These songs were just altogether extremely good. Like, almost worryingly good. This round, you embraced the challenge in fun and surprising ways and the result was a batch of songs that was just a delight to listen to.
Read on for my thoughts on your songs!
gammammannn - Collided
This song has a brilliant concept and is chock-full of harmonic surprises and your trademark delightful bleep-bloops. I think it suffers from being too ambitious, and the vocals are so buried that the story is hard to follow, which is a shame because there are some great lines, like "Planetary dysphoria is slowly wearing thinner every year".
glennny - Mottainai (What a Waste!)
Your electric guitar playing and tone are of course always terrific, but in this song it's your acoustic guitar that captures my attention - the layered acoustic riffs and harmonics that open the song sound great. I also love the vibe of the opening of the first verse at 0:41 with some tasty strummed acoustic, such that I'm a little disappointed when the electrics come in almost immediately at 0:48. Let things breathe a little bit! In a four-minute song you have plenty of time to enjoy a calmer atmosphere in parts and also rock out in other parts.
Your vocals sound terrific on this song, both the lead vocals and particularly the falsetto backing vocals on "fold it up" and "thinking of" in the later chorus.
Wendy Wiseman Fisher - Falls Red With You
The chorus of this song is so good - that swing to the relative major is an old trick but it's just so, so satisfying, and the climb up to the C# on "every" is a wonderfully dramatic way to pull the song back to D minor.
Musically, the rest of the song is not as satisfying. In particular, the bridge ("You turn your back", etc.) feels clumsy, like it was written to fulfill the challenge in as many ways as possible rather than to be satisfying or natural to sing or listen to. It doesn't help that the text setting is really weird, particularly on "Your boots grind into dust", where the syllable placement onto the melody seems entirely arbitrary.
I should say that the moment when you get into the bridge, with the staggered vocal layers of long notes, is really cool.
OutLyer - Dive In
I love the dark, moody atmosphere you create at the beginning of the song with the sustained piano chords and your soulful voice. It helps that "Don’t know the body that I’m haunting" is one of the best single lyrics in this round.
In a different context, I wouldn't mind the drums and arpeggiated synth that come in at 0:44, but they make such a contrast with the atmosphere you've created earlier that they strike me as cheesy and pull me out of the song. I get that they help illustrate the line "Life is too happy to miss" and the overall message of the song, but I think I'd prefer a less jarring build-up.
David Taro - Something About Her
The Randy Newman comparisons will continue for the foreseeable future! In seriousness, this is a lovely, charming song and a masterful execution of the challenge. The instrumental section with the piano's tastefully ornamented melody and the warm string pad is just great.
The song's main weakness is simply that it plays things a little too safe, both lyrically and musically. This song doesn't do much to distinguish itself from the many songs it's drawing influence from. To preview some terminology from my review of SEE/MAN/SKI farther down, you didn't make a lot of Choices.
On a technical level, the one lyric I don't like is "A chord not in the tonic key". It strikes me as awkward, I think in part because of the word choice of "not in" instead of "outside" or something, which feels weird grammatically in a way I have trouble explaining, and also because "not" is set on a tiny unstressed syllable and there's simply not enough time to give the word the emphasis it wants while fitting in the weird consonant cluster that results from the d of "chord" followed by the n of "not".
Hot Pink Halo - Borrowed Time
Your piano playing keeps leveling up! The mellotron is super sweet as well; when you prominently feature two keyboard instruments there's always the risk that they'll just step on each other's toes, but you balance them very well in this song. And your backing vocals are gorgeous, particularly on the word "climb".
Knowing that this is based on a book I haven't read, I've switched my lyrics brain from analysis mode to vibes mode. The vibes are good.
SEE/MAN/SKI - Melton Mowbray
This song is a terrific execution of a principle that I have to constantly remind myself of, namely: make Choices. Nothing about the genre conventions you're working in demanded that you stretch out "Mobray" over four measures with a vocal trill. That was a Choice! And it makes the song!
The rest of the song is charming, has some nice details about your hometown, and is performed and produced well. But it's that chorus that sticks in my head instantly. Delightful stuff.
Good Guy Sôjàbé - Whatever, I’m Not Precious
I've heard a lot of Good Guy Sôjàbé songs and enjoyed most all of them. This one is probably my favorite.
The A - Dm progression in the verse feels more like it's in an altered A major with a flat 6th than in C with a secondary dominant, but I'm not mad about it because it makes the harmonic swing into the chorus that much more effective. And what a chorus it is! That vocal melody tracing arpeggios, the little ornament on "heart". Beautiful. And throughout the song, the music has this tired, resigned feeling to it that perfectly suits the lyrics.
My only complaint is with the end of the verse, where you have a pause after "Is this what you dreamt of when you / Were...", then "younger" comes as an anticlimax. I'm not sure if it's the word choice itself, the pause, the pitch contour on "younger" wanting a few more syllables to round out the phrase, or what, but it feels limp. And the second chorus with "it’s not “now”... it’s “never” has the same issue.
The Pannacotta Army - Jean-Paul
There's charm for days here, musically and lyrically. Your use of secondary dominants is perfectly in line with this arch, sardonic style. If anything, I'd encourage you to put in more actual jokes to put this more squarely in the style of comic song that it feels adjacent to.
There are some unnatural syllable/word stress moments that normally I would be foaming at the mouth about (the last syllable of "easy" in "that sounds too easy"; "your" in "let your guard slip"; the first syllable of "about" in "You know all there is about the mind", etc.), but in this case the artifice is baked into the genre so I'm inclined to let it slide. If Flanders and Swann can rhyme "hippopotamus" with "ignoramus", I'll give you a pass.
