Here are your rankings from Jim of Seattle:
Read on for Jim's reviews!
Hello all! It is truly an honor to be given the chance to write reviews for SpinTunes, so thanks for indulging me!
I have been poking around Song Fight and SpinTunes off and on for years. Some of you might know me or my work. I have been writing music since 1980. I have three albums on the streaming platforms, most recently an orchestral suite dedicated to a local park. But most of my work is kind of novelty pop. I did Song Fight for a few super fun years. I did pretty well in a SpinTunes a couple years ago, but then crashed and burned in the final round.
Let me provide a little explanation of how I reviewed these songs.
To my mind, the main goal of a review in this kind of setting is to be helpful. At first blush, this sounds like it means merely telling the entrant what I like and don’t like and why. And so it is, but I think there’s more opportunity. It’s also helpful to see how a work compares with that of its peers. To that end, where possible I have tried to point out aspects of songs similar to something another entry is also doing. Maybe it employs a certain lyrical technique, which another song does something similarly. How does it compare ? What’s the diff? On top of just “this thing good, that thing bad”, I aimed for comparisons with other entries so everyone is learning from one another.
Each of these songs has been stuck in my head at one time or other. Safe to say, my review of a song is the result of probably at least 20 listens. The songs were mostly pretty deep in my bones by the time I sat down to write about them.
So, I may have brought up your song in the reviews of other songs. At the very least, it may be helpful to read the review of the song right before yours and then right after, because I sequenced them deliberately to try for a sort of narrative flow.
Lastly, please remember I’m a newbie here mostly, and if there are things about any of these artists that are common knowledge within the community, well I don’t know them, so if I say “Your voice sounds like Gilbert O’Sullivan” (which I don’t), I won’t know that EVERYONE says that about him and it’s old news. So apologies up front for any of those inadvertencies.
You can skip the rest of this intro if you want. But if you’re interested in my process, read on.
MY PROCESS
I have 8 categories I am ranking. They are:
Composition
Lyrics
Arrangement
Instrumental performance
Vocal performance
Engineering/production
Concept (Also, how well the song adheres to the challenge.)
Miscellaneous: Purely subjective reaction. Do I enjoy it? Totally subjective and very vulnerable to genre bias, but it’s only one of 8 categories, so don’t get your panties in a bunch about it.
For each of these categories I’ve assigned a score from -3 to 3. A 0 score means it didn’t do anything for me either way, and in many cases wasn’t even relevant to the song. 3 and -3 are pretty rare. Then I totaled up the scores for each song and that’s how I did my ranking mostly.
OK here we go…
Man, “To Victory Or to Glory” by Mobius Strip Club really conjures the image of all those DnD-playing, Renaissance fair-attending, dulcimer-owning, Tolkein-worshipping, peasant-dress wearing Ursula K LeGuinnies. I know that tribe well, and kudos to you for evoking it so spot-on! I miss those folks. Glad to know they’re still around.
My fear with this challenge was that we would get songs about games that were opaque to those who didn’t know the game already, and that fear has been borne out, this song being one example of that. Though this lyric comes pretty close to avoiding that trap:
Today I choose to be a hero in this story
I know my strengths. I claim my voice.
What’s left behind? I’ve made my choice.
Master of my destiny
to victory or to glory
Taken on its own, this is a nice strong lyric. Of course, not knowing what it’s actually about, it takes on a personal meaning, as the singer is presumably talking about herself in real life. I like it. But… it’s not really about the singer in real life, is it? It’s about what character she will play in DnD. That’s ok, it’s about both. It’s a metaphor, using the confident resolve to stand in for both the DnD thing as well as real life.
Except… it’s not really that, because in the rest of the lyric the metaphor doesn’t carry through. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Who am I today?
What will be my name?
What role do I play as fate rolls away
Sharp stones and weathered bones
Weighted for its endless game
What does “fate rolls away” mean? No idea. (And using both “role” and “roll” in the same line is bound to trip people up. Perhaps that was on purpose, a wordplay thing, but I don’t think it works because I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean in the first place, and because people wouldn’t be reading along to see the different spellings.) What are these sharp stones and weathered bones? No idea. “Weighted” is a tough sell because most people are likely to hear “waited”. In either sense, I don’t understand it.
OK, so other warriors are coming along, and the “I” in the lyric changes to a “we”. Cool, I like it. Then I would have made the second verse “Today we choose to be…” etc. Because now it’s a merry band of travelers. And the music could get bigger and thicker. Maybe don’t bring in vocal harmonies until the others are coming along? To that end, (though I get it may not have been available in the time allotted), I might have tried to musically evoke the idea of a single person marching along, then when others come along and it’s now the merry band, add in more instruments and make it bigger (ala Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” for example, or a lot of songs from Les Miserables.) Also, there seems to be a potential for evoking a kind of marching-confidently-across-the-steppes-into-battle feeling, which is sounds like maybe was intended, but doesn’t ultimately come across.
Nothing is off the table
When indecision proves to be fatal
“Off the table” is a modern almost corporate phrase, out of character for this song (same goes for “no one asked”, btw), “fatal” is a really weak rhyme for it, and the couplet doesn’t really make sense anyway.
There’s more of that, but alright, I’ve made my point, the lyrics could be tightened up quite a bit. Moving on.
I appreciate the effort put into the multitracked vocal parts. That was a ton of work, and the writing is musically pretty proficient, and I appreciated the high bar the song set for itself. Not only that, but I’m hearing the merry band of travelers each singing of their personal resolve as they march into battle. Got it. Nice! The problem with this section is that the singer’s vocal style is pretty strident and solo-y, and doesn’t lend itself to blending into a vocal ensemble, taking plenty of liberties with cutoffs and tone and whatnot. Each of these parts would be a perfectly acceptable lead on their own, but when singing as part of a group, a different vocal technique is called for, with more exacting attention paid to timbre and blending and such. The effect of multiple voices singing in counterpoint is mostly a musical one, so individual expression has to take a back seat. This sounds like a whole group of soloists all trying to be center stage.
While “To Victory Or to Glory” evokes a kind of ancient female folk vibe, Jim Tyrell’s “Game Over” evokes a completely different vibe, but still rooted in folk music. When I saw that connection I realized it was all over the place in the competition. Interesting (to me, at least). Both these songs are a kind of folk music.
Right up top: I’m sorry about the fire, and good on ya for recording this anyway. I can tell it’s not what it could be, but you did a pretty darn good job given the circumstances, so no points off there.
This is obviously a performance and composition by someone who’s been doing this kind of thing a long time. As such, the vocal treatment and guitar playing is right there in the groove, and I’m immediately comfortable. If I forget about the lyrics as if I didn’t speak English, the whole thing comes off really well.
To wit, listen to all those chord extensions in the bridge. Not strictly necessary, and a lesser songwriter wouldn’t bother with them, but they subtly add so much flavor to the song. I love that sort of thing. You can hear this inner line creeping up and down chromatically and changing the flavor of the chords just enough. Under the line “totally resigned”, those are some accomplished chords there. Again, not necessary, but just make everything sound cooler. Eric Baer’s shadow entry “All the Marbles” is good at that too. And enjoyment was had by me thereby.
However, upon shuffling through the playlist of this round, when it popped up I didn’t find myself wanting to get through this one after the first few listens. Why not? Hmm… I finally decided it came down to the lyrics, which rely too heavily on game puns and don’t really make sense on their own. It’s gotta have both.
They sound like the lyricist sat down and listed the games he could think of, then next to them wrote some vaguely relationship-related play on either the title or the game itself. Then strung them together with rhymes and called it good. But without an overriding story to hold it together, it’s just a bunch of puns.
She got ahold of my copy of the game of life
Just to make it so I couldn’t take another wife
The pink pegs are gone, now I’ve got to go on
With just the blues
I mean, I had the Life game, I get the reference, but how it relates to the real world escapes me. Her getting hold of his copy of the game of Life so he couldn’t get married again? Huh? Where did the pink pegs go and why? Honestly, I don’t think the lyricist knows, he just wanted to end with the (admittedly awesome) double meaning of “just the blues”, without properly setting it up so it makes sense.
And this kind of thing happens over and over. I want a relatively clear picture of what happened and how he feels about whatever that is, so I have a fighting chance of getting all the game references. This may not be strictly necessary, but it would also have been nice to have revealed up front why the game references are there at all (beside it being the challenge!). Maybe he and this partner played games together or something? It just dives right into the list of games references but it’s not motivated properly for me.
No points off for this, but Scrabble was not a Parker Brothers game. And why would they cry because she took the U and I? I know, nitpick. Just pointing it out. I wouldn’t change it because the line trips off the tongue so well :-).
Anyway, without anything to hang them on, the list of game puns becomes tiresome. Kind of a “we could do this all day” effect by the end. I think that’s why I stopped wanting to hear it.
Across the dirt road from Jim Tyrell is an old shack in which sits Celestial Drift, playing their own folksy entry, “Jigsaw”. Full disclosure: I am struggling to say the nice things this song deserves to hear because I have such an unpleasant reaction to the lyrics and vocal delivery. I’ll just say this up front: I found this song unfunny and in poor taste. I don’t want to get into it because if I let myself I know I’d go way too far, so I’m just leaving that here. Not amusing. Ick. So this review is admittedly short and that’s why. I don’t want to have to dwell on it any more than I have to. OK, with that out of the way…
Excellent care in placing accents on right syllables. Given how little focus is often given to that by other songwriters, I appreciated the thoughtfulness put into it.
I found myself (to my chagrin, see above) with this tune running through my head for long stretches. It’s a good tune. I especially like the little turn at the end of each phrase and the repeat of the final line. Consider that technique logged in my mental toolbox for someday.
The song is not about a game, but merely uses game as a metaphor.
The song is performed and recorded nicely.
OK, moving on.
As a bizarre contrast to Celestial Drift’s “Jigsaw”, which uses a traditionally gentle and kind-heared style to deliver a demented lyric, Flintsteel’s “Tarnished” uses a genre traditionally used for anger and violence to deliver a song about triumph. In both cases, the musical chops come through. Also with both, they faced genre bias which I had to consciously ignore.
“Tarnished” is very slick. I want to point out something I noticed that impressed me. So the song starts with this jittery and fairly intricate riff. (I had trouble locating the downbeat before the band came in, and once I learned it, rewound to the beginning and learned that what’d’ye know, it does start on the downbeat, it’s just syncopated in an interesting way.) But what really impressed me is as good as that riff is, the band doesn’t simply sit on it, but changes it to fit the chords as they change. We hear it twice, then as soon as the drums come in, the chord and riff change, and then change a second time, before we get back to the original version. And then when the whole band comes in, the riff is simplified, removing those little repeated sixteenth things, because they wouldn’t come through the mix much anyway. It takes a true facility on one’s instrument and a sensitive ear to notice and work out things like that. Really nice. Though I wanted that riff to reappear later in the song; it never came back. That seemed odd and a missed opportunity.
I noticed a similar sign of chops in the lead vocal. Listen to the blue note bend on the word “caught” in the line “caught in limbo far from home”. That’s a sign of an accomplished and musical vocalist. Love it. And in the section which starts “does hatred grow?” there is a different vocal style entirely, and not knowing the game or having any idea what the song is about really, I couldn’t tell if this was now supposed to be a different character singing, and so the voice was made deeper and growlier for that reason. I don’t know, but given everything else, I wouldn’t put it past them.
