Here are your rankings from SpinTunes 21 Champion Tunes By LJ:
Read on for LJ's reviews!
The Pannacotta Army - This Can’t Be Love
You’ve set the bar incredibly high with your prior submissions. While this song falls a bit short of the mark, you’ve delivered some great moments here. I’m hearing Graceland-era Paul Simon in your chorus, particularly the guitar work, which sounds fantastic. The bass is a little boomy in the toms though, and the alternating between the full instrumental and quieter vocal sections is a bit jarring, like something doesn’t quite flow properly between them. You’ve got clear variety between verses - vocally, melodically, lyrically, and even the mix, though the muffled verby muddiness of verse 3 is a little much. The final chorus has a few polishing touches that help it feel like a well-earned climax despite being the fourth repetition. Your lyrics in this one are a bit lacking - while “this can’t be love” is a catchy and effective refrain, the rest of the lyrics feel a bit too smooth and textureless, and after a few listens I didn’t have much to hold on to from the verses. Overall a fine entry that doesn’t quite make the cut for me in a difficult and highly competitive round.
Stacking Theory - The Ballad of the Black Hole Brothers
You’re back with another mournful and beautiful song, infused with deeply personal emotional gravity. The lyrics are simple and direct and quite beautiful at times, collapsing decades of connection and relationship into a few short verses. Instrumentally this was tight and well produced, lush guitar and washy drums, and some very cool soft glidey synths. I also really enjoyed the harmonizer effect on your vocals in the third verse (I actually can’t tell if that’s two takes layered on each other - whatever it is it sounds great). I found a lot to like in this song, and you certainly fulfilled the challenge, but the biggest thing holding it back is the slow tempo. It’s a pleasant sound, but the melancholic theme paired with the slow and methodical pace makes it a bit of a tough hang on repeated listens.
Joy Sitler - The Front Bottoms
You have a fantastic voice and an impeccable sense of style that comes through so clearly here. I love how personal and vividly realized this is - the specificity on display really exhibits your confidence as a songwriter. Great vocal performance, great guitar work, great lyrics. The hard thing about a challenge like this is that it demands variety, and the simplicity of your chosen genre works against you here, at least in comparison to your competitors. That being said, you’ve handled that setback masterfully, providing a stark and noticeable contrast between verses that still aligns to a coherent theme. While others had more room in their soundscape to play with variations across instrumental and vocal treatments, you make do with a very minimalist setup and you deliver on it with aplomb. This is my favorite entry from you yet.
Cheslain - Not Losing Sleep
This is an amusing distillation of political nihilism, casting off the revolutionary ambitions of youth and settling into a detached indifference that tends to come about with the comforts of age. I found it a little too relatable and it tickled me greatly. In keeping with your other submissions this is an absolute masterclass of instrumental sound design and mixing. The wah pedal rhythm guitar excels as the instrumental centerpiece of the chorus, adding a frenetic momentum that complements the high energy vocals. For that matter, the guitar work throughout is phenomenal, and the solo at the end really shows off your skill. A fantastic entry overall with one glaring problem preventing a higher score: you’ve submitted only two verses and three choruses, which leaves you one verse short of the challenge being fully met.
▷ - Found No One
You are the odd one out in this competition on genre grounds alone, but that doesn’t stop you at all, does it? There’s an undeniable center of gravity in this community that tends to reward songs with conventional structure and appeal, and to your credit you are completely unaffected by it. You make your own gravity. Some of the softer synth sounds (and the song’s obscure internal logic) remind me of a modern take on Boards of Canada, though I’m admittedly not well-versed in this territory. I’m not really sure I have anything to offer here in terms of feedback, you’re operating in a postmodern musical substrate that doesn’t really merit objectivity, at least none that I feel confident giving. I will say that I didn’t feel alienated by this as I often do with similar compositions - you’ve kept it pretty grounded in recognizable sounds and melodies that never feel too intellectual. I guess it meets the challenge, but you’ve highlighted the core problem of purported objectivity in a “songwriting competition”, which is ultimately just aggregating the subjective opinions of a few judges with fundamentally similar pop-derived musical taste. I enjoyed this, but I think you’ve missed the boat on what merits admission to the final round. Pretty cool stuff though!
The Moon Bureau - Turn Around Again
You did a great job cramming a lot of song into two and a half minutes. Keeping the chorus short and simple was a smart move, and the varied directions of each verse merge back into it nicely. The instrumental sounds great, guitars are neatly layered and well-performed, drums are clean and punchy. Lyrically this song came up pretty short for me. I described your previous entry as a “mopey paint-by-numbers breakup story” and unfortunately I think that critique can also be applied here. I’ve heard this story a thousand times already, and you haven’t really added anything new or interesting to the formula. You are obviously a talented songwriter but it still sounds to me like you’re striving for emulation rather than original ideas of your own.
The Alleviators - A Trick of the Light
The vocal melody on these verses is just impeccable - you both have a remarkable sense of confidence in your melodic choices. “Turn it up and drown it out” in that first verse has such a great sound. You managed to make the verses quite varied, moving all over the scale and between octaves, but without sounding too scattered or improvised. The vocals really are the star of the show here, as the instrumental is otherwise pretty simple. Clean and straightforward rhythm guitar is perfectly balanced by the piano in the chorus. Really great work, confidently delivered, and a masterful showing from Beka in particular on those vocal melodies!
