What a strong collection of songs, and a great way to start off SpinTunes 24. I don’t provide rankings, but I do give reviews when I’m able. Since I’m not a real judge, you can take or leave any of my opinions below as you like. Read on for my reviews!
West of Vine - Easy Modes & Cheat Codes
Thank you for giving the context for the extremely specific Madden NFL scenario referenced in the lyrics, although it’s hard to know how I’d receive the metaphor without having it explained. I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about whether I wish you made the reference more explicit in the lyrics or not, and I haven’t quite made up my mind. I’m going to pretend that I’m on the Two Jerks One Vote podcast and go on an enormous tangent about this question.
In the Song Exploder episode about the Weezer song “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori”, Rivers Cuomo revealed that the song’s title came from when he was at a party and he heard two men talking about how their wives, who were usually pretty tense, became different people when they were relaxed (one, when she had the summer off as a teacher, and the other when she had a bit to drink). He thought that this idea was interesting, and worth putting in a song. I agree! I’d love to hear a song about this idea. But the song “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” is not at all actually about this idea. It doesn’t seem to be about anything at all, really - the lyrics consist of phrases, like the title phrase, that Rivers Cuomo thought sounded cool and would fit into the meter and rhyme scheme of the song.
Your song is not at that level at all, but I do think that “In Madden NFL, there was a very specific play you could execute that was guaranteed to give you a small incremental gain, and if you made that play every single time, you were guaranteed to win but the actual experience of playing would be a joyless slog” is a really compelling idea for a song, and I’m not convinced that you did the work in the lyrics of presenting it to me. But of course, I read the song bio first, so I have no way of knowing what my experience would have been.
Does this reveal a flaw in the way we do SpinTunes? Should I ban song bios, so that if contestants want something about their song to be clear, they have to actually put it in the song? I don’t know! All I know is that for me personally, at this point I want song lyrics to either be opaque enough that each listener can interpret them differently, or clear enough that the songwriter’s specific intentions are unambiguous - but either way, that the songs stands alone without needing external explanation (aside from musical theater or other contexts where the song is intended to be heard as part of a larger work). And I recognize that this can be hard - it’s hard to present all the information the listener needs in the lyrics, and make them rhyme and fit the meter and sound compelling and natural and not like an exposition dump. It’s way easier to stick that info in a song bio, or in a spoken intro at a live show, or in a genius.com annotation.
Back to your song. Putting aside the question that sent me on that tangent, there are some really great, vivid, concrete images in the lyrics. “So I’m banging my head on this wall again / And I loosened up that golden brick / But the room is starting to spin” is a highlight for me. I wonder about the last line of the song, though - “I got you, I hope you call that a win”. Am I, the listener, to infer that the singer’s relationship is another example of taking the easy but unsatisfying route in life? Or is their relationship the one thing that the singer got right? Either way, it feels like too big an idea to tack onto the end of the song.
Musically, your guitar and bass playing is excellent as usual. There are some timing issues with the drums, and the song struggles to settle into a consistent groove, although I do like how the instrumental parts lock in rhythmically during the guitar solo, demonstrating a deliberateness to the musical composition rather than a “let’s just record a bunch of instruments and see what we end up with” approach.
Joy Sitler - Dress-Up
Great match of music and lyrics here - if the music was slower and more introspective, I might say the lyrics would get bogged down in the specific details of the story you’re telling (which, for the purpose of this review, I’m going to treat as a fictional story about fictional characters). As it is, it works well. I might say that the constant splash cymbals feel a little like cheating - a quick way to try to boost the energy level that’s not quite matched in the vocal performance or the rest of the instrumental. But that’s a minor complaint.
The vocal delivery is good and the lyrics all flow nicely, except for “About your identity and how you show your emotions” which you seem to be tripping over due to the extra syllables.
Aside from cleaning up the rhythm of that “About your identity” line, there is one other lyric change I would make for story-telling purposes (again, treating this as a fictional story). In the beginning you say “she didn’t like cards and I didn’t like Twister”, and you end with “Sometimes I wish that we’d just played cards” - we seem to end by blaming the sister for the narrator’s relationship to clothing (“If we had just done what I wanted to do…”), which I don’t think is the intent of the song. Changing the earlier line to “I didn’t like cards and she didn’t like Twister” would side-step this and put the focus back on the narrator’s own decisions and motivation.