OK, so I have no frickin’ idea what any of these lyrics mean. Normally I take off big points for that, and some come off here as well, but I really don’t care. This style of song is barely about lyrics at all, it’s all about style. So I’m not going to do my thing where I rip apart lines that are weak or nonsensical. Most of them are, but again, I don’t really care.
I’m also impressed by the fairly complex structure of the song. And the whole band is on board and adjusts their parts accordingly right on cue. They are really tight and are all on the same page. I love how right after “your journey must begin” those repeated eighths stop before the downbeat and let the guitar ring a second. A lesser band would have also played that downbeat. Sweet.
Like “Playing Games” by We Happy Few, this song had some serious genre bias headwinds to overcome, and like that other song, it did so. This one is really good, top contender. It demonstrates how no matter the genre, basic musicality wins out. (Hey world, you can’t just ROCK and call it a day. You have to be able to play your instruments and understand how music works.)
“Showdown” by Tunes for LJ is also a song that fits well into a stylistic slot and demonstrates big fat musical chops in the process. Ths song is my #1 in the competition, I really love it. If I were 11 and this was on top 40 radio, I don’t know that I would have saved up my allowance to by the 45, but I suspect if I went to View Ridge Pharmacy to buy some other record but it was sold out, and I saw “Showdown” in that box of 45’s instead, I probably would have bought it.
There’s a lot of things I could point out that are super expert imo, let me call out a couple of them.
The setup, melody, chord change and arrangement on the line “And it’s time for your lies to unwind” is my favorite five seconds of the entire competition. I sing along every time, and my hand involuntarily rises to the level of my head and the thumb and middle finger touch and make a little swaying motion. (I don’t know what I’m supposedly doing when that happens. But it’s involuntary. Anyone else?)
The song makes expert use of silence. This is so often overlooked. There doesn’t have to be a full-on wall of sound every second. They let the song breathe, and the coolness on display is made that much more obvious by not having to compete with anything else.
The main melody of the verse descends down in a nice syncopated way, but how the line ends is just unusual enough to draw my attention. Under the lines “action yet”, “cigarette”, “spot a threat” etc., the tune goes on a couple notes longer than it sounds like it’s going to. Avoids cliche right there. And keeps it up every time. So nice.
I hope people notice that there’s a little puff after mention of lighting the cigarette, pretty obvious, but then there’s a second puff in the silence between the chorus and the second verse. Makes me want to be a smoker.
There are two organs here that serve different purposes. The first one comes in the pre-chorus acting as a pad to warm it up and provide contrast, (notice as the pre-chorus winds up, the tone of that pad organ gets brighter to lead us into the chorus. Subtle but effective) then that staccato Billy Preston organ comes in at the chorus, playing these great syncopated chords which play so well with the syncopated bass. Winding up with my favorite line, then everything drops out, and then we get that little puff. Scrumptious.
The song is really short, but I can’t think of anything I would add. The chorus is repeated at the end, and I liked how extra backup vocals are added for that last repeat.
Another thing I really appreciate is the super clean vocal double tracking. It does what double tracking is supposed to do, adds weight to the lead without drawing attention to itself. To pull that off, both tracks need to be nearly identical, but that could threaten it to sound stiff. That doesn’t happen. It’s hard, I know, and done really nicely here. I love that the little “yeah” is left in just one track on the line “got more hands to play”.
This one and “The Gambler” by Vehicles of Beware were neck and neck for my #1 slot. This one won out because it’s not imitating another band (that I’m aware of), and it hit me harder on a pure my-11-year-old-likes-to-hear-it level.
In contrast to “Showdown”, but equally effective when done well, is the double tracking style in “Tarot Cards” by Fourty Two. The vocal syncing is not as slick as Tunes by LJ, but that’s part of its appeal. The individual vocal tracks are a little more independent of each other and give a more raw effect. Fourty Two’s lead vocals sound lovely here and feel exactly right for the style they’re going for.
It’s a bit hard to come to terms with the vocal treatment, however, because of that Autotune effect they were subjected to at the ends of lots of lines. Honestly it was probably about the fifth or sixth listen before I could get past the strangeness of that vocal treatment. The first few times through, it seemed like that heavily-melismatic effect on the double-tracked vocal was a defect, but at some point I decided it was on purpose for atmosphere, and then I was more able to meet it on its own terms.
I still don’t know the intent behind that vocal effect, but I’m reviewing assuming it was on purpose, and I’ll review it with that (possibly wrong) assumption. Because the lead vocal is double-tracked, and the two vocals match unnaturally perfectly in their fluctuations, it seems clear to my ears that it’s a post-recording effect. In any case, that effect operating on both tracks together was attention-grabbing. Once I decided it was all on purpose, I found the effect pretty cool, though my guess is it would be too strange to endure a full album.
Double-tracked or not, I like the soft but not glottal performance. Unfortunately, when the tune goes into the lower register (i.e. “observing their flaws”) the vocals get swallowed, and for such a lyric-forward song, that’s fatal. It would be helpful in tracking the meaning of the lyrics if those swallows were fixed, such as rewriting the melody, fixing the mix to bring the vocal out more there, changing the key of the whole song, or singing it differently.
I went looking for a clear reason why the song’s arrangement is right for it, which led me to the lyrics, and this is where things began to get troublesome for me.
I’ve been told I’m good at reading people
But really I’m just good observing their flaws
I have an optimistic mindset of the world
But see most things in black and white, bronze or gold
The first two lines I find good. Specific, clear, and interesting. The third line gives me pause though, because it doesn’t follow naturally from what came before. What does seeing the world in black and white have to do with observing people’s flaws? Also I don’t know what bronze and gold is supposed to signify. I’m a little confused now, but I think I know what the song is about. When the next lyric comes up:
I’ll put you on a pedestal, it’s not an accurate portrayal
Cause I like to idealize the ones I can't see through
Is it my lack of acute observation?
Or just my inherent self-centered attitude?
I see that there is a “you” she’s singing to. But then she continues to examine herself, and a lot of ideas fly by too quickly for any of them to land. It’s sounding complicated and I haven’t been given enough meat to hang these questions onto.
At the same time, the chord progression is the same four chords repeated, and the individual sung lines have different numbers of syllables a bit indiscriminately. All of which gives the impression that the song is far more interested in its lyrics than its music. Which is of course totally fine, but if that’s the play, that we are supposed to pay attention more to the words than the music, then those lyrics need to be killer.
In writing this I’m thinking of similar songs like “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian or a lot of Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, or Alanis Morrisette. Even when their songs were all about the lyrics, swimming in pools of poetic abstraction, they usually wrote them so that people could keep up with the imagery and they still mostly obeyed the dictates of the tune.
I do think there’s a ton of good material in these lyrics, too much really. If this were my song, I would at this point take out half the ideas, stretch out the ones I was keeping, and make sure I knew exactly what the song was trying to say in the first place. Like it or not, songs mostly work in a strict time, and so that rules over how the lyrics are going to be perceived. No matter how good a line is, it’s only as good as its listener’s ability to get it, and time is king because there’s music happening. Like a series of billboards along the freeway, they know you only have a couple seconds to grasp the sign’s message, and another one is right behind it, so they design their signs accordingly.
Whenever this song came up in the SpinTunes playlist, I enjoyed it, because it’s got a pretty vibe, but never did I understand what she was singing about, and so the repetitiveness of the tune stuck out more. And like I said, the strange autotuning of the vocals kept stealing focus. Whether ultimately it’s a sound to go with is not my call of course, but it really sticks out. To be sure, the sentiment behind wanting to have in-tune vocals is worthwhile. If this was an attempt to correct vocal pitch, I applaud the effort. Because nothing hurts a song more than an unintentionally pitchy lead vocal.
This turned out to be a big issue I had with “Easy Modes and Cheat Codes” by West of Vine…
There’s a lot to like about “Easy Modes and Cheat Codes”, which I’ll get into anon, but the off-pitch quality of the lead vocal completely kills it. Not only is it consistently off-key, but it’s in a song with big long sustained notes in the melody, all of which are quite sharp. If that were fixed, the song would be onto something. There are a lot of unfortunate lyric misses as well.
It’s a terrific idea, and at the start the lyric pulls it off. I like how the scene is set in the first verse, (though I don’t know what a federale is, and the line “estranged from the truth” is a little affected and out of character, not to mention a mouthful to say). Saying he’s in a diner booth, and then saying he’s playing too much Madden is confusing, because it sounds like he’s playing Madden in a diner. So I’m picturing a young, sad dude in a diner, and then a line later I need to adjust my mental picture to his home where he’s playing Madden. Not ideal.
I wish the second stanza about running it up the right side again were near the end of the song. Maybe early on it could explain the concept that is in the song notes, and then later after the guy is fifty-one, saying he’s still doing that, metaphorically perhaps, and what that says about him, would have more impact.
I don’t see how the guy is “allergic to fun”, because he said he was playing too much, which is kind of a contradiction.
Anyway, once the guy turned fifty-one, the lyrics go totally off the rails, and I don’t understand any of what it’s trying to say from that point on. Why didn’t it stick to the well-organized and evocative style of the first verse?
And I never did learn
How to get a thing done
In way that was not giving
Me the need to be forgiven
If one reads this as a prose sentence: “I never did learn how to get a thing done in way that was not giving me the need to be forgiven”, it lays bare the fact that this is a really convoluted statement and there’s no way I’m going to understand it in a lyric. What does that mean? It could probably be explained to me, but as they say in politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. This is a similar issue in “Tarot Cards” by Fourty Two.
I think there’s a terrific idea for a song here, and for about half of it, the idea is executed decently, but it loses its way in the middle and never recovers, which is a shame. Add to that the consistently errant vocal pitch with big long sustained notes, and we have a problem.
Governing Dynamics’ song "Falling for Maybe" has some of the same vocal problems as “Easy Modes and Cheat Codes”, and is an interesting contrast to “Tarot Cards”, actually. First, here is another instance where attention to vocal pitch would make a huge difference. The lead part is quite sharp the whole way through, made a little more glaring by being in harmony with another part. That is really undoing this song start to finish.
In addition to being off-key, a number of the harmonies aren’t exactly correct for the chord being played, which is also a problem for the arpeggiated guitar. It almost feels in a couple places where not everyone is on board with what the chord is. This is most noticeable in the bridge, but it’s elsewhere too. Also in a few places the logical progression of chords seems a little unusual. This would be fine if I thought it were on purpose, but it doesn’t sound like it is.
There are some lyrics here that I really love.
As I step to through the door
Towards the shine above the floor
Just one stop for my woman with the tokens
Tight smile, bright hello
When she looks at me I know
Every victory still ushers me towards broken
All this is great, until the last line, Every victory still ushers me towards broken which is uncharacteristically oblique coming right after a nicely specific and vivid image. I’m not sure what that means, or why her looking at him would usher that in. I mean, I get it, but it I don’t grasp it in the amount of time I have before the next line comes up, or why the word “still” is in there. (See billboard analogy in the Fourty Two review.) Which is a shame because it’s a good line. Of course, after a few listens I don’t have that problem because I know the words, but it still rings oddly after the song has just painted this visual image.
