Here are your rankings from owl, a past SpinTunes competitor who also has multiple Song Fight and Nur Ein wins under her belt, both solo and as a member of Vowl Sounds. Owl has very generously stepped up as a substitute judge since Zoe Gray was unable to judge this round.
Read on for owl's reviews!
I haven’t been following along for this Spintunes so far, but it’s kind of fun to just dive in as a guest judge most of the way through the competition after everyone’s already gotten warmed up. Strong round! It was actually quite hard to judge since there were so many excellent songs, and I kept moving songs around in my rankings up till the 11th hour. I admit I had a moment of dread after agreeing to guest judge this when I read what the challenge was, thinking it would lead to a lot of unlistenable, choppy songs, but was pleasantly surprised that there were so many tunes that made the challenge element non-obvious.
The Pannacotta Army—super appealing musically, the refrain instrumentation is beautiful—love the combo of the sort of snaky 50’s-type lead line, acoustic guitar and bubbly synths. Weirdly, it kind of reminded me of Jump by Van Halen and I can’t even explain why. I have to say am not all-in on the abrupt stops in the music—I get wanting to give it some space but the twisty backing track just has the kind of groove where it feels like it should continue. The verses I think suffer a bit from the same issue as the majority of these songs, where they seem a bit disjointed or random because of the constant changes in the non-refrain sections. All in all, very nice, though.
Stacking Theory—love the lyrics in this song, all the recurrences of the circles gave my brain a nice little ping of pattern recognition, and the black hole imagery in the chorus stuck with me as I listened through the rest of the album. I was listening in the car at first and interpreted this as a song to the person’s partner (I think it’s the “our kids” line) but the brother angle is more interesting, I think. It has an appealing, oppressively melancholy Radiohead feel to the music but the processing on the vocals feels too harsh to me at times; I know this is kind of your signature sound, but I think it could use a bit more softness. Feels coherent throughout, not so much of the disjointedness of many of these tunes.
Joy Sitler—love this, I’m a sucker for this kind of song and you do it really well. I love the slant rhyme of “fullest” and “jealous.” This feels coherent (though maybe the verses aren’t different enough?) and has a very charming personal feel that really captures the complicated emotional landscape you’re describing. I like how the exes feel like they are smushed into kind of an oddly specific monolith here, possibly playing on the rondo structure with a theme of some things changing and some always staying the same. I assume the twin-size mattress is itself a Front Bottoms reference but I don’t know the various bands enough to know if I’m missing other little lyrical references. The top few songs in my rankings bounced around a bit, but I ended up ranking this highest in the end because it felt honest and sincere and like something I’d listen to outside this contest, and not like something purely written for a prompt.
Cheslain—the wah guitar is fun and sounds great. However, this feels a bit scattered and unfinished to me—I would have liked more non-refrain parts, and I think maybe a tighter chorus would have worked better given that it’s the only repeating element. The lyrics don’t rhyme much (arguably shook/put rhyme, I guess) which gives them a bit of an improvised feel rather than something carefully crafted. It’s a nice vocal performance and production, but I’m not hugely into the genre, it kind of has a late 90’s funky pop-rock feel to me—Dave Matthews Band or 311 maybe, I don’t know.
Triangle—ok, this is different. I’m not against it being experimental, but I don’t find it to feel especially purposeful or interesting to listen to—doesn’t justify its 3-minute runtime. The “found no one” part has a cool melody and I like the little keyboard motif. The issue I think I have with this song is that it has a lot of space in it but not enough to feel fully ambient or relaxing; I think I’d prefer it to either go in that direction (maybe with more held pads underpinning the sparse elements to glue them together?) or get a bit busier, with less space between the samples, as I got bored a bit in the end. It felt noodly rather than deliberate. However, various individual elements were cool and interesting, so I could see it working just fine exactly as is for someone with somewhat different tastes from me.
The Moon Bureau—this has such a great, hooky chorus. Maybe the best chorus of the round. The lyrics are simple but work well as a meta play on the rondo form with all the turning and changing and returning. Really enjoyed this one, to me it feels kind of like a lost classic from some 80s movie soundtrack. I especially dig the call and response vocals towards the end. Nice jangly production and harmonies.
The Alleviators—lots of great little details in this song—the high part in the melody in Episode 1 is great, the half-time drop back at the end of Episode 2, the phrasing of the lyrics in general is really well done. I like the “mess of intersecting lines” lyric. The feel of the song is a bit mid-2000s adult contemporary to me, so I don’t entirely enjoy it from a genre point of view, but I think it’s well-crafted songwriting and the performances are solid. Cute cameo!
Hot Pink Halo—I had to look up “norks”—I wasn’t familiar. Now that I know that, it’s a clever title! This has a fun groove. It’s not very loud in the mix, but I really loved the high-register funk guitar bits in the chorus. I don’t think I would have pieced together the backstory from what’s actually in the lyrics. I’m trying to decide how important that is in this case—I do feel like you lose so much from the song if you don’t have the liner notes explaining the lyrics, so ultimately it fell a bit in my rankings compared to the more standalone tunes. The spoken word parts help glue together the musically disparate parts where they appear, so despite some abrupt transitions this didn’t feel too disjointed to me.