This Big Old Endless Sky - I Love a Sunburnt Country
The abrasive sound of the instrumental and vocal combine with the vivid descriptive language of the lyrics to very effectively portray the dry heat of the Australian summer and, it seems, the desperation that accompanies it. “like rust chokes a chain / we’re all choking for rain” and “the dry grass is cracking / under our feet / like our dead coral reef” are great lines.
I won’t tell you that I’d rather you have sung the vocals than shouted them; if you agreed, you would have! I think you achieved exactly what you wanted to achieve for this song. Good on ya, mate.
The Pannacotta Army - Covfefe
A political critique that’s more playful than scathing, this is a clever take on the challenge by imagining a game of Scrabble with a certain someone, which goes about how you’d expect given both his propensity for ignoring the rules and his grasp of the English language.
Musically, this is very laid-back… maybe too laid-back. The verses are twice as long as they need to be, given that each line of vocals is followed by an equal-length line of… not much interesting happening. The choruses are similar, but it works better in the chorus where the vocals are punctuated by the whistle-y synth and great palm-muted guitar riff. The instrumental intro is also twice as long as it needs to be. These feel like somewhat minor complaints given how sonically pleasant the song is, but my attention does tend to wander while listening.
Jim Tyrrell - Game Over
Here’s the first of several songs this round that take the approach of a rapid-fire stream of references to multiple different games to metaphorically describe a romantic situation. The first stanza sets a high bar, with the lyric “The pink pegs are gone, now I’ve got to go on / With just the blues” being a master-stroke of layered meanings.
The rest of the lyrics are a bit of a mixed bag that could do with some editing - for instance, “I can’t play Operation, there’s no water on the knee” doesn’t make much sense to me as actual water on the knee is a bad thing, which you should be happy is gone. Like, I get that she’s taken a game piece so you can’t play the game properly, but there’s no extra layer of meaning that’s consistent with the overall theme.
I know that circumstances outside your control meant you couldn’t give this song a fleshed-out arrangement, but your bare-bones guitar and vocal recording captures the emotion of the song quite well. I suspect this song would do very well in a live context, and I hope it makes it into your gigging repertoire.
Stacking Theory - Andrew Management Issues
This song elicits some of the same thoughts in me as West of Vine’s entry “Easy Modes & Cheat Codes”, so I’ll encourage you to read that review rather than reiterating those thoughts. But the tl;dr is: your song bio is doing a lot of work to explain what’s going on in this song, and I encourage you to consider how much of that info you might be able to (or want to) include in the song, and how, to make the lyrics coherent without outside explanation.
Alternatively, you could instead choose to focus on the most emotionally evocative or compelling part of the lyrics (for me, that’d be basically the second half of the song, starting with “did you see the sun rise”) and build the song around supporting that emotional core, stripping away any lyrical details that make someone who’s not reading the song bio say “Wait, what the heck is this song supposed to be about?” and letting them fill in the gaps with whatever story or context they want.
Musically, it’s lovely. The pedal steel is indeed used to great effect. The overall effect is somewhat soporific, with little dynamic variation over an almost four-minute runtime.
We Happy Few - Playing Games
Welcome to SpinTunes!
This is some fun garage rock. The band is tight, the vocal performance is good and the contrast between verses and choruses is great, with the energy rising and falling in really satisfying ways. I bet this would be a lot of fun to hear live.
The story in the lyrics is clear enough, but there’s little surprising or original in your turns of phrases, and at times it feels like you’re settling for whatever lyric makes the rhyme easiest. And the overall idea is “playing games” but then you have lines like “try to keep up, but I’m losing the beat”, which suggests a music metaphor, and “The curtain’s coming down, but you won’t let it go”, which suggests a theater metaphor.
David Taro - The Hardest Game
Welcome to SpinTunes!