The next stanza:
Faces around the table
Calling shots in the dark
Places where you're nameless
Strangers know just who you are
Is plenty clear, and a good sentiment when written or read. But when sung in the song, the music sounds like it ignores the words, and they aren’t working together. The tune, chords and arrangement don’t say what the lyrics are saying - they just sound like your basic rock song sound. It’s like the lyrics are busy lyricking and the music is busy musicking but they aren’t looking at each other while they’re doing so, they’re more just working in parallel, if that makes any sense.
I do want to point out some good lines here. I like
Don't tell me the odds
They're as fickle as gods
quite a lot. And there are numerous turns of phrase that are pretty nice. But - and here’s where it’s an interesting comparison to Fourty Two - these lyrics also fly too thick and fast, and the music backing it up isn’t helping get the sentiments across. Unlike the previous song however, I know exactly what the song is about. But even so, I’m not feeling it viscerally because the music is generic and not really interested in helping the lyrics out. I can’t get into it because the song doesn’t sound like it really means what it’s saying.
All this makes for a somewhat boring experience. Brings up the question: What makes a song boring, exactly? A slow, ponderous song can be riveting, and many peppy upbeat songs are dull, so it’s not tempo or energy necessarily. I might argue that something that makes a song boring is when the vision it’s transmitting is not entirely clear and internally consistent. Also relying too heavily on cliche can dull our ability to connect with a song.
Lyrically, this song isn’t boring, because it’s relatively clear and follows some of the unspoken rules for effective communication. But the music’s unfocused harmonies and reliance on cliche make it difficult to get into. This was one of the songs in the round which I found impatient to get through every time. There are plenty of other ways for a song to be boring, of course, a good example being the song “Andrew Management Issues” by Stacking Theory.
Why did I find “Andrew Management Issues” a bit boring? I actually have enjoyed a great deal of this dreamy style of music over the years. Some favorite music of mine that this song reminded me of were the albums Bavarian Fruit Bread by Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions, and Trinity Sessions by Cowboy Junkies. Also a lot of Radiohead sounds like this, and a personal favorite ambient artist Biosphere. So why do those work on me but this song, as much as I do enjoy it, falls a bit short?
Right off the bat I’m pointing the finger at the lead vocal. It’s just not up to the task. For this song to work for me, the vocal has to be confident and interesting enough purely tonally because songs like this aren’t usually about lyrics, but atmosphere. If ever there was an instance in which Autotune was necessary, this is it. To maintain the spacey illusion, it can’t sound like just some dude singing slowly. It has to have an aura. I’ve never composed this kind of music, but finding such an aura to blend correctly with its sonic world sounds hard.
Another reason I think the song falls short of its potential is I want it to be a bit dirtier. I want there to be some subtle monkey in the works that keeps the song from feeling sterile. This is one of the things that makes the dreamy Radiohead songs work. For one example, in their “How to Disappear Completely”, the chord structure is clear and simple, but there’s this creepy dissonant whine that runs through much of it, and little melodic details pop in randomly out of tempo. Their songs that don’t do this are often the ones with the killer melody and harmonies that are so wonderful they don’t need dressing up. Since “Andrew Management Issues” has a straightforward chord progression based mostly on I-IV-V, I feel it needs more going on aurally.
I think the arrangement here, however, is pretty wonderful. Though the slide is annoyingly out of tune, it sounds like it is consistently so and perhaps a little nudge up on that whole track would be a simple fix. The slide is played with nice subtlety and is very appropriate to the whole, so it would be worth it. Everything else instrumentally in the song is nicely balanced and mixed and does a great job of setting the vibe. Really good work.
The drums seem impatient with the slow pace though. It’s that the kit chosen and the way it was mixed seem more energetic than is right. That snare hit sticks out, and the drum track is in stereo and perhaps a little too much high end. In trying to find an example of what I’m thinking, I ran across “Lose Me On the Way” by Hope Sandoval, which isn’t exactly the same I know, but those drums are doing their job without pulling focus.
This sensation that the drums are just itching to party the whole way through causes the song to feel too slow, as it sounds like it’s riding hard on the brakes. The initial temptation if this were my song would be to speed it up, but I don’t think that solves anything. I feel like the drums are going along to get along but really don’t want to be in that room with those zoned out dreamers.
This song isn’t about lyrics I realize, but I have a few comments anyway. I like the imagery, and the balance between too vague and too on-the-nose seems to be just about right. Because of the kind of song it is I haven’t paid attention to the lyrics at all, and don’t care that much about them. However, the title (?) phrase “anger management issues” has a modern, tongue-in-cheek connotation which doesn’t fit the rest of the song. It’s kind of a nitpick, and doesn’t matter a ton to me, and otherwise I like the lyrics just fine, and don’t care.
Lastly, just pointing out that the title seems a typo, Andrew instead of Anger. I figure this was just a goof, but if it wasn’t a goof, then I’d say it’s not doing anything for the song.
Because for me this song is all about the atmosphere. The song is something to evoke and complement reverie. And it does reasonably well at it. I do wish the song’s dreams had a little more danger in them though.
It’s a truism that the quality of the lead vocal telegraphs the quality of a song more than any other aspect, including songwriting, so when there is a problem there, the song is now working uphill to win us over. Ominous Ride also has this problem with their “Hide And Seek” for example.
The lead vocal on Ominous Ride’s “Hide and Seek” has a similar feel as that in Stacking Theory’s “Andrew Management Issues” in some respects, though the songs are otherwise pretty different. Where I hear the similarity is in the perceived distance from the singer, accomplished with the echo and EQ but also the softer performance. The vocal here is more on pitch, but is perhaps less appropriate for the song than the other is.
“Hide and Seek” has a schizophrenic quality I could never quite wrap my ears around. On one hand, it’s got the dreamy sound of the Stacking Theory entry and “Roses” by Dream Bells. But it’s not on paper a strictly ‘dreamy’ song. It has a lot of lyrics, which have a point and make total sense, and a regular old melody like your garden variety pop song, but the overall effect is that it wants to be more of an ambient thing.
As I sit here looking out the window at the clouds where Mt St Helens would be if I could see it, I’m asking is this a decent composition given the wrong production, or is it a production being host to the wrong composition? The lyrics alone evoke a nostalgia and wistfulness for an earlier time playing hide and seek, whether literally or metaphorically is not clear, but in either case the sentiment is that of a memory of a past that has been lost. I like this concept a lot, and the lyrics put it forth pretty well. But the music doesn’t say that to me at all. It’s much more anodyne; it doesn’t underscore the lyrics much, and so actually diminishes their effect. Similarly to my point about Governing Dynamics’ “Falling For Maybe”, the lyrics and music don’t complement one another to create a cohesive vision.
Regarding the chords in the bridge, I’m sure others will mention this as well, but here are my two cents. At 1:46 the guitar is playing C minor and the piano is playing C major. It’s jarring. To be sure, piling major and minor chords on top of each other like that is actually a favorite technique of mine. I love that little rub. Radiohead uses it sometimes. And I actually sort of love it here as well. What’s odd about it however is I’m not positive it’s on purpose. It comes kind of out of nowhere very late in the song, and there’s nothing else before that would seem to motivate it. (The fact that new material at all is introduced only at the very end seems strange anyway, but setting that aside…) For me to be confident that this dissonance was intended, I would ideally hear something earlier that would set up the fact that weird chords might be on the horizon. As is the case with Stacking Theory’s song, a little grit all along might do the trick. Since this is the first time we are hearing the piano (I think), it could also work if the figures the piano played were all a little off, or if it were mixed so that it pulled focus, or had some arresting effect placed on it. I need something to give me confidence the dissonance isn’t a mistake.
Your comment indicated you are not pleased with how this song came out. I don’t know what aspects of the song you are particularly dissatisfied with, so it’s impossible to know, but one guess is you might be dissatisfied with the fuzz guitar track. It seems uninspired and sloppily mixed, and is basically the same riff over and over. I think its inclusion in the song is a fine instinct, but there’s room for some finesse in how that part fits in to everything else. Also the bass part seems first-draft-y, like if you’d had time you would have laid down another more musical take.
Apart from that, I like the arrangement. Everything seems to have a reason to be there. There’s enough detail thrown in to keep it engaging and those details feel appropriate. Apart from the issues I’ve laid out, overall it seems like the lead being pulled back, heavily echoed and pretty low in the mix doesn’t serve the composition, though it would be appropriate were there not such a clear point to the lyrics.
Another song which suffers from a low energy lead vocal is SunLite’s entry, “No Fun!”…
As with Ominous Ride’s “Hide and Seek”, my initial impression when first encountering “No Fun!” is that the lead vocal is lower energy than everything else in the song, “smaller” is how one might put it. It’s mixed pretty low, off-pitch a lot and it doesn’t have enough “juice” to the performance. It sounds fixable to me, but would require multiple takes, a nudge up of the fader, and maybe a couple beers to take on a little ‘tude to match all that guitaring. It also sounds dry as a bone, a pinch of reverb would help that.
The song is repetitive musically, and repetitive in a non-interesting way, with just the I-V-IV over and over. I have an image of walking down a street with a lot of coffee shops on it. One of them has a real cozy vibe inside, one has some interesting art on the walls, one looks to be extremely popular, then I run across “SunLite Coffee Shop”, and while it has the requisite chairs and tables and drinks, there’s fluorescent lighting, no color, no art on the walls, and the menu has like three items on it. Not enough effort was put into providing anything special for the patrons. The song is no fun. (It’s not the only song which is just askin’ for it with its title, by the way. chewmeupspitmeout’s “Bored Games” keeps talking about how bored he is….)
Let’s talk lyrics. A minor problem I have here is that the adherence to the challenge is pretty tenuous. Some other entries, (We Happy Few, Celestial Drift, Jealous Brother), employ games as a metaphor, which to me is a cop-out. This song isn’t totally egregious in that regard, but it merely uses game play terms to talk about something else. The challenge is for the song to be about a game. I didn’t take off the maximum points for this, because it does nod to games a lot, but, well it’s on thin ice. Jim Tyrell does this also, but he is referencing specific games, and this song is merely using game-related phrases like ‘rolling the dice’ and ‘struck out again’.
Which brings me to my real beef regarding the lyrics, and that is the over-reliance on overused stock phrases that don’t seem to add up to anything. I’m trying to follow along, either via some narrative, or the evocation of a vivid scene or situation. I come up empty, though. It reads like a string of vague cliches that are game-related, but I don’t get an understanding of the relationship between the I and the You, and it doesn’t sound like the song really has one. Let’s take the second verse as an example.
You crown me king then slide right over
We’re playing different games
I shoot my shot while we’re not sober
This always ends the same
I’m confused immediately here. What does crowning someone king imply? And what does it mean to slide right over after having done so? I don’t get what that’s supposed to evoke. The second line doesn’t follow on the first, and the third doesn’t follow on the second. And in the last line I don’t know what the ‘this’ is that’s being referenced. A little mystery is good of course, but this is all mystery. If it means something to the lyricist, no effort is being made in taking the listener along.
