professional sounding, which might work against you. The lyrics are accusatory, even biting, which makes for a very odd juxtaposition with the very un-demanding, laid back music. I don’t even hear the accusation in your vocal performance, which is impeccable but mostly emotionless. It even turns the song into something of an exercise in self-criticism: the line “We make pretty speeches” might as well be “We make pretty music”.

Maybe the incongruity I’m pointing out was exactly your intention all along and you meant to lull the the listener into a false sense of security before confronting them with the lyrics… but one thing I think is true about the average music listener is that if there’s a mismatch between the emotional tenor of the music and lyrics, most of the time they’ll respond to the music and ignore the lyrics.

Cavedwellers - Elevator Pitch

I love to hear both of you singing lead; Glennny, I don’t know what if anything you’re doing differently but I find myself enjoying the sound of your voice much more this tournament than I have in the past.
I love the bridge where Person 1 nervously sets up his pitch and says “Here we go!” - then the pitch itself is so incoherent it’s represented not even by words but by a guitar solo, and a somewhat sloppy (by Glennny standards) slide guitar solo at that!

Your idea to have the “unexpected but satisfying” connection between the two subjects be a literal fusion of their melodic lines is an inventive one, but I think you’ve sacrificed some coherence for the sake of cleverness: “Would anybody listen to me?” is a perfectly natural-sounding sentence; “You ask not to carefully explain” seems to be an extremely tortured way of saying “You decline to go into details”; and the fusion “Would you ask anybody not to listen carefully to me explain” is up there with “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” in the hall of sentences that are grammatically well-formed but semantically nonsensical.

Phlub - War Dawgs

Between Rock Phlub, Country Phlub, and Experimental Phlub, I think Rock Phlub is my favorite. This song takes full advantage of your drumming skills, and your guitar riffs are pleasingly heavy, although your soloing starts to get into “aimless noodling” territory and could certainly be tightened up.

You’re tying together “dogs in the military” and “Bluey” by writing a song about… a character from Bluey who is a dog in the military. Well, people this round took the challenge in all kinds of different directions, so I’m not going to lose much sleep over your take… and your lyrics are barely intelligible anyway, so when I'm listening I'm just along for the ride.

Jim Tyrrell - Salt

I love that you played this live, because it means that people outside of SpinTunes are hearing SpinTunes songs! Both the mix and the audience attentiveness leave much to be desired, but I certainly understand that both those factors were pretty much outside your control.

Your voice sounds great; plenty of SpinTunes contestants are primarily or entirely studio artists who aren’t used to singing in front of a live audience but I know that’s not the case for you. Your melody doesn’t break much new ground but stylistically it’s perfectly suited to the song you’ve written, a classic story-telling ballad. Your lyrics are well-crafted; they flow naturally both grammatically and musically, and I can’t pinpoint anywhere that it feels like one has been sacrificed for the other. I enjoy the lines where you use parallel constructions like “With songs for the singing and tales to be told”, as well as “He made orphans of children and widows of wives”. And the final line, where you turn the admiral’s insult back on him, is deliciously satisfying.

My only complaint with the lyrics is that Byrne is simultaneously an admiral and a local recruiter? I don’t really know anything about naval hierarchy, but it doesn’t seem like a member of the top brass would be personally responsible for recruiting seamen. If you revise the lyrics, perhaps he could start off as a mere local recruiter, and ascend to the rank of admiral in parallel with the narrator making his career as a traveling musician.

The Dutch Widows - When The Storm Start To Rise

You’ve got a compelling central concept and you use your sonic template to great effect in supporting it. Many of the lyrics come off simultaneously stiff and long-winded - e.g. in the very first line, why say “When the storm starts to rise, it comes on quicker than I can deal with” when you can say “The storm comes on too quickly”? But for the most part, the music carries the emotion of the song and makes up for some of the lyrical awkwardness, at least in the verses.

I have the same complaint about your chorus as I did in your (otherwise very different) Round 2 song: Just too many words! The music swells, the energy rises, those great backing vocals come in, and I want to sing along, but it’s too wordy. At each chorus I want to sing “I’ll keep my head down now” but it doesn’t come until the very end.

Maybe this is all intentional to support the emotion of the song, with the always-rushing lyrics of the verses and choruses representing the powerlessness the narrator feels in the face of the storm, with the anthemic “I’ll keep my head down now” representing the small amount of power they are able to assert. Or maybe your default songwriting mode just involves a lot of words!

Speaking of “I’ll keep my head down now”, what’s going on pitch-wise with the first one at 3:24? Subsequent repeats of the phrase sound fine; seems like a bad vocal take just made it into the final mix at that spot.

Glennny - Platypus

Musically, this is off to a great start with the bass/drums intro followed by the wordless vocal hook. Obviously there’s great guitars throughout; I especially enjoy the super high rhythm part at 1:10 and similar spots.