This is my favorite, I think, of the “laundry list of games” approach to the challenge. In this case, your expertise at various games contrasts with your difficulties in the game of love. I’m a sucker for a complex rhyme scheme executed consistently, so your AAB CCB scheme in the verses just tickles me.
The delightful guitar licks, delicious backing vocals and toe-tapping energy, along with the compelling and memorable lyrics, make up for a somewhat unremarkable melody.
I interpret this as a happy song; the narrator’s feeling that “love is the hardest game of them all” is not because he’s failing at love, but because he’s so hopelessly in love that he doesn’t feel in control; he’s helpless in the face of his beloved’s charms. Let’s hope his beloved feels the same way.
The Moon Bureau - Carcassonne, and On, and On
The connection between the board game and the unrequited love story is… tenuous at best. But I’m a Carcassonne fan, and the song doesn’t overstay its welcome or take itself too seriously, so I don’t really mind.
I like how you keep things tight by forgoing an instrumental introduction and by cutting the second verse in half. The guitars are too loud and the vocal is too muddy, but the lovely melodic bass playing and the pizzicato string interlude keep the music engaging. The chorus hook is memorable and at a lean 2:04 the song invites repeated listening.
Jealous Brother - Kings in the Corner
Musically, this is another example of your consistently well-crafted, well-executed brand of country rock. The performance and recording are impeccable as usual.
I like the double meaning of “Kings in the Corner” as well as the lyrics “But none of it matters when the dealer is corrupt” and “But nobody wins by hoarding cards, you have to lay them down” I’m not sure, though, that the central metaphor is served by getting into the details of the gameplay in the verses. I think you could get some mileage out of the fact that the kings end up on the bottom of the stack rather than the top, but the opening lines about dealing seven cards, draw pile in the middle, etc. feel tedious.
The stress pattern feels odd in the first line of the chorus, “It's time to put kings in the corner”. I’d recommend making “put” a pick-up note so that “kings” lands on the downbeat and is twice as long: “Let’s put kings in the corner”. “Kings” is the salient word in the line and I hate to hear it jammed into an offbeat.
▷ - Golden Child
Your usual brand of delightful weirdness is fully on display. I’d never heard of the game Golden Child, and upon looking it up I find the rules to be needlessly complex for a kid’s gym game, and I’m still not convinced I entirely understand it. But who cares? The interjections of “Golden child!” are fantastic, the boodly-boodly lead synth lines are tasty, the beat is infectious, and I think it’s the right choice to keep the energy level pretty darn high throughout the song. I like the spoken interjections throughout, but I think the ending skit does not improve the song to any measurable degree.
Brian Gray - Hide and Seek
Here’s another song [see my review of West Of Vine’s “Easy Modes and Cheat Codes” for the relevant essay] where the song bio is absolutely necessary for understanding what you’re “really” singing about. In this case, there’s nothing in the lyrics to indicate that this song is about dolphins and not about humans, other than the name Fungie (in which case you still need to be familiar with the actual story, which I wasn’t).
In this case, though, I think the song holds up perfectly well as a song about a missing child and a brother holding out hope that he’ll return. It seems to be set in some kind of dreamlike past, before entire countries would mobilize to find a missing child. But the story is coherent enough, and plenty emotionally resonant. The question to ask yourself is whether you’re fine with people hearing the song and reacting to it emotionally without having any idea that it’s about a dolphin. If you are, great! If not… Lucy, you got some ‘sposition to do!
Now as for the music… compositionally, it’s lovely. Production-wise, you do an admiral job of pretending to be an entire Irish trad band, given that you are not in fact an entire Irish trad band. The effect you’re going for comes across, but I’d rather hear actual acoustic instruments, even just the ones you actually know how to play, than simulacra.
Hot Pink Halo - A Numbers Game
I wish this song worked for me. Musically, too much time is spent with not much prominent instrumentation other than a pretty oppressively repetitive drum loop. The vocal harmony in the “Look up! Look up!” section and the electric guitar that comes in soon after provide a very welcome change of pace, but I need things to switch up a lot earlier.