Musically, the overall adjective this song calls up for me is ‘oppressive’. It’s a big guitar song. That fuzzy lead guitar is oppressive, playing the same three chords over and over, and that sort of wall of sound playing style gets tiring on the ears. I also hear a faint second guitar in places that seems unnecessary. The guitars are played fine by my non-guitarist ears, but there’s not a lot of oomph to any of it. Drop the needle randomly in the song and you’re sure to hear almost the same thing every drop. The only difference is whether the lead is in there or not.
The song lacks ‘space’. It could get a lot of mileage by just not playing anything in places. A few songs in this round really benefit by ‘space’, such as “Showdown” by Tunes by LJ, and “The Gambler” by Vehicles of Beware, which I’ll talk about next.
Right away at the outset of “The Gambler” I am given a very deliberate vibe. Lots of space and syncopation, allowing the parts to each stand out clearly and not tiring our ears with too much sound. It’s a great example of how where you don’t play can be as effective as where you do. I appreciate how attention to that aspect makes it easy to listen to and really notice everything.
The Steely Dan essence is spot-on, the arrangement, harmonies, right down to the lead vocal. It’s eerie really. My goodness, good job! Not much to say about that. You went for Steely Dan, you hit the bullseye, ‘nuff said. (For the record, I was also strongly reminded of Michael MacDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’”.)
What I enjoy most about “The Gambler” is what I refer to as ‘smack modulations’, where there’s a key change entirely unmotivated musically, yet that feels deliberate and correct. At 2:05 heading into the bridge the song jumps to a completely foreign key, then again at 2:38 coming out of the bridge into the guitar solo, it jumps to yet another completely foreign key but in a really satisfying and interesting way. So sweet. (Steely Dan does that a lot too!)
Harmonically, I appreciate all the extension chords, which I realize were needed to evoke Steely Dan, but also feel totally natural. I don’t know any other songs by Tunes by LJ, so I don’t know how far afield this song lands from their body of work, but whether that’s one of their signatures or just this one time to land the mimicry, the chord progressions are killer all the way through.
I also really enjoy the great variety of phrase lengths in the melody. If you just go doo-dee-doo talking through the verse to focus on the phrasing, you’ll hear the first two lines are one rhythm, and the 3rd through 5th lines are another. Keeps things interesting. But my favorite phrasing comes in the chorus. We get this long string of short bursts (“The gambler/Put em down etc.). A lesser songwriter might rely on that phrasing 8 lines in a row. But here, the songwriter changes up that phrasing on the very last line “Giddy up let’s do it”. After having just heard the same phrasing 7 times in a row, when the 8th line comes up and all of a sudden does not start on beat 2 but is shifted back a beat, it’s so very satisfying, and it does so on a good lyric. At that moment I go “Oh!”, and a second later the key changes back and I go “Oh!” again. It’s really clean. Hats off, man.
I also like the idea of the lyric. Also very Steely Dan, and underscored enough by the arrangement to create a pretty vivid scene. Lot of fresh and specific imagery I really enjoyed. I do think the lyrics could be tightened up a bit more, however, as there are a few sloppy moments. “Dressing gown” implies he’s in drag to my mind. Feels like a stretch to get the rhyme. But let’s look at verse 2
He knows the bookies all by name
He always makes his bets alone
At the track and on TV
He always gets his drinks for free
Listed as a VIP
On his phone
He is friends with all the bookies, but he makes bets alone? That confused me. Pairing TV with getting drinks for free is also confusing because you don’t get free drinks when watching TV. And who bets on TV exactly? I love the line Listed as a VIP / On his phone, but again, if he’s on his phone where do the free drinks come from? I mean, I get that he’s gambling in all sorts of places, but it took me a minute to grasp and could be cleaner. If I were writing this, I’d be proud of the VIP/phone line and would spend a line or two to better set it up.
Anyway, chorus lyrics are great. After that I’m fine with the general scene painting lyric style, it works decently. I take great issue with the bridge lyric though. All of a sudden we’ve switched to the first person. Up until that point, it’s a song about a character we are all observing together. The bridge suddenly makes it a confessional of some sort, maybe? This change was not welcome. If the intention was kind of “And it turns out the I’m the gambler and am singing about myself”, it’s not set up well enough, and the scene painted up to that point is easily enough for the song. I would definitely leave it third person there. Also, the bridge makes no sense to me in general.
I think there’s a missed opportunity in the arrangement. Verse 4 paints a scene of the gambler’s world shut down, and a sense of loneliness and maybe regret settles in. At this point it might have been nice to change up the arrangement a little to underscore that the groovy syncopated swagger of the gambler’s life is suddenly gone. A hundred ways to accomplish it, I won’t suggest any, but I found myself wanting that image to be underscored in the arrangement.
This comes out at #2 in my rankings. Really nice job!
A final word on the arrangement. I’m impressed with the organ here. There are so very many types of organ sounds, I have always struggled with finding the right one. I guess it’s something one just has to be knowledgeable in. It’s so exactly correct, both in tone and how it’s played.
Unlike “The Gambler”, the organ on Pannacotta Army’s “Covfefe” doesn’t come in until the chorus, but again, it’s the absolute correct organ to underscore, and I appreciate how that note is held over into the vamp before the return to the verse. A detail to be sure, but I noticed it and it relaxed me into knowing I was in good hands here.
For whatever reason I happened to have read the lyrics to this song before I heard it. Initially my thought was “God, not another Trump song” (a similar reaction when hearing Jealous Brother’s “Kings In the Corner”). So when I actually heard it I was pleasantly surprised there’s not a whiff of anger in it, and the man is belittled in a subtler way. This disconnect, an anti-Trump song that sounds like “Don’t Worry Be Happy” was refreshing and a welcome surprise. The whole SMDH with a smile could actually be more effective in angily taking him down because it feels more degrading. Clever choice.
The concept for the song is a terrific take on the challenge, and a big part of my enjoyment of it is just in the coming up of the idea for it.
I admire how the first verse sets up the chorus. That verse flows so nicely, first setting up the character, then the game, and it ends with “Let’s consult the dictionary”, which leads seamlessly into the chorus and title. It really sounds like the guy singing has the dictionary open to the exact spot. I know that’s harder to get right that it might seem. Kudos.
In general, I appreciate how spare these lyrics are. Too many images is such a common error, and one the song doesn’t succumb to. The song knows its idea is enough, and lets that be it. Lastly, I love that you never mention Scrabble, we just all have to get it, and being such a well-known game, I think that’s cool that you gambled that you wouldn’t have to.
… and how fortuitous for you that C and V rhyme with E…
Honestly though, there’s not a lot else to say about this song. Like Vehicle of Beware’s “The Gambler” and Brian Gray’s “Hide and Seek”, effectively pulling a pastiche move is fraught with danger. “The Gambler” nailed it with Steely Dan, and you nail it here. Because it’s a mimicry of another style it doesn’t make my #1, and because the genre you happen to be imitating doesn’t require a lot of complexity and doesn’t quite hold my music-geeky interest, it’s a notch below “The Gambler”, so it’s #3. All three songs are very close though.
Speaking of Brian Gray, let’s look at one of the other blatant pastiche songs in the collection…
All three purely pastiche numbers in this round, including this one, scored really high in my rankings, though of the three (including “The Gambler” and “Covfefe”), I found “Hide And Seek” the least successful. This is purely relative to be sure, because “Hide And Seek” is mostly very successful.
When pastiche suffers it’s often because there is some aspect to it that doesn’t contribute to the effect. In this case, it’s the lead vocal, which comes across more as musical theatre than a true Irish pub song. I don’t believe I would ever hear this guy in such a pub singing this song like that. It sounds out of place. Too emotive, too close to the mic, and yes, too American. To be sure, if you’d sung in a flawless Irish accent it would still be too emotive and close. (Also, the penny whistle sounds synthetic, but no points off for that. Without an actual penny whistleist at hand, this is as close as I think one can get.)
OK, though I led with that, it’s not that big a deal to me, we were just talking about pastiche so I opened this review with it. A bigger issue for me is the lyrics. But before we go there, let’s cover this:
Songwritingly speaking, how the song straddles the line between the genre it’s going for and basic musical interest is expert. The tune and harmonies sound not only like one of those songs, but they sound like a good one of those songs. I love the interesting phrase lengths in the verse; and the way the opening line is set (There’s a little known walkway etc.) is elegant and effective, just unique enough to get my attention, but not out of character. The whole song is full of skillful melodic invention. I also love the chord progression, which jumps in some strange ways that seem appropriate somehow nonetheless.
Lyrically, I have some problems, though. I appreciate the slavish obedience to the rules regarding syllabic placement and rhyme, a tall order given the long patter lines required. It was a joy to hear a lyric which respects that, and keeps me from feeling the song is being lyrically lazy. Not to mention it keeps up that inner rhyme. But therein lies the problem. In its dedication to syllables and rhymes, some meaning was sacrificed. Reading your song notes, I agree that a middle verse involving a search might work, but the song is already 4 minutes, and I didn’t miss it. (In a musical of course it could work at any length, which it really sounds like what the song was written for.)
Wait— a dolphin? I admit to having heard this song 20 times before it occurred to me to read the song notes. So all my comments are from when I thought it was about two brothers playing hide and seek and one brother went missing. And that I disliked the name Fungie for what I thought was the lost brother. So, even after learning it’s about a dolphin, the lyrics don’t really let on, and it sounds like it’s about two brothers. My recommendation would be to either forget about the fish (mammal) and make it about brothers, or else make it more obvious it’s about a fish (mammal).
Anyway, because the lyricist clearly gives a lot of attention to and has the chops for lyric craft, I’m going to get all lyricistically nitpicky on this song’s ass. Hopefully it will be welcome, but fair warning, here come some profoundly geeky nitpicks. (Also remember I didn’t know it was about a dolphin.) Of course, lots to love here, and I hope using my electron microscope on the song won’t be unwelcome. Having read the song notes, it’s astounding the song was pulled off in the amount of time it sounds like was available. And I wouldn’t wonder that a lot of my notes will be met with ‘yeah yeah I know but I was rushed’ or even ‘yeah ok but that’s such subjective caviling’ but the underlying purpose here is to point out things a fellow lyrics nerd might notice, and ultimately I don’t know that anything really needs fixing. With that in mind…
There’s a little known walkway
This is not a song about the walkway. Opening with that image and letting the image linger for a couple more lines is a red herring, since the walkway doesn’t really matter. At the end it’s a pathway. Oops.
Shed my best every Sunday
I know why you left off the “I” at the top, because it diminishes the musicality of the line to add that pickup. Unfortunately, the word shed is the same in present and past tense, so as soon as the lyric is working to establish itself, an ambiguity is presented both in tense and subject, so I’m unclear right off the bat. I like the vivid image, but the choice of words is sub-optimal for a song with such a specific story to tell.
To play hide and go seek as the sun breathed its fire
Hmmm… we’re not in the desert here; it’s like Ireland or somewhere up north like that, right? Like with the walkway, giving attention to the sun’s fire seems unnecessary. I would find a different image that is more appropriate and helps the story and/or helps set the scene.
And I figure it lasted forever, about,
This line is so nice. The ‘about’ adds a little boyish flavor. And the prosody is perfect - it’s just fun to say. (Though ‘figure’ isn’t quite right. Maybe ‘it felt like’ is more appropriate.) However…
Two brothers eternally quarry and scout.