Hot Pink Halo - Exquisite Norks
Wow, a syncopated groove right at the top! At least someone around here has a sense of rhythm... I really liked the energy in this, bubbly and infectious, warts and all. A goofy and weird take on the challenge that sort of trades musicality for a series of divergent vignettes. I appreciate what you tried to do here, though I think it works better on paper than it does in practice. After a few listens I had to go back and scrutinize your bio to understand what was going on, the song doesn’t really stand on its own without the explanation (which I found quite hilarious and original!) I think the vague lyrics combined with the pretty radically diverging verses made this a bit too textureless, and after a few listens it still feels a little hard to follow. The interesting time signature changes get lost in the shuffle - I missed the 5/4 happening under your spoken word vocals, I didn’t even notice until I read your bio. All in all a fun and original attempt that didn’t quite stick the landing in a highly competitive penultimate round.
Ironbark - Insignificant
Your signature composition style never fails to confound and beguile me. This song ambles and waddles along, asking big existential questions and pairing them with unabashedly goofy instrumentals. While it lacks the emotional depth and auteurish gravitas of your prior submissions, it nevertheless feels distinctly part of your aesthetic repertoire, with familiar accordions and organs opposite rather jarring clavichords and wompy synth patch melodies. I loved the callback to pesto at the end, circling us back around to the start - a sort of thematic rondo I suppose, at least geometrically. Your undeniable charisma cuts through the corniness, and I can’t resist liking this more than I feel I should. At this point I may just be an Ironbark stan. A Barkie? Whatever, count me in for more.
Governing Dynamics - Aura
Anytime I hear adoring lyrics addressed to a nameless “you”, I have to stop and ask: is this a song about a love interest or a song about Jesus? It’s not always easy to tell! This song had me pretty perplexed until the third verse (people don’t usually threaten to leave Jesus if he doesn’t “choose” them). Still, the imagery throughout was just ambiguous enough to distract me from the love song you attempted to write here. Instrumentally this was your usual rich alternative style, but it felt a little too drawn out to hold my interest, especially with the length of the chorus and the slow tempo. You do offer some dynamic variety between sections, with vocal melody jumping between octaves and intensity fluctuating. The challenge is certainly met, and it's not a bad song by any stretch, but it lacks the full commitment I was hoping for.
glennny - Put Your Hands Up
This is exactly what I wanted to hear this round: a full commitment to the challenge, musically and lyrically and thematically. You left it all on the field. The venn diagram concept you chose is a stroke of genius, perfectly aligning to the rondo form and providing an interlocking geometry to the lyrics - especially the chorus, as “reach for the sky” gains new meaning with each repetition. The instrumental foundation varies across verses to align with the lyrical theme: synth arpeggiator and goofy record scratch; church organ and “choir”; guitar plunks infused with heist-thriller chromaticisms. You even incorporate these separate elements discreetly into each chorus, which further helps the various sections blend into each other. This was a collection of risky decisions that pushed you musically in several new directions and paid off in spades. To top it all off - and perhaps most importantly - it's a damn good song! The chorus is a pure pop earworm, fun and upbeat and catchy. The guitar solo coming out of the bank robber verse back to the chorus gives me goosebumps each time I hear it, a simple melodic sequence over a key change that sounds perfectly natural and effortlessly cool. I am very glad I don’t have to compete against this! Welcome to the podium!
Temnere - Voyage Home
As someone with only surface-level understanding of Star Trek this song was pretty alienating for me. Usually these fantasy songs create their own mythology or lean on tropes that don’t require the listener to understand some deeper lore. I almost started googling who these people are but decided I shouldn’t have to do that to enjoy a song. Instrumentally this is strong as ever, and the mix in particular is top notch, perhaps the cleanest and fullest I’ve heard from you yet. The divergence between vocal and guitar melody on “Plasma is burning / warp core is churning” is a little distracting, especially since those melodies otherwise track each other carefully. The slow buildup during the monologue section is rich and beautiful and evocative, so well done, but that whole section goes on a bit too long. I found a lot to like in this song but I just couldn’t really handle the subject matter, and I wonder if a more generic sci-fi setting with the same story beats would have been easier to follow for me.
Sober - Greater than the Sum
You’ve done a remarkable job on this, covering a ton of ground, creating an expansive odyssey that showcases your considerable talent. Flawless instrumental performance per usual, love the panned banjos and the chromatic descending chord progression. Each individual section stands out from the rest in myriad ways - percussion, mood, lyrical perspective, tempo, even instrumental style and mix. The muted 7 chords in the 3rd verse blew me away (of course they did), that’s a sound and style I haven’t heard from you yet. Each section masterfully blends back into the chorus with that signature drum patter, and you manage to make the chorus feel new each time, with the third and final serving as a building emotional climax that deftly caps things off. Exactly what I wanted out of the challenge, a series of unique creative ideas stitched together into a coherent whole. You’re on my podium for the round, fantastic work!
No comments:
Post a Comment