To be fair, that vocal harmony is really cool. The combination of 1. the backing vocals which are either very carefully and precisely sung or (I suspect [with no shade intended]) heavily pitch-corrected, and also treated with generous reverb with 2. the more naturalist lead vocal is a combo that works quite well and I’d be happy to hear it deployed more extensively.
The significance of the title is a mystery to me, and its appearance in the lyrics doesn’t really line up with either my intuitive understanding of the term “a numbers game”, or anything that shows up in a Google search, or my recollection of any specific part of Alice in Wonderland. And in general, the lyrics of this song feel more like a collection of Alice references than a coherent whole.
chewmeupspitmeout - Bored Games
You have a knack for writing really simple choruses that worm their way into my head and refuse to leave (“Hurricane” from ST22 also comes to mind). I like this song a lot! I like the main guitar riff. I like the vocal melody of the verses. I like how the instrumental section at first seems like it’s an entirely new, completely different thing and then reveals itself to be the chorus in disguise. Your voice sounds great too, especially when you go up high at the end of the verse. My only (small) complaint is that I wish the overall sound was a little less clean, a little grungier and rawer.
Vehicles of Beware - The Gambler
Welcome to SpinTunes!
The lyrics are the highlight of this song for me; I like how you narrate the gambler’s fall from darling of the house to penniless pariah with rich, detailed language but also matter-of-factly without judgment.
Musically, this doesn’t quite keep my interest over the four-minute-plus runtime. The bridge and guitar solo are welcome diversions, but there’s a lot of vamping (the instrumental intro is at least twice as long as it needs to be) and the chorus kills the energy with a repetitive vocal melody that feels wooden compared to the expressive vocals of the verses. Still, I can’t deny the talent on display here.
The Dutch Widows - The loneliness of the third choice goalkeeper
This is a great example of a song about a very specific phenomenon that doesn’t need any outside explanation to understand. The song bio simply serves as a confirmation of what’s already made clear in the lyrics. The flip side may be that some of the lyrics come off as clunky or over-expository, or are occasionally awkwardly delivered (I’m looking at you, “syndrome”).
But look, man, I’m a Dutch Widows fan. Your melodic, harmonic, production, and arrangement choices just scratch a little itch in my brain and it feels so good.
Celestial Drift - Jigsaw
This song answers the age-old question: “What if the plot of Saw was retold in the form of an old-time waltz?” The instrumental solo is nice, but otherwise the music is low-energy and somewhat mechanical, which I wouldn’t mind if the lyrics really dug into the psychology of the Jigsaw Killer or his victims, or if they presented a novel perspective on the movie, or if they included actual jokes. Instead, the lyrics simply summarize the movie’s plot and setting without any insight or humor of their own - which I wouldn't mind if the music were more energetic, emotional or otherwise compelling.
Siebass - The Least Dangerous Game
This is a lot of fun - the musical style is perfect for describing your middle school gaming habits. The music is dead simple but you keep the interest up by bringing the guitar in and out, throwing in some tasty drum fills and introducing some new material in the bridge.
I didn’t recognize the specific musical quotes in the guitar solo, but it did seem vaguely video-gamey. It’s a fun idea but I don’t think you nailed the execution as some of it comes off as random noodling.
Your vocal performance is good - in the past I have cringed at your tendency to slide downward in pitch on the last notes of phrases, which has seemed like a stylistic choice made to cover up insecurity about technique. But you don’t do that here. So thank you!
SunLite - No Fun!
Is the organ intro supposed to represent some video game sound effect or something? Because it seems out of place in the tasty pop-punk song that it kicks off. Anyway, once the organ is out of the way, the electric guitar is a delight to listen to - very nice tone, and I appreciate that the riff is subtly different when it’s repeated (maybe just the penultimate note is different? In any case it’s a nice touch).
I love me a nice I V IV progression, and I appreciate that you build energy from section to section by layering more vocal harmonies and instruments, but I wish there was more variation between the verse and the chorus, which have the same chord progression, same basic melodic shape, and the same lyrical stress pattern and rhyme scheme.
The key change at the end is a nice touch - putting it after an extended instrumental section means I had to rewind to make sure we were actually in a new key, and it avoided the “we’re out of ideas so let’s just bump it up a whole step” effect.