Huge Shark - Wanting a Letter
The "you're not getting in" section is terrific. The rest of the song is pretty darn good too; I really like the quick secondary dominant chord changes in the chorus. And that saxophone is awfully tasty. Good work all around.
Boo Lee Crosser - As often as I’d like
What does "With a penance for playing my guitar" mean? Do you mean a penchant for playing your guitar... or as penance for playing your guitar?
Okay, now that that's out of the way, this is lovely. The tune doesn't really stick in my head when I'm not listening, but when I am listening, I'm moved by the weary, resigned feel of both the lyrics and the music, which are perfectly suited for each other.
Governing Dynamics - Demolisher
My favorite Governing Dynamics sub-genre is up-tempo fuzz-covered blistering but oblique critique of tech-bros' latest golden calf. This is a fine addition to the canon. Love the energy, love the guitars, love the vocal delivery.
The overlapping vocal lines is a cool effect, except at the very beginning where the lines don't actually overlap but it's clear they're two different takes, so it just sounds like careless editing rather than an intentional choice.
This Big Old Endless Sky - Sunshine / Abyss
One thing I love about this challenge is that each contestant adopted it as a new tool to fit within their existing harmonic language, rather than completely reinventing their own writing style. In your case, your harmonic language is a diatonic, I-IV-V modified blues progression with slow harmonic tempo (rate at which chords change). In this context, trying for the urbane, sophisticated use of secondary dominants that, e.g. David Taro or The Pannacotta Army went for this round, wouldn't make any sense.
Instead, the borrowed chord comes at the bridge and serves as an extended moment of ramped up tension before returning to the more familiar harmony. It's a perfectly timed something new before returning to the familiar (in other words, a bridge).
It's great. This whole song is great.
chewmeupspitmeout - the house i build wouldn't hold
This song has a terrific sense of shape to it; there's lots of variation in instrumentation but it never feels like things are just changing arbitrarily. The sad organ chords, the guitar riff at 0:53, the change in vocal register from one section to the next, it all sounds great. And I love that the "real" chorus is saved for the very end of the song.
The lyrics are good too; your central metaphor of "relationship = house" is one that has certainly been used before but you treat it consistently and interestingly throughout. My only real complaint is that the "Xanadu" bridge is a bit overwrought both lyrically and musically.
This song really works for me; thanks for making it!
Jealous Brother - Under the Waves
These lyrics are certainly more abstract than in your Round 1 entry, but the issues that plagued your Round 1 lyrics on the mechanical level of rhyme and scansion are nowhere to be found here, so thank you!
"Either way she'll sing a song you love" is a great lyrical and melodic hook; a shame you couldn't save it for next round!
My comments in my review of SEE/MAN/SKI's song, about making musical Choices, are relevant here. At some point you made the Choice to fill the song with hammer-on trills from the lead guitar. Do you go overboard with it? Maybe just a bit, but it's better to make the Choice and commit to it than to stay comfortably within the default parameters of whatever genre you're working within.
The Alleviators - A Start
You two are on a roll this tournament. This is a gorgeous song, gorgeously performed. Make sure Sara Bareilles doesn't steal it for her next Broadway musical. The orchestral elements are very tastefully done, the vocal melodies are lovely. I'm obsessed with the transition at 1:50 and the expressive moments like Beka's little chuckle at 2:13. I really don't have anything bad to say about this song!
☀️bucket - Shoot Me
Your chorus is fiendishly catchy, which is rhetorically smart for a polemical song like this - just like a comedian doing political material can say "If you're laughing, that must mean you agree with me", you can say "If my chorus is stuck in your head, that must mean you agree with me".
The verse lyrics are dripping with sarcasm; a highlight for me is "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words are literally violence / If you follow that thought to its logical conclusion then a bullet is a fair trade for silence", although "logical conclusion" is clunky both for having a few too many syllables and being overly formal-sounding.
All the harmonic stuff you're doing in the verses is interesting to read about, but given that it's drenched in fuzz and used as the backing for a shouted, rather than sung, vocal, it doesn't really have much bearing on my actual experience of listening to the song.
Bob Voyg - The Navigator
This is lovely, I'm obsessed with the bass walk-down, and the rest of the instrumental is great too. Similar to Hot Pink Halo's entry, knowing this is based on a book I haven't read means I'm not going to work too hard at deciphering every line, and instead just enjoy the vibes. And also like her entry, the vibes are good.
Möbius Strip Club - It Feels So Good
This is so charming. I love the 60s throwback chorus and the vocal harmony. My favorite part of the lyrics is in the bridge when you include a metaphor drawn from each season of the year.
The handclaps sound like they were recorded in a completely different space from everything else. Too much reverb and too forward in the mix. I myself have no idea how to record and mix handclaps so they actually sound good, so I don't have any actionable advice for improvement.
Sober - I Didn’t Leave Texas
Musically, this is a great song with a classic country feel; your steel playing is terrific and your voice sounds lovely.
"I didn’t leave Texas / Texas left me" is a great, compelling lyrical hook, but its rhetorical power is diminished when you sing "But I left it behind and I’d do it again" and "It’s worth all the pain / Of breaking the chain / To leave it behind". You undercut your own argument when you use the exact language in the verses that you refute in the chorus.
Flintsteel - Last of Your Name
I like the lighter piano-based texture of the intro, but it's never revisited in the rest of the song, which seems like a missed opportunity to create a more interesting overall shape to the song.
Even so, there is some shape to this song, and it's certainly a fun ride.
Shadows
Every single shadow entry is simply gorgeous. Every single one.
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