Ironbark—the pesto lyrics are weird and funny and instantly appealing, and you have a knack for sounding quizzical and resigned but also very warm and pretty with your vocals. The bluesy chorus progression is great. At times the instrumentation feels a bit too self-consciously quirky, and definitely has a pasted-together feel with the different arrangements, but I just have such a soft spot for the various elements you use here—the harpsichordy verse is my favorite. It’s restrained, and I sort of wish it had taken off a bit more in terms of energy level at some point, but on its own terms I enjoyed it a lot and it felt like a song with a lot to say in a deceptively small package (jar?)
Governing Dynamics—great guitars, the combo of clean arpeggio, fuzzy lead and clicky bass is really nice. (Although the lead tone sounds a bit thin once it gets to the guitar solo section where it stands alone; I wish you’d switched to something a bit beefier there.) The vocals have good feeling, but the lyrics feel a bit generic to me and there are a few spots I think could use a bit of adjusting in terms of pitch. This is one of the most “invisible” in terms of the rondo form—I think it really works as a standalone song.
glennny—This one overall feels very novelty song to me, unfortunately. I like the lyrical conceit of the three “put your hands up” images, but also I have seen this as a Venn diagram meme and I think you’re missing a verse about “Mom taking off your sweater.” The “reach for the sky” backing vocal response harmonies are great. I also really like the chord progression you go into in the bank robber verse. Going back through those parts for the solos in the outro feels a bit long, but I think helps tie it together as a whole.
Temnere—this feels very theatrical and operatic. Impressively epic arrangement. I like the parts where it almost veers into Queen territory… I guess if I have to listen to Star Trek filk, disguising it as something like ‘39 by Queen is a pretty painless way to do it. The chuggy metal guitars are fun. I do think the sample VO part goes on really long and the instrumentation build behind it isn’t interesting enough to justify it. It’s also a sort of weird effect at the end because it feels like it’s building back up musically but then fades out at the same time, like a guy wearing both camouflage and hi-vis orange gear at the same time.
Sober—the performances were solid, but writing-wise, this was definitely one of the more disjointed-feeling songs for me. There is obviously a lyrical throughline, but the really abrupt transitions and musical shifts were giving me whiplash. I think the processed vocal in the “child” verse was especially jarring. I also could not figure out at all what the third verse had to do with anything until reading your liner notes. I think a crumb of context within the lyrics would be helpful if you want people to get that without the notes (or maybe you don’t care, which is fine too—but it feels more in the story song tradition than something meant to be cryptic).
SHADOWS
Falcon Artist—I don’t really get the point of the misspellings, and the lyrics feel pretty tossed-off/generic to me other than the misspellings. I do like some of the strange chord progressions you use, and the performance and lo-fi recording quality are appealing to me; it kind of feels like it could have come off one of those Smithsonian Folkways song collector albums.
1823295e-8371-45c6-b842-30d11b12b6aa—I will probably enjoy procedurally generated music more when I’m a brain floating in a jar on a generation ship hurtling away from the smoldering ruins of Planet Earth and have infinite time to contemplate amusing algorithms. It was fine, I guess. I think having some explanation of the ideas behind your code would have helped.
See-Man-Ski—the level of delay/reverb on this is wild, and I don’t think the production quite fits with the genre. Same with the vocal, you sound pretty emotional here, almost overwrought, particularly in the “nail another coffin” verse, but the lyrics seem to be evocative of a melancholy, quiet scene, so it left me kind of confused about what mood you were going for. I think the lyrics are really lovely and almost painterly, but for me, the music just doesn’t support them well even though both are good on their own.
The Dutch Widows—I did a lot of listening to this round while in transit this last weekend, and I’m embarrassed to tell you how many times I heard the chorus as “like a substance down the loo” (the lines about water and floating and so on didn’t help) and was thinking “it’s so pleasant and hooky as a whole, why did he make that weird, crass toilet humor decision in the lyrics?” There’s a lot going on constantly in the production here and it’s a little fatiguing to listen to, but I like the songwriting—the chorus is catchy and poppy (and not actually poopy, as I’d originally thought), and the lyrics have some interesting things to say, with a coherent central metaphor.
Ménage a Tune—this is inaudible next to the other songs—what are you using to record? Seems like some kind of DAW since you have the Twilight Zone samples, but if so, maybe you could revisit your settings and make it a bit louder. I remember this Twilight Zone episode and this is a fun point of view to take, but it’s pretty hard to make an a cappella song like this stand on its own successfully. Harp seems like an interesting if unusual choice for instrumentation if you revisit this later, but I would love to hear it as a full orchestra production in the style of a 1950’s sitcom theme (along the lines of this: My computer is a 1950s orchestra | VI-CONTROL)
Thank you for your time and review. I don't know what happened to the volume, it sounded fine here in my headphones and on my speakers. I am not a techie, obviously. Just someone who likes to make up tunes, create lyrics and sing. I use Audacity to record and edit and try to erase noise and poos and such. Eventual harp being added is because I have been taking harp lessons for a few years, and have a 16 string Dusty Strings Ravenna.
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