Lyrically, you take a similar approach to a few other entrants this round, using metaphors from multiple different games to describe a relationship’s failure. “It’s clubs instead of hearts” and “We’ve both built our largest armies / Instead of longest roads” stand out to me as especially clever. Overall, this is a really nice listen; I just wish, as stated above, that there was more variation between verse and chorus.
Sober - Blue Shells
This is musically very solid with some great playing in it, and great vocal delivery on the choruses. The hoarseness of the verse vocals make it seem like you’re trying for an energy level higher than what the pitch and volume allow, whereas in the big soaring chorus that energy comes naturally.
The inconsistent syllable stress in “Luigi” makes my eye twitch. With the stress on the final syllable it sounds like “Louie G.”, although I get that it makes rhyming a whole lot easier.
Overall the treatment of the two layers of meaning is well done, although I don’t love the final line “Banking blue shells with three words that start with D” - I get that it’s a signal of the “hidden” message of the song for anyone who might not have gotten it, but the awkward phrase “three words that start with D” doesn’t have any of the rhetorical punch of the actual three words that start with D, and comes across as an attempt to side-step the question of “do I keep the facade or do I make the actual subject matter explicit?” by winking at the hidden meaning while maintaining a little bit of plausible deniability.
“Fourty-Two” - Tarot Cards
Welcome to SpinTunes!
Your voice, guitar playing, and the understated percussion are all lovely and work together to create a pleasant, somewhat dreamlike vibe that you maintain throughout the song. The bridge is a nice change-up musically; I’d love to hear you explore even ways to create more musical contrast between the verses and choruses, to give more variety over the 4:35 runtime.
I’d also encourage you to develop your lyrics so they are less abstract, and more concrete. To illustrate what I mean, you open Verse 2 with “I’ve come to realize that the world comes down to perception / And we’re all bad at just expressing our thoughts”, followed by “Cause I’m no divinations expert at all / But I can guess and guess til I’ve got you pinned with string to the wall”. The first lyric makes a claim but it’s abstract; it doesn’t have any sensory or physical image attached to it. It’s just an idea. The second lyric, though, features a great concrete image in “til I’ve got you pinned with string to the wall”. This illustrates the idea (although in this case, one might debate how well this image illustrates that idea).
Of course, you do have the central concrete image of dealing a tarot deck in the chorus and pre-chorus, but the verses tend to stray from it into more abstract territory. You can make abstract claims in your lyrics, but they should be balanced and grounded by concrete imagery to help your audience have something to grab onto as they listen.
Tunes By LJ - Showdown
I don’t play poker, I don’t know much about poker, all I know is that the narrator is pretty confident in his abilities. Give me a tight AABCCB rhyme scheme, some smooth falsetto, and dynamic, energetic instrumentation and I find myself not caring what the hell “I can smell a worm in this cassoulet” means.
Easy to imagine this song playing in an Ocean’s movie over a montage of the heroes casing the casino they’re about to rob. Really fun stuff!
Governing Dynamics - Falling For Maybe
We gotta press this as a double A-side with Vehicles of Beware’s “The Gambler” - two very different songs about gambling addiction. I’m used to having to very carefully parse your turns of phrase in order to figure out what your songs are actually about (and I usually can get there, eventually). But this time the subject matter is pretty clear, even with your tendency to write about the space around your topic rather than the topic itself (non-derogatory). Maybe my only real concern with the lyrics is the bridge
Musically, this is of course right in your wheelhouse. I like how you use irregular phrase lengths in the verse to keep up on our toes, with the third and sixth lines being three measures rather than four. The guitar harmonics in the introduction are great, and I wouldn’t mind hearing some more of that sound throughout the rest of the song.
The energy builds from verse to pre-chorus but stays flat or even dips from pre-chorus to chorus. It sort of feels like the “real” chorus is the brief instrumental after the chorus. I wish the vocal chorus was bigger in some way than the pre-chorus: higher vocal register, extra instrumentation, something.
The bridge is the weakest part of the song, I think: musically, the vocal melody is confusing (and I’m not convinced you’ve completely taught yourself how to sing it properly), and lyrically it’s all abstractions, and doesn’t say anything that isn’t already said more effectively with the help of concrete imagery elsewhere in the song.