Yellow card. It went into present tense in the need for syllables and rhyme. I run across this little knot all the time myself. Bottom line: If you have to break a rule to make your prosody come out right, you need a different line. Which rule is the most damning: Imperfect rhyme or switching tense? They’re both no-no’s, I try not to have either. I’d come up with something else entirely because I don’t think that works. And ‘quarry’ is pretty arcane as a verb anyway.
(Not really on topic, but I’m reminded of a piece of advice I was given in a songwriting workshop in about 1994 that’s never left me: “When writing lyrics, if you have to choose between a good image and good lyric craft, always opt for the craft. The unsung image will not be missed if it’s never heard, but the bad craft will be forever obvious. And if opting for the correct craft means a crummy image, then you don’t have your line yet. Think of something else.” This song obeys that axiom, but sometimes it needs to be something else.)
The chorus
Here’s where the lyric really falls short for me. I think you painted yourself into a corner when you decided to keep up the inner rhyme. You could have given the rhyme scheme a little rest in the chorus which would have also freed you up by not having to contort to get that extra rhyme in there. Though again, the adherence to syllabic placement and rhyme is wonderful and I love that the lyric does that, I can ‘see the strings’ so to speak, the meticulously mangled syntax shows through, both in some mildly convoluted phrases and occasional lessened impacts and meanings.
Hey Fungie, let's go.
The light's failing, and so
Mama's saying it's time to come in.
Good, (though as mentioned, not knowing that was an actual name of a big fish, I was confused by the name. Fungie? Is that someone’s name? What do you gain by intentionally confusing us like that? Why not Davey or Johnny?) Anyway, good.
‘Cause I've counted to ten
And sought time and again.
Here's your cup now, it's over, you win.
Confusing. The use of ‘because’ here points to some ‘therefore’, and to my ears it points to let’s go. “Let’s go because I’ve counted to ten.” But it’s already established that the reason is the light, “Let’s go because the light is failing.” Adding that second ‘because’ is weird.
I understand that use of ‘sought’ is a quicker way to say ‘looked for you’, but it belies the fact that it’s the voice of a boy, who wouldn’t use ‘sought’. In this case meaning has been too sacrificed for prosody. I thought the last line was quite effective — (that is until I recently learned it’s about a frickin’ dolphin! Makes me wonder what sort of liquid a dolphin needs a cup for. Kidding.)
So Fungie come back
With a ninety-plus craic
Of tall tales of wherever you roam
Nice use of colloquialism! I admit I had to look up ninety-plus craic. Good line. But again, we jump into present tense for the sake of a true rhyme. If he has come back to tell tall tales, everyone’s all relieved, so one assumes he’s through roaming, and so the proper word here would be ‘roamed’, which is not a true rhyme, but changes the meaning a great deal. It’s a little puzzle, I’m not here to solve it, but I see it there.
And an evening song
About learning the longest
Way ‘round is the shortest way home.
This is the line that bothers me the most in this song. Biggest problem: I don’t get it. What does that mean? And it’s the moment in the song where the biggest, best, splashiest line needs to be and will get repeated. It has to totally kill, and it doesn’t. But again, it’s got a nice musicality to it and sounds like a really good line, until I really try and parse out the meaning and end up confused. Am I missing something, or do you know what it means and thought it would be clearer, or do you also not know what it means but hoped no one noticed, or something else?
“Ev-en-ing song” sounds pretty and vaguely Irish pubby, but the stretching it out to four syllables like that sounds like it’s just there to fill out the line, and the fact the song’s in the evening seems irrelevant anyway. The learning the longest way round is the shortest way home just furrows my brow a bit. Again, it’s a lovely, lilty, little phrase, but unclear. If the whole song were that style, and we were just getting impressions and abstractions, that’s one thing. But this is a narrative story song and adding a koan as the big tag line seems odd. (EDIT - A few days later: it occurred to me that the delivery of that line is part of its undoing. If it is supposed to be a nonsense koan-type line, the delivery can’t land on ‘home’ in that genuinely emotive, theatrical way. If the whole chorus was delivered more insouciantly, it might work better. Just a thought I’m tossing out there.)
I love me a good patter song lyric. Though the real trick is to make them sound natural and inevitable and clear, if the syllables are absolutely perfect, just the joy of the mere sound of the words is delightful. (“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” sounds both inevitable and clear and follows the rules to a T. With an inner rhyme! Alas, it is not noticed as the genius patter song it is. Those lyrics are perfection in craft. And speaking of inner rhymes, if you don’t already know it, Sondheim’s “Please Hello” from Pacific Overtures has to be read on the page to be believed. Quatrains with inner rhymes ala Gilbert & Sullivan, all essentially perfect, and sung overlapping each other, which means he knew no one could hear them individually in a theatre yet he stuck to that standard nonetheless. Amazing. And then there’s Geisel…but I digress.)
So thank you for upholding this noble tradition.
All this to say I love that you pulled off that pole vault. But in clearing the high bar you set yourself, you lost some points for form.
There is another song in this round that has fairly patter-y lyrics. That is “Some Kind of Pawn” by Dog Star Pilot.
Patter is so much fun. This lyric is somewhat looser not holding itself up to the same exacting standards as Brian Gray, but some of the same rules should apply. In the case of this lyric, I’ll bring up the fancy term “euphony”, which describes words which have a harmonious and easy-to-pronounce sequence of sounds.
“Some Kind of Pawn” suffers from a lack of euphony at times. Here are a few lines that are plain old hard-to-say at the required speed:
The bishops were smiling
cost us the war
I broke from the ranks before the axe could descend
without the checkerboard squares I was totally lost
some sort of game
I’m not about to start suggesting different lines here, but if this were my song I’d know lines like those needed replacing so that I’d be able to spit them out.
Referring back to the looser style of this lyric as opposed to “Hide And Seek”, there are numerous places where you stretch out a word over two eighth notes. In the first verse, ‘poised’, ‘win’ and ‘drastic’ are examples. I realize this is getting weedsy, but coming up with words which will maintain that triplet rhythm on every syllable is a worthy goal in maximizing Patter-Song-Deliciousness. Maybe you don’t care about PSD, which is fine, just pointing out that an hour spent coming up with a line where you don’t have to stretch a word across two beats just to make it fit might be worth the effort ultimately. Not that this is a better line, but to demonstrate, changing the first line to “Our forces were going to win it by all the accounts” would earn a higher PSD score.
OK, let’s get this out of the way. The opening of “Happy Together” by the Turtles. Please select the most appropriate answer:
You were intentionally quoting it
You didn’t notice the similarity until after recording
People are pointing it out to you over and over
I’m the only one who has pointed this out
I’m full of it, they aren’t even close
Anyway,… In the name of completeness, I’ll mention that the simple guitar accompaniment was rough and bare, and that didn’t bother me at all, it seemed right.
Once I understood the concept behind this song, I really enjoyed it. I had to go read the lyrics carefully to parse out the scene, but it was worth it. Fun idea. The fact that I had to go read it before I got it points to a couple things, though.
The first two verses are hard to make out. I wish the lyrics were more enunciated, and if there’s going to be vocal harmony with rapid-fire words like that, the parts should be dead-on synced up. I think the combination of multiple voices singing fast lyrics quietly like that spells trouble. I noticed how at verse three with the Legos things got better in that regard because the higher part meant clearer enunciation. (Honestly, I don’t think you needed to harmonize every line. Could have started with the solo lead for a verse or two, would have given the layering in of harmonies more impact.)
The second issue is that because the concept is weird, I wanted to know that the song knew it was weird. After the first verse I’m thinking the song is about a chess game narrated from the perspective of a pawn as if it were an actual war. Which, honestly, is a great concept for a song had it been just that. But when all the other game pieces start coming on board, the music doesn’t clue me in that something surprising is happening. It all continues at almost the same energy level. I’m not suggesting there be a bunch of musical exclamation marks thrown in, but some sort of acknowledgment that things took a sharp turn could help the flow a bit. It’s the difference between saying “I was pumping gas and a giant purple monkey came and crushed the Denny’s across the street.” vs. “I was pumping gas, and I was shocked to see this terrifying giant purple monkey right out in the open. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and then he actually crushed the entire Denny’s across the street.” In the first example, he doesn’t sound surprised enough.
So because when the song started it immediately required the listener to grasp what it was about (a pawn as a narrator), then adding a second layer of weirdness was enough of a stretch that I wish it had been clearer. You could have set the scene of a messy room with all sorts of game pieces nearby, you could establish that the pawn was just going about his everyday business in another chess match when…. All of a sudden guess what happened!?
The song is fun and silly doesn’t sound like one the songwriter would be motivated to perfect, and anyway I got it soon enough, but since I’m reviewing it here, I feel obligated to point out there was some confusion until I read it through more carefully.
Any confusion is bad when one is trying to tell a story, especially an unusual one. “Hangman” by Pigfarmer Jr. Suffers from the same problem, and I had to dwell on it some to try and comprehend it.
“Hangman” was a difficult one to get into. Mostly I struggled with understanding the concept. A lot of lines about the hangman right out of the gate, but I struggled with all of them. Why doesn’t he give a damn? What is he missing to be a man? Why is he lonely? Why can’t he be my friend? Also, if I didn’t already know it was to be game-related, starting out with “the hangman” connoted the executioner, who is known as ‘the hangman’. Hangman is the name of the game, but the guy being drawn is not the hangman. He is the guy getting hung by the hangman. Maybe that sounds too picky, but it threw me a bit at first.
So, I get that the singer doesn’t want to be someone’s hangman, in which he is whole when they are wrong, wrong, wrong, but I couldn’t reconcile that idea with what it’s a metaphor for exactly. In what situation does someone only feel whole when someone else is wrong? Then life is being shattered by the way it’s being drawn. Life isn’t being drawn, the hangman is. And what is being shattered exactly? What does that mean? And then the person can’t be the missing part of the singer, that seems like it’s referring to missing parts that haven’t been drawn yet, but it just doesn’t connect to the game, as if it sounded like it meant something, so it was in. I’m not getting it.
I could continue, diving deep into the last verse, but the point is made. The lyrics mostly string together vaguely hangman-related phrases that sound like they are conveying a double meaning, but don’t add up to a cohesive world I can understand. In songs like “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”, “I Don’t Wanna Be Your Moscow”, or “Not the Doctor”, the metaphor is made clear. We all get what the stepping stone represents and what the relationship is. That never happens here.
The band and the arrangement are all fine. The vocal is also good enough. This isn’t a singer-y song anyway.
If the lyrics made no sense that wouldn’t have been a problem at all, plenty of lyrics don’t make sense, and I listen because it’s musically seductive. Unfortunately, this song is musically pretty ordinary, with no real hooks or area that perk up my attention.
This was also the case for “Carcassonne And On And On” by The Moon Bureau.
Like “Hangman”, “Carcassonne And On And On” suffers from ordinariness. The first few times through the playlist, this one would come and go without my noticing it much. It wasn’t till I intentionally told myself to stop and pay attention was I able to do so. Nothing pulled me in when I was even a little distracted. Those same three chords over and over, it gets tiring and I found myself longing for something musically delightful to happen.