It’s a silly lyrical concept, but I’ll give it to you; yes, a platypus is indeed like a chimera of an otter and a duck. From this premise the lyrics feel mostly like stream-of-consciousness wordplay, which doesn’t engage me all that much, but I won’t complain about it either.

In the duck verse, “surface”/”nervous” is a perfectly decent rhyme but the difference in emphasis makes it come off as quite unnatural.

Pigfarmer Jr - Falling Down

Solid melody that, if the song was a bit longer, would lend itself well to a rousing sing-along section. I can definitely imagine this performed in a bar to a sympathetic audience of down-on-their-luckers.

I like your subtle use of chiasmus - verse 1 is the street and verse 2 is the house, but you flip them in the bridge. I also like how you save the “falling down” title hook for the very last chorus, as it ties the two previous choruses together nicely. 

There are a few times when you repeat a word in a way that doesn’t feel like deliberate parallelism but just a failure to come up with a different word - I’m thinking of “pothole”/”hole” in verse 1, “crumbling” used twice in chorus 1, and “busted” used in both verse 2 and the choruses.

Tunes By LJ - Morning Water

I’m a little torn on the morning/mourning wordplay: I sorta believe that if you’re going to play with homophones in your lyrics you should let the listener know what you’re saying without reading the lyrics, which would require at least one instance each of using the words “morning” and “mourning” unambiguously. I suppose the second verse should clue someone in, with “Morning water flow / Day begins” and “Mourning water flow / Day it ends”, but both words are only used as an adjectival modifier of the word “water”, rather than a noun or verb respectively.

I suspect at this point a reasonable person would say, “Micah, you’re being ridiculous; Tunes By LJ has here crafted a compelling and elegant meditation on overindulgence, regret, and grief, with the clear emotional content of the music more than filling any gaps in the lyrical details.” They would almost certainly be correct.

Jealous Brother - Guitar Picks and Nail Clippers

The SpinTunes administrator in me feels like this is at best a vague gesture in the direction of the challenge. The lyrical sophisticate in me feels like you’ve cobbled together a collection of time-worn cliches (e.g. “Popped the tires on my car”), partially redeemed by some clever and ironic turns of phrase (“I guess I must have come home late / And I heard we had a fight”). The country music lover in me is leaning back and having a great time.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Sober - Cheap Wine and Expensive Beer

I suspect that, with an eye to the challenge, the judges won’t be all that impressed by the comparison of one alcoholic drink to another alcoholic drink, but as for me I’ve accepted the gulf between my own initial assumptions about the challenge and the wide-ranging interpretations contestants have brought to it.

Your chorus certainly spent a lot of time stuck in my head this past week; musically this song goes down nice and easy (unlike any of the beverages cited in your lyrics, as far as I’m concerned - but that’s neither here nor there). I spent a few minutes wanting you to be more consistent with the rhyme scheme in your verses, before deciding I didn’t really care all that much that “sommelier” and “feel ok” rhyme while “shelf” and “fuss” don’t.

Please enlighten me about the significance of the line “Whiskey dark and moonshine clear” - is it a continuation of the previous line, and these are also things that, along with cheap beer, life is too short to drink? Or is it a separate thought, and these are things you should in fact be drinking? I think of moonshine as being cheap (or at least low-quality) but I think of whiskey as a higher-end drink, though I don’t know anything about what it being dark or light means. Or am I just overthinking a throwaway line?

Mandrake - River Flow (SHADOW)

Chill, laid-back music supports the contentment of the lyrics. The chorus has some great imagery but the verses are very expository; I don’t necessarily need more metaphor, but more specific examples of what someone said that makes you feel how you feel, besides just "thank you for existing", would give the verses a lot more impact.

Siebass - Ambulance (SHADOW)

I enjoy your vocal performance a lot more here than last round, maybe because you’re Doing A Thing so your vocal choices are more deliberate.

Lyrically, the sphinx’s riddle tipped me off right from the start, so the reveal wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a fun listen.

Ominous Ride - Willard and Karma (SHADOW)

Great story, great twist, great punchline. What’s not to love?

nightingale’s fiddle - Baseball (SHADOW)

I’m hoping this is just the start of a long and beautiful adventure in multitrack recording! It was a delightful surprise to hear the drums come in, but the song is engaging from the beginning. Your voice sounds great and you deliver some great melodic hooks; the harp, while mostly playing an accompaniment role, does some really cool stuff like the syncopated chords after “I’m not a hopeless case”. The timing is a little rough between the sequenced (drums, bass) and the live (vocal, harp) elements, and your vocal gets buried sometimes, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating what a well-written song this is. I sure as hell ain’t giving up on you.