Pigfarmer Jr - Hangman
I really like how you mix acoustic and electric guitars to get a thick, heavy rock sound. Your voice sounds great too. The melody feels natural and you sing it well, but it also feels pretty safe - I’d love to hear you try for more larger vocal leaps and less stepwise motion.
Lyrically, the metaphor seems to be that the hangman is the guy who the girl takes advantage of, takes for granted, and comes to when she needs something, but she doesn’t really care about him. I’m not completely convinced the metaphor hangs together (heh), but it works on vibes, and the vocal and instrumental performance make the emotion clear.
Dog Star Pilot - Some Kind Of Pawn
Welcome (to most of you) to SpinTunes!
This song is delightful. The story is so weird but you tell it well; the surreal image of various mismatched game pieces descending on the chessboard is great, and I can’t help but root for the little pawn striking out on his own for a new life away from the chessboard.
I like the patter rhythm, but it could do with some variety by the end of the song; the bridge introduces some new harmonic ideas and would be a good opportunity for new rhythmic ideas as well.
Boffo Yux Dudes - Fizzbin, Fizzbin
This is certainly charming. I’m not a big Star Trek guy so this was all new to me, but I looked up the rules to Fizzbin and sure enough, you got it.
The trap that it’s so easy to fall into with this kind of song is to figure that, if people are fond of the subject matter, you just have to make a bunch of references to it and hey presto, they’ll love your song too. Indeed, this song doesn’t really have any kind of insight or commentary on the game of Fizzbin, the episode it appears in, or Star Trek as a whole. It’s just a summary of the episode and an “explanation” of the rules of the game. Like I said, it’s charming musically, which does help a lot. But this is not the kind of song I tend to come back to much for repeated listens.
Ominous Ride - Hide and Seek
I reject your disclaimer about this song; to my ears it meets the standard I expect and enjoy from an Ominous Ride song. You’re really good at creating an atmosphere and a texture that I happen to really enjoy. It’s all in your vocal doubling, the electric guitar, and those bouncy synth arpeggios. The only sonic element that I don’t think works in this song is the piano that comes in late in the song; it sounds dull, artificial, and doesn’t add much musically.
This is great lyrically, too. The central idea is perfectly clear: how a parent-child relationship changes as they both get older, with the literal game of hide and seek giving way to a metaphorical one where they fail to connect emotionally like they did before. It might come across as hackneyed with a different musical treatment, but the atmosphere you create musically perfectly supports the emotional content of the lyrics. Good stuff.
Dream Bells - Roses
I’m not sure how obvious the connection to “Ring Around the Rosie” would be without the song bio, but I think the song holds up just fine either way, and the essential memento mori message is perfectly clear. The light, airy music also helps the bleakness of the lyrics go down easier.
The only aspect of the music I’d suggest changing is to add more variation to the drums - the “doom doom chuck digga digga doom chuck” beat grows oppressive after a while with so little variation.
Möbius Strip Club - To Victory or to Glory
Welcome to SpinTunes! (I know one of you has been around a while, of course.)
I’m struggling with the title - victory and glory are placed against each other with the word “or”. Does glory mean you’re dead? Like a martyr’s glory? Because otherwise, victory seems to imply glory coming along with it, so “and” would be more appropriate. But “glory=death” is not the immediately obvious interpretation for me, so it’s confusing either way.
The feel of the song is very Ren Faire, which I’m not opposed to at all, although I wish there was some more variation in the energy level, and more variety in the guitar strumming pattern. Also the drums could be much louder. The vocals are great; you know I’m gonna love it when you do the canon at the end, just make sure the rhythm is tight!
Flintsteel - Tarnished
I came to this song with no knowledge of Elden Ring whatsoever, but the glimpses of plot I get from these lyrics (disgraced warrior, world in chaos, chance at redemption, mortals vs. gods, etc, etc) sure seem epic enough to fit your musical style perfectly. You do the thing you do very well here, and I don’t think I have any useful feedback for improvement. Rock on!
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