I don’t think it would take much, because it’s basically competent. There’s a lot of sound going on though, maybe more than it needs. Both guitars are very jangly and suck up a good deal of the song’s sonic energy, and they don’t seem to be aware of each other. Maybe only one jangly guitar would be enough and give space for the other doodads to shine. I also felt like the bass could have been more musical and varied. And the drums seem to throw in syncopations at semi-random places. I guess overall it doesn’t sound like these instruments all agree on what the song is supposed to sound like. As if they were given the charts but didn’t know anything else anyone was playing.
The pizz strings and the chimes at the end are nice but they get lost in the mix, and I question whether they are appropriate at all. Pizz strings are often used to impart a light-hearted charming vibe, but this wasn’t that light-hearted or charming of a song, so I wasn’t sure they felt like the right choice. The song seemed to suddenly be trying to claim out of the blue that it was jaunty and carefree, but nothing else was expressing that, so when the strings stopped, so did any jaunty, carefree tone.
The title sounds like it’s trying some wordplay with the ‘on and on’, but nothing in the song implies what ‘on and on’ is saying. Maybe it means the game goes on forever, or is being played constantly or something, not sure. But just putting it on there because it’s a nice play on ‘carcassonne’ isn’t enough to justify it. I do like that wordplay, why not add some more ‘on and on and on and on’s at the playout (assuming it was made clear what that means)? Frankly, I didn’t even pick up on the wordplay at all until I’d heard the song quite a few times. The song might have left some fun on the table there.
OK. Gordon didn’t build a fortress. He just postulated what would happen if he did. So that bugs. And why bother with ‘Gordon’ instead of saying just ‘Sting’? And why bring Sting into it at all for that matter? And what’s the functional difference between a fortress and a wall anyway? And how would a wall place him in her heart? The first among what? There’s gotta be some sort of internal logic even if it’s oblique.
I don’t think it matters if the listener doesn’t know the game. I’d be ok with not knowing what a meeple was, or any of the other esoteric references to the game, if I could at least piece together where the singer was coming from. This one is making inscrutable references to a game I don’t know and stringing together supposed metaphors with it, but they don’t add up. This is a similar problem in ‘Hangman’, the difference being I know the game in that case (and still wasn’t getting it).
One last thing, I would remove most of the reverb on the vocal. It’s not motivated and sticks out from the rest of the mix. If a song is going to lay it on that thick like that it better belong there because that’s a lot of sound. For example, a song like “Roses” by Dream Bells also uses a lot of reverb, but it’s appropriate to the mood, and there’s enough sonic space in the mix that the reverb doesn’t make it crowded.
Reverb is an enormous part of “Roses” by Dream Bells. In this case, as opposed to “Carcassonne And On And On”, the whole idea of reverb is part of the world “Roses” is trying to create, what with the pads and spacey vocals and all. “Roses” has got more reverb than “Carcassonne” by a wide margin, but it’s handled more carefully and seems more in character.
“Roses” is a producer’s song. Its attention to detail is admirable. Here are a couple subtle details I noticed that reveal the level of care put into the recording.
The first bar of the drums is super muffled, then is opened up at the second bar. Cool.
At 0:23, at the line “Close your eyes”, the sub-bass is introduced, which is really effective every time, but there’s a little echo-y clave comes in on the pickup, as if to say “Welcome, sub-bass”.
At 1:07, under the line “just the same”, the bass drops out early, and not on a beat. Effective.
The song opens with a mark tree-like sound, which is never heard from again (that I could hear) until the very end, like tinkly bookends.
Songs like this don’t even need to be in any recognizable human language to work, so it seems sort of beside the point to critique lyrics. For what it’s worth, I don’t love these, but they are serviceable. It’s interesting that as much effort went into an explanation of the meaning of the song in the song notes, because as interesting as that is, that sort of thing matters not a whit to the enjoyment of music like this. If this song thinks people are paying attention to its lyrics, it’s got another thing coming.
I appreciate the ethereal melody, hovering on extensions of the chords, though I wish a few more chances had been taken, as even that arresting tune starts feeling a little threadbare by the end. I also think the inventiveness shown in the production could have been employed in the service of the harmonies. That flat VI flat VII I progression is kind of an overused cliché.
What really sells me on this one is the luscious atmosphere created by the layering of synth pads. Even within the pads chosen, there’s variety, as they are brought in and out in effective ways. The thick reverb placed on them is tasteful and contributes greatly to the overall effect. I realize it’s very possible that whole bed consists of a single patch and the reverb was built-in, and a press of a single finger was all it took, but I’m giving the song the benefit of the doubt, because it sounds good. Interesting that instrumentally, it’s almost entirely pads and that energetic percussion track.
It demonstrates why it can be worth the expense to invest in high quality synth libraries I suppose!
Coming out of “Roses” and heading into Hot Pink Halo’s “A Numbers Game”, at first it seems like we are jumping from one pad-heavy song into another, but it turns out the swoony opening to “Numbers” is a sort of fake out. Which is probably a good thing, because that synth used to open the song is not something I was going to want to listen to for a whole song.
Regarding that long synth intro, well it’s really odd. I’m not clear what it’s doing there. It acts like it’s setting us up by ending on what sounds like a big dominant chord, but it turns out to not be a dominant at all as the song is in another key entirely, and is of a completely different character. I get that the major VI chord in the intro comes up in the bridge a couple times, but that’s the only connection I hear. That whole intro could go entirely and wouldn’t be missed at all.
Like a few other songs in the competition (“Tarot Cards” by Fourty Two is one), these lyrics read a lot better than they sing. There’s a lot of imagery flying fast and furious, and the music isn’t even trying to keep up with all of it, merely starting its metronomic thing and leaving it at that pretty much.
Suffice to say, this one doesn’t work for me at all, and rather than drag it through the mud, I’ll just make some general suggestions that could help to move it in the right direction.
The rhymes don’t follow any logical pattern. The first verse is AABB, the second is ABCB. The first bridge (“I try so hard…”) is AAB, but the next time (“I grow so tall…”) it’s ABCB. And so on. Forcing oneself to stick to a rhyme scheme or two would help cohere the song and make it sound more polished.
It’s fine to be impressionistic in lyrics, listing a series of images to bring on an overriding atmosphere, but even impressionist lyrics need to have some logic, or else I may disengage from them. As with “Tarot Cards”, it feels like the lyricist wrote the lyrics slowly and deliberately and that there was personal meaning behind every line. The problem is, once it gets put into a song where it’s competing and working with other elements like melody and rhythm, the nuances that seemed meaningful on the page all alone lose a lot and no longer work, like trying to enjoy the nuances of a fine wine while playing badminton at a family barbeque. There’s too much else going on to be able to appreciate introspective musings, unless one is very careful about it.
And I realize these may be perceived as pedantic details, but cumulatively these kinds of things add up very rapidly over the course of a song. I want to follow along, but the lyrics keep me out of it.
Chase my tail around the bend – How does that work exactly? The image is difficult to picture, and that difficulty slows me down (also, it’s two cliches one after the other)
To fit through doors once closed to me – If they were closed, how does getting smaller solve that? Aren’t they still closed? Isn’t it more accurately To fit through doors I once was too big to fit through?
Terrified you’ll call my bluff – Who is she singing to all of a sudden? And what’s the bluff anyway?
A numbers game – Wait.. it’s a numbers game? How so? It was about getting smaller and fitting through doors and getting a key, but now it’s apparently a numbers game. Huh?
Keep pushing on until your dreams run out – Whose dreams? Doesn’t she mean “my dreams”?
On top of all this inattention to detail, I have to mark some points off for not really sticking to the challenge. Not only do I not get how it’s a “numbers game”, even if that were clear, it’s using the metaphoric definition of ‘game’, like a handful of other lil’ cheaters in this competition (“Jigsaw”, “Playing Games”, “Kings In the Corner”). So, I’m writing up a citation in my little cop booklet.
“Roses” employs synthetic drums (from the sound of it) and so does this song. It’s instructive to listen to both and hear how the other song gets away with it to great effect while in “Numbers Game” it sounds cheap and mechanical. Synthetic drums are a sticky wicket, to be sure. How to make them work? To be honest I’m not an expert in it, but in this song it sounds like the PLAY button was pushed on a drum machine and was henceforth forgotten all about, and the STOP button was pushed when the song was over. Some attention to the role percussion can play in a song would help here.
“The loneliness of the third choice goalkeeper” by The Dutch Widows also uses a drum machine, and there was some attention paid to it, but it doesn’t work for me for different reasons. By the time they get to the chorus I forgot about it, but in the verses it’s unnecessarily dorky. Doesn’t fit with the sentiment and vibe of the song. It stuck out for me amongst all the other traditional rock song instrumentation.
But the real problem with “goalkeeper” for me is the lead vocal. I actually like the tone of the voice just fine, but it doesn’t have the elasticity required for this melody, which is composed to require lots of big leaps and important bullseye landings on specific notes. Far too often the voice isn’t up to the task and it shows. If the composer is also the singer, they should be writing tunes they can successfully pull off, or else give the vocal to someone else.
It’s a shame because the song is nicely tuneful. The iii-vi-ii-V progression in the bridge is particularly effective for me, and I found myself longing for a better singer to do it, because it could be great.
I also like the idea for the song a lot, and the lyrics fairly decently get the idea across. There’s a clear goal (tee hee) to the lyric and it sets out to meet it. The singer swallows so many of the lines that I didn’t get many, nay, most of them until I read them, at which point the song rose in my estimation, and the skill of the singer fell in my estimation.
Moreso than most other songs in this round, this one has one big thing about it that is so much less accomplished than the rest of the song that it single-handedly brings the whole thing down in my rankings. I can already hear some Dutch Widow saying “Yeah mate, of course I know, but I’m doing it anyway”. To which my reply is “then don’t write athletic tunes for yourself, give your shortcomings a chance to succeed”. Plenty of non-singers have made good careers writing within their vocal limitations.
My favorite bit in this song is “keeping the benches waaaaaarm….. (and they’re warm)”. Funny lyric and set just right. Why the second part of the phrase was left out when it changed to the flat VI and the fuzz guitars came in I don’t know because that could have been a cool moment. (At the chord change I hear the melody attempting a big major 7th leap, which with a better singer woulda been so shweet.)
And those fuzz guitars are a weird choice. I like them there, but it’s like someone opening the door to a meeting in progress and then seeing there are people already in there and apologizing and quickly leaving. But I like that detail a lot. Fuzz guitars are not my favorite musical sound. In fact, most of the time I’m like “Who wants to hear that?” These step in, say one thing and get out. Just like it ought to be for all fuzz guitars in the history of fuzz guitardom.
“Bored Games” by chewmeupspitmeout loves fuzz guitars though. My genre bias is showing here, but a few seconds into this one my metaphoric arms folded and I thought “OK, let’s see you please my ears with that infernal buzzing going on.”
Right off the bat, I’m not a guitarist, but these seems pretty nicely-played. And the whole fuzz thing is mixed low enough to not be too grating. All in all, the production for this tune is solid. Even though there are two fuzz guitars each playing their own jam seemingly independently, it seems to work ok. In general though, I felt a lack of groove. Sometimes the vocal anticipates the beat, sometimes the guitars or bass aren’t in the pocket, sometimes the BG vocals aren’t. None of them is terribly egregious, but in total they keep me from really feeling it and it was noticeable enough to cost a few points.
But I should note that this song grew on me over the weeks. I find the fuzz guitars actually kind of effective in a softer texture like this song has, where the potential explosive energy of the guitars is implied but never actually revealed.
The composition is simple and clean. A little lacking in imagination, but given the proper interpretation, could work just fine. And there’s the rub. The performance sounds bored. The lead vocal needs to have more weight and emotion behind it, a little more emotive personality, as it seems a bit robotic. The BG vocals are especially so. I wish something more interesting that the plain chords in the harmonies were tried. Simple and clean is great, but (like the guitars do fairly well btw) there needs to be more energy to the performance. Likewise, when the verse comes back after the chorus, I wanted the arrangement to add something new to keep my ear engaged. There’s nothing like that, and so the song comes off unnecessarily flat.
All in all, it seems like a rather half-hearted effort. Maybe the effect I’m talking about was on purpose, but I don’t think boredom is a strong candidate for the topic of a song. Boredom is boring to depict. And this song seems almost as if it is on purpose. But I don’t know that succeeding at such an effort is a true victory.
Lastly, I’m going to ding this one a bit for not truly making a song about a game. Game used as a metaphor doesn’t count in my book. To be sure, several songs got dinged a bit for that (“Jigsaw”, “Kings in the Corner”, etc.). It’s a relationship song using games as a metaphor. It’s not the same thing.
Case in point: “Kings in the Corner” by Jealous Brother. The first time I listened to this song, I was really digging it at first, then it got to the line “None of it matters when the dealer is corrupt” and I thought oh no, is this yet another Trump song? And so it is. Sigh… disappointing. The song isn’t about a game, it’s about Trump, using games as a metaphor. Not the same thing. I call foul. Plus, personally I’m so very tired of Trump songs.
But hey, let’s call out how great the playing is on this song. What wicked guitar solo work! Guitar solos normally don’t do a lot for me, but these all-too-brief breaks were terrific. In general, the band sounds awesome, with plenty of space and attitude. Everyone knows when to lay back and come forward, and is in the pocket nicely. It’s cool. Nice job, enjoyed it a lot.
The songwriting is catchy and clean. A few too many syllabic flubs for my taste, (“A red 8 face up” really should be fixed,) and I don’t like that the game metaphor is essentially dropped altogether at the chorus. “Do this with your cards and then do that with your cards, and oh, Trump is bad.” It doesn’t quite flow logically. And the second verse doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. I’m not clear what it’s even about.
Not that I really care all that much, it’s a fun listen. Lastly, the lead vocal is just pitchy enough to draw attention to itself. Not a big problem to be sure, but a little Autotune in a couple places wouldn’t be unwelcome. If I had total creative control I’d swap out for a heavier lead vocal, but this one has the right attitude and enough juice to sell it, even though it’s a little light for the song. Not a biggie.
This is a good time, thanks. Even though it’s the 7.6 millionth Trump song, when the challenge was something else entirely.
Write a song about a dog: “Trump Is Such a Dog”
Write a song about any flying object: “Air Force One Crimes”
Write a song about Oreos: “The President Eats Oreos While Feeding His Ego”
It’s too easy.
There’s not a lot of room for improvement in “Playing Games” by We Happy Few. Everything about this song exudes skill and justifiable confidence. The lead reminds me of Eddie Vedder, there’s a ton of detail to the arrangement, all the instruments are played well and appropriately, and the songwriting, though not particularly inspired, is solid and takes good advantage of the lead singer’s strengths. The band sounds like they’ve been playing together forever. Lead vocal anticipates the beat on a couple occasions, but not a biggie.
The BG vocals are the only thing about the production I think could be looked at. I can’t tell if it’s how they sounded originally, how they were mixed or recorded, or what, but they have a thin, young, and almost sped-up sound that seems out of place. I agree with the instinct of adding the harmonies where it does, but this particular execution does sound a bit like Eddie Vedder and the Chipmunks.
I don’t know how SpinTunes normally handles judging this particular aspect, but in my book, this song doesn’t meet the challenge. There are a few other songs that merely use ‘game’ as a metaphor, but some of those at least make vague game-like references. This song doesn’t even pretend. It’s as much about a game as “Free Bird” is about a bird. The point of the challenges are to stretch the songwriter into writing something they wouldn’t otherwise, in addition to ensuring the song was written for the competition. Like “Kings In the Corner”, it doesn’t seem like the ‘game’ aspect was taken very seriously. Grrrr.
All this is just my own personal peeve, (from having been on the receiving end of that criticism before 😊). Had it really been about a game it might have been top 3. The song is frickin’ great, man. And I didn’t even mention the strong headwinds you were facing through genre bias, as this is not my thing usually. Top ten.
Just like ”Playing Games”, David Taro’s “The Hardest Game” benefits from a very strong lead vocal led by a super professional band. And while We Happy Few’s entry is tough and muscular, Taro’s is upbeat and fun. I’d venture both bands could perform the other’s song well.
The lyrics of “Hardest Game” immediately reminded me of this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ycvlgrKW4. Neither here nor there, just sayin’.
OK, now that it’s time to review this one, I don’t have very much to say about it. It exudes professionalism. The band and the production are pretty much 10/10. So why isn’t it my #1? It’s pretty close, but there are a couple reasons it landed at #4.
The lead vocal is mostly pretty great, but I don’t think the gravelly voice is right but the material. I thought I’d get used to it, but I didn’t. It’s distinctive, but the peppy melody would be better suited to a cleaner and more facile style of singer. On top of that, the pitches on those melismas are usually not nailed, and that sticks out. And it does seem like in a few spots he’s trying to sound tougher than is natural. Kind of a shame, because he totally sells it. If one reads the lyrics without knowing the song, there appear to be a number of lines where the syllables fall wrong, but then hearing it, I appreciated how every line was delivered in a way that covered that up. “Knocked him over two sets to one” is sung with one rhythm, but “I beat a business man so handily” is different. Rather than shoehorn a single rhythm every verse as a lot of lesser singers would, the delivery was changed up to obey the syllables. (I was disappointed the idea of the third line “two sets to one” and then “three out of three” wasn’t continued so there was a score every verse’s 3rd line, but no points off, I just know I would have spent probably too much time trying to carry that idea through to every verse.)
The song also lacks a little specialness. It is so very by-the-numbers that I find myself wishing something unusual would happen to knock me off balance.
All fairly minor stuff though. It’s a totally solid entry, and ranks really high. And it’s catchy as hell.
And while we’re talking about catchy, let’s talk about the infectious “The Least Dangerous Game” by Siebass. That guitar riff is so much fun, with that magnetic chromatic thing thrown in there. I just wanted to hear that over and over and over.
Normally I would probably say that the thin, reedy lead vocal is all wrong for a song with those kind of forceful guitars, but given that the main character is a middle school kid it’s actually just right. The combination of the wimpy voice, powerful guitars and punchy drums sound exactly like a 14-year-old video game kid. So I was totally on board.
I also really loved how the song held back the lead guitar until the pre-chorus and then joined in unison with the bass riff in the break before verse 2. Super effective, and then there’s this happy little drum fill and the chromatic thing drops again. By the start of verse 2 I’m slain. So very nice.
As tight as this song is, I’m not a fan of the pre-chorus though. For those few seconds, the whole thing threatens to collapse. Melodically those rising chords with the repeated note melody lacks imagination. I wouldn’t have added the lead guitar there as the song is already adding a second vocal part. Also, the chord progression isn’t well-motivated. It sounds like the song didn’t know what it wanted to do there, musically, and that was a ‘good enough’ moment. By the time we get to the IV-V under “40 hours a week”, it’s losing me. Then the riff and the verse come back and the ship rights itself. (Same problem with the bridge.)
That guitar solo made me laugh. The fun being had in the studio really comes out. If a more traditional solo was in here it would have seemed more “OK, time to ROCK!” but it doesn’t do that. It still has an unmistakable middle-school vibe. And though I didn’t earn the extra points for recognizing anything in that solo, I found it appropriately silly and loved it.
Then the song just sort of peters out, and doesn’t have any more ideas. Kind of a disappointing finish, but oh well, still a good time.
Why is it that people who love video games find it perfectly ok to just let ‘er rip with obscure references a tiny percentage of people will get? I got almost no references whatsoever in those lyrics, and that kept me on the outside looking in. I can live with a few of them because for the most part I was getting it, but lines like
We are all made up of the sum of our traumas
But why hate and love, when I've got Secret of Mana?
Yikes. First off, half rhyme. Secondly, “sum of our traumas”? Coming from a middle-school kid? It sounds like it was all a setup so the song could get “Secret of Mana” in there which was important for some reason, but which means nothing to me at all. As a non-video game player, that lyric didn’t do a thing for me and hurt the song.
In-jokes and argot can work if the songwriter is winking to the listener a little, saying “I know a lot of you don’t get this, but stick with me here”. By not catering to people who won’t get it, much of the potential impact is lost to them.
Case in point, Sober’s “Blue Shells” is another song about video games in which insufficient effort is made to include listeners who don’t know what the song is talking about. I don’t like feeling left out, and that makes me a little mad.
OK, so I’ve played Mario Kart, and I know who Luigi is, but if I didn’t, I would think maybe this is a song about a radio personality and sports announcer in Los Angeles. https://www.radiobigboy.com/featured/louie-g/about/
I know I am overzealous at times regarding syllabic fidelity in general, but this one is really flagrant and damaging. It sits way out there front and center, is the main subject of the lyric, and is sung over and over, but it almost always sounds like “Louie G”. While with many syllabic flubs I might say “ohhhh, okay fine”, in this case, it’s just too wrong to let it slide. If this were my song I would have rewritten the line entirely to get out of that. It sounds like “Louie G”. I just couldn’t get past that.
I also don’t get why there’s an army of Luigis. Is that something I’m supposed to know? Does the singer think that’s a good thing or not? The lyrics seem to make it sound like a good thing, but the singer seems pretty mad about it. See, that’s a problem with using niche lingo in a song. Since I don’t get a lot of it, I don’t know when something comes up I’m not necessarily supposed to get. It’s all Greek and that diminishes the whole thing. Does the line about always being player two mean something I’m not getting?
Everything here is played and arranged really well. It all comes across kind of role-play-ish though, dressing up and playing “metal band”. That’s okay, it’s a song about a frickin’ video game, I don’t need pure genre-fidelity here. Just pointing out it does feel a little fakey.
Maybe the fakiness comes from the lead vocal, which really sounds like it’s trying hard to sound edgy. It’s really dry and kind of sits in the mix all alone, which is not only contrary to the genre the song is sporting, it also draws attention to the pretty apparent fact that it’s not a performance by a “real” metal band vocalist. This unnatural growl kept creeping into the voice and stuck out as inauthentic. Not to mention that had it been pulled off flawlessly it still might have sounded wrong.
This review points out a lot of negative here, but as I said, it’s a good performance and is really fine all around. And I get it, it’s a song for people who get the references. I’m just not one of those people, so it does nothing for me.
And while we’re talking about songs that do nothing for me, let’s take a look at “I Love a Sunburnt Country” by This Big Old Endless Sky. This one was really difficult to listen to more than a handful of times.
There’s very little I like about this song. Right off, the overuse of fuzz guitar and vocal distortion makes it impossible to listen to. The lead vocal performance is dripping with contemptuous swagger, and it’s about something that had to be explained in the song notes.
Even though this one falls to the near bottom of my rankings, I will call out some terrific imagery in the lyrics. It paints a clear and vivid portrait of the dry climate without resorting to cliche. The lyrics actually read pretty great I think.
But it is impossible to listen to. My worry is that’s on purpose, and I should just go suck it. It sort of feels like when Aussies sometimes tout how great their country is, it sounds like there’s an unspoken “so fuck you” at the end of every line.
So I really don’t like it, and part of me thinks that was the point. That there’s a malevolent grin behind it all. It’s just ugly.
Which brings us to Joy Sitler’s “Dress-Up”. Like a handful of songs in the competition, it’s not a song about a game at all. Instead it throws in an obligatory game reference to talk about something else.
It’s telling that in the song notes, it was thought there was a need to clarify how true it was, what game they don’t like, and in how their made-up name was trivially incorrect. The entire song feels somewhat self-absorbed. I found that the song lacked universality, was specifically about the singer, and was not relatable to me, or I would venture to most listeners.
Most everything about this song I found rather insufferable actually. The repeated I-IV-I-IV, the lack of a melody with any art to it, the disregard for prosody, the intentionally artless vocal delivery, all suggest that the songwriter mostly wanted to talk about themselves. As songwriters, we are throwing parties for our listeners’ sake, not our own.
The first few times I heard “Golden Child” by The Last Piece of Quiche, it sounded like a confusing, muddled mess, I couldn’t understand the lyrics, and felt totally left out. It was quite low in my rankings.
Then I took Australian Glennny’s suggestion and looked it up. Once I learned what Golden Child was referring to, and understood the rules of the game, (it sounds so fun, I wish it were around when I was in PE), my opinion of the song completely changed. I went “ohhhhh!!!” and suddenly, the confusing muddled mess seemed exactly appropriate. It really sounds like a song produced by a kid excited about Golden Child. And it shot up the charts. Thanks, Uncle Internet!
Incidentally, adding the spoken bit at the end turned out to be just the right touch, acknowledging people might not know what the song is about, and suggesting they look it up if they want to know, but in a way that doesn’t expressly tell us to look it up. It was pretty clever actually. Acknowledgment that some people might be left out can be just what a song needs. I’m looking at you, Siebass and Sober.
There’s obviously a lot going on in this song. And like I said, that seems appropriate. However, it also presents an audio engineering challenge. Without changing much about the arrangement at all, I would have tried to isolate the individual bits more so they didn’t moosh together. The song is almost in mono, for one thing. Selective panning of random voices, drum machine, bloopy synth, would have made them more discernible without losing that frenetic vibe. Also, judicious use of EQ would have helped. Bass and drums need to come down a few notches. It was going to be a tall order making a song like this not devolve into a muddle, but it would have been worth it because it’s so much fun.
This delicious mess could only have been created under the influence of actual inspiration. It’s deceptively hard to make something complicated that also sounds off the cuff like this. All those goofy synth runs manage to sound frantic and giddy yet in places are clearly pretty darn musical. And the little bits of riding the pitch wheel work too. I would certainly have over thought it and drained it of any spontaneity.
Maybe not top ten, because at the end of the day this is pretty daffy and short, but it ranks surprisingly high for me because its energy is infectious and when I listen really closely, I think I see more musical chops than the song wants me to believe it has. Definitely one of my favorite crummy songs.
OK, “Fizzbin, Fizzbin” by Boffo Yux dudes.
“A Piece of the Action” was one of the handful of comedic season 2 episodes. When Gene Roddenberry had to leave the producer role for a time to work on something else, Gene Coon took the reins in his place, and felt that Star Trek needed more comedy, so we got Tribbles, I, Mudd, and A Piece of the Action. The scene referenced in “Fizzbin, Fizzbin” by Boffo Yux Dudes is notable because it gave Shatner a chance to show off his comedic chops, which were considerable when he was given the chance, which was rare. Outside of his performance, this scene has always bothered me though because there’s ultimately little purpose in going to the trouble of befuddling that wise guy, as it ends up with the dropped card and the neck pinch anyway, which could have happened in a much simpler way. I used to love that episode, but I’ve soured on it over the past 10-20 years and now I can’t watch it at all. I’m still agog at how Star Trek Discovery mentioned Fizzbin as if it were a real game, even though it is set before the original series timeline. A cheap bone thrown to fans of the lore but without any understanding of the original usage. Kirk made it up on the spot while locked in a prison cell. God, Discovery was an awful, awful show.
Oh right, there’s a song to review, sorry.
So, my favorite thing about this song is of course the geeky ST:TOS reference. I got all the in-jokes. This makes for an interesting comparison to songs like Sober’s “Blue Shells” and Siebass’ “The Least Dangerous Game”, also rife with arcane references that in those instances I did not get. It might seem logical (< ooh) to claim “Oh, once you get the in-jokes then you’re ok with it, but if you just happen to not know it then it’s bad!? You’re so full of it. Jim bad.” However… “Fizzbin, Fizzbin” doesn’t just go along its merry way making references to something people won’t know. It is intentionally explaining the rules (nonsense though they are). It is aware of its own inaccessibility, so it gets away with it.
It seems stuffy to go into pedantic musical analysis for a song like this, because it wasn’t your aim here to write Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major. But for the sake of thoroughness, here goes:
The clapping at the opening doesn’t earn the song anything, because it’s not ultimately a rhythm-forward song, and the clapped rhythm is immediately forgotten (though still there in the background) once the song starts. The lead vocal is dry and naked and too hot in the mid-low end. The syncopated drums don’t seem necessary and are really just distracting. They also need to come down a few points. I think the BG vocals are well sung and recorded, but far too repetitive. In general, the song seems too wrapped up in just saying “fizzbin” over and over and over. Accent placement is all over the place. Sentence structure is often jumbled to make rhymes. The song is musically bland and repetitive and uninteresting.
OK, that’s out of the way. As someone who still owns the Blueprints, the Technical Manual, all the Blish books, and the Concordance, I admit to a bias here. I wrote an opera version of Day of the Dove for crying out loud (available on YouTube by the way!!!Yay!!). So thanks for the fun. And yes, it probably did get a higher ranking for unfair reasons. But there it is.
Charlie Cheney – “Swifter! Higher! Stronger!”
Ha, I wish I knew what game you were referencing, but it doesn’t matter really, I’m just curious. I imagined Stratego, which seemed close enough.
I approached this song from the perspective of making sense of the grandiloquent phraseology and arch, stentorian vocalic oratory :-). I applaud the concept. After all, isn’t that kind of what games - especially war games - are? Silly meaningless imitations of big serious doings? In that vein, this could be considered one of the most apt songs in this round.
Of course, all that fancy talk can obscure any actual meaning, so there’s that.
Rightfully or not, I decided that this was the concept - to kind of imitate the phony magnitude of war-themed board games. And in that regard it’s quite successful. Problem is it’s kind of a one-joke idea that doesn’t do anything else.
Like “Tarot Cards” by Fourty Two and “A Numbers Game” by Hot Pink Halo, these are lyrics that sound like they were written down with some meticulousness, but they are not particularly musical. Take a line like “My mantra: dream, perchance believe”; it doesn’t play because we can’t hear that all-important colon. We hear “My mantra dream” and immediately go ‘huh?’. I know, it’s supposed to be bombastic puffery like that. But once we get that joke, there’s nothing else going on.
Also, if I’m correct about the intent of the song, then the rather middle-of-the-road accompaniment isn’t contributing to the idea. The instrumentals sound fine, really not much wrong with them, but they contrast with the jokey operatic delivery and big words, so for me the sum total effect is schizophrenic.
It’s a shadow, but probably would have landed around #16 or so.
f6b62652-a4e5-43ac-9b70-33e135d62c4b – “Conway's Game of Life Data Sonification Test”
If this were an official entry in the competition, I would have taken a little time to parse through the code that apparently was used to create this. Being a shadow entry though, I’m not going to do that. In any case, this is pretty frickin’ awesome. Had it not been a shadow entry, (and had it clearly met the challenge), it would have ranked about #5-6 for me.
I’m writing under the assumption that this piece was the result of that code linked to, and so the human element existed only in the creation of that code, and not directly in choosing which notes to play and when. It brought up a lot of thoughts about the rise of AI in our culture, as this sounds to me like what AI bots play for each other in the evenings around the fire, after a long day of making music the humans told them to make. This is the AI bots’ own music, played for each other and divorced from the human world.
Listening to this piece as the result of code is a totally different experience than listening to it as if a human explicitly chose everything. In the former interpretation, its weirdness, not only in pure sonics but also in the piece’s structure, are chalked up to the fact that it’s an experiment in creating sound under a given set of rules, and what actually results from those rules. But under the latter interpretation, where someone consciously chose the sounds, I find myself wondering what the human creating them was trying to get across. As a piece written by code, it’s a sonic experiment; but as one written by a live person, it’s heard as a social event.
As code, I’m fascinated by the logic used to arrive at this sequence of sounds. As music, I’m fascinated by the creative inspiration behind them.
And that thought process taught me something about how I hear music, so thank you. I love this one.
Eric Baer – “All the Marbles”
Lovely. This one wins the trophy for largest chasm between songwriting and performance. Had this been in the competition it would have probably ranked about #9-10. The opening verse lyric is arresting, specific, and vivid. I was immediately into it.
I love the rhythmic quality of the lyrics, the attention paid to syllable stresses. The lines trip along so nicely. I also enjoyed a lot of the imagery. Lines like “Tons of pure momentum / pulling forward like a chain” and “find someone else that’s lonely / and we both feel less alone” are just great. I’d have been really proud of those lines had they been mine.
I wish the second verse had followed along with the narrative set up by the first. The guy is still on a train, but the specifics are abandoned in favor of abstractions, so it lost me a little. And throughout the rest of the song, the woman with the suitcase never came back. That seemed like a big missed opportunity. The lyrics started extremely specific, setting up a visual scene, but after that just used the train metaphor in the abstract, which was a shame.
Musically, the composition is simple and elegant and focused. Great job, I don’t think I’d change anything. The minor chord in the third line is so pretty (i.e. under “pulling forward like a chain”), as are those chromatic extensions under lines such as “while I just sit here silently…”, something I also praise in Jim Tyrell’s “Game Over”.
Of course, the performance falls way short, and I don’t wonder that you are very aware of that. It’s painful hearing the struggles with the banjo. (I also think the choice of the banjo isn’t necessary, and could work just fine with a guitar. Why the banjo was chosen is kind of a mystery to me.) And while I might be tempted to ignore the audio production, I can hear some kind of stereo widener effect on the lead vocal which leads me to believe there is some gear available there, so I’ll mention that I would roll off some of the piercing high end on the banjo and take the whole track down a little.
There’s a train load’s worth of talent in this song. If this were my song I’d carry through the scene with the woman, at least loop back around to it at the end or something, cinch the lyrics a little tighter. And of course record it anew. If just those few things were done, this would be top 2 or 3 for me.
Definitely Not Secretly ...? - Definitely Not Secretly ?
An in-joke I’m guessing. I don’t get it.
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