ST26 R3 Reviews - Micah Sommersmith

This batch of songs took a little while to grow on me; I think they suffered at first in comparison to Round 2, in which the melisma challenge was basically a cheat code for catchy melodies. But once I got past that, the brilliance of these songs started revealing themselves to me. I don’t have any rankings to justify, so instead my reviews are attempts to pull out some of the most distinctive features of each song, and in some cases, to generalize them into some basic principles of good songwriting. So I invite you to read the reviews of your fellow contestants’ songs; there might be something there for you to chew on too. Read on for my reviews!

miscellaneous owl - Writ in Water

I want to zero in on some lyric writing in this song that I think is particularly effective, and tease out some general principles from it, which may be useful to any other contestants who might be reading this review. Let’s examine this stanza:

You ride your bike to Griffy Lake

Where bluegill gleam like dimes

And all the wishes you could make

All have to do with time

The first half (lines 1 and 2) is physical, visual, and action-oriented. The second half (lines 3 and 4) are introspective and emotional. In isolation, the first half could seem dry and pedestrian, and the second half could seem vague and theoretical. But together they unite concrete imagery with clear emotion to make something powerful. And the ABAB rhyme scheme ties the two halves together even stronger with the double rhymes (Lake/make and dimes/time) in a way that an AABB rhyme scheme wouldn’t. Because the songwriter had to conceive of the two halves together in order to make the rhyme work, it creates an even stronger impression that this is one cohesive unit that includes both sensory and emotional content. That’s good songwriting! 

As a bonus, the lyrics flow naturally and smoothly, seeming to fit in the iambic pattern merely by coincidence, in contrast to several songs in this round with unnatural word order or awkward word choices. In this and the other CM stanzas, it never seems like you are settling on a less-than-ideal word choice or grammatical construction in order to fulfill the challenge (except for maybe the repetition of “all” in lines 3 and 4).

I don’t think the song necessarily needs more musical elements than the voice and guitar, but the instrumental sections between verses do feel like you’re just killing time until it’s time to sing again.

The Moon Bureau - Passion Is a Knife

Is this the meanest song we’ve heard from the Moon Bureau? I dig the bitterness, as it comes from a conflict that feels real and accessible. The central conflict between the characters is laid out clearly, in lyrics that fulfill the challenge neatly and naturally (and throughout the whole song!). The biggest weakness of this song is simply that the melody is unmemorable and repetitive. The stabs on “knife” and “heart” are the closest thing we get to a hook, and they’re the best part of the song.

Nathan Joe Long - Pocket Watch

The emotion of this song comes through very clearly, and the relentless sound of the pocket watch makes for a great sonic anchor to the song.

In contrast to some entries in this round where the lyrics flow naturally and seem to meet the challenge only by coincidence, there are some lines in your song that it’s very clear you wouldn’t have written without the constraint of the meter: “A solemn vow that's spoken true”, “Till heavy hands did fall”, etc. I suppose this sort of fits with the content of the song, if the CM stanzas represent the rigid expectations of the narrator’s family, and the freer meter of the chorus represents the narrator’s own desires (supported by the fact that the tick of the pocket watch disappears by the end of the song). But also those lines sound weird and I don’t like them.

Ironbark - Where It Hurts

Here’s a song in which the lyrics flow perfectly naturally, without any telltale signs like inverted word order to suggest that you’re fighting to fit the prescribed meter. In your song you use the CM stanzas to tell the story and present the visuals, and the contrasting middle section to explicitly name the emotion behind the story. This is in contrast to miscellaneous owl’s song “Writ in Water” in which the visuals and the emotions are neatly tied together within individual stanzas (see my review of her song for more), but this approach works just as well for the “this song is about this thing but it’s really about this other thing” effect.

Arrangement-wise, there is a lovely gradual sense of build throughout the song, although the strummed guitar that forms the rhythmic backbone of the song feels harsh and jerky in this setting; I wonder if finger-picked arpeggios would be more effective for the mood I think you want.

We get a nice little taste of modal mixture at 0:50, a trick of yours I’ve been on the lookout for since “Bit By Bit” from SpinTunes 20. I’m not sure if the sung word “where” at 1:39 is something similar or if you just briefly lost control of your pitch. A tiny thing that stuck out.

Best Dad in Yorkshire - Home

I like the quiet atmosphere of this song, especially in the instrumental middle section. The interplay between piano and guitars is really lovely. The children’s voices in the background are a nice touch and tug ever-so-gently on the heartstrings.

The lyrics are well-done, clear, and mostly natural-sounding; there’s maybe a tiny sense of struggling against the constraints of the challenge with an awkward line or two like “the train delays push back my haste” but it’s nothing major. The biggest flaw of the song is that the vocal melody feels like an afterthought; you put a lot of care into an instrumental arrangement that rises and falls in satisfying ways, and then you have a vocal that, aside from the contrasting middle section, seems to stick to just a couple notes.

Carrie Spillane - Dystopian Pentameter

Adhering to a strict meter like this can sometimes make your lyrics feel stiff and robotic, it’s true. Here you’ve made the clear choice to lean into it. The rigid poetry of the CM stanzas is reinforced by a herky-jerk melody that emphasizes the artificiality of the AI narrator, and contrasts with the snippets of clearly human songs throughout (although I might point out that “Do you wanna build a snowman” is just as rigidly metrical, albeit trochaic rather than iambic).

This is a song in which every compositional choice is clearly in service of a well-thought-out central idea, but those same compositional choices (the repetition, the herky-jerk lead vocal, the pounding percussion) also make it difficult to enjoy as a listening experience, especially on repeated listens.

Stacking Theory - Losing Steam

For the first few listens, I heard the chorus as “I can't find the home to hang my hat on baby”, which I thought was a nifty play on the expression “Home is where you hang your hat”. Your actual lyric is pretty good too though.

In fact the lyrics are pretty good on the whole - certainly you meet the challenge naturally and avoid the grammatical pitfalls it’s easy to fall into when operating strictly within a specific meter. But it feels like you’re only halfway committed to the steam train metaphor. Certainly the second and third challenge-fulfilling stanzas are all-in; they literally describe an idle steam engine and empty railroad tracks, respectively. But the first stanza is very clearly about a human being with human emotions (and eyes). I want you to stick with the steam train for the verses, and let the chorus be the place where you reveal what the song is actually about.

Cheslain - Devil By The Horn

Fans of Tom Waits are in for a treat. The arrangement is impeccable and I’m sure you had a blast recording this. To me, though, this feels like such a clear and blatant pastiche that your own voice doesn’t come through.

From a story-telling perspective, the pacing feels off; you devote a full three stanzas to the narrator killing his father, then provide just one more example of killing another deserving victim in stanza 4 before generalizing an undefined “blur” of victims in stanza 5. Compressing the first killing to two stanzas, and then providing two separate additional examples in stanzas 3 and 4, I think would do better to concretely tell the story. Or even something like this in stanza 5:

i've lost track since how much i've killed

it's all a hazy blur

a righteous cause, my cellar filled

with pimps and usurers

Without more specific examples of the kinds of people the narrator is killing, his righteousness feels hollow and he comes across to me as no better than his victims. Maybe that’s your intention, in which case there would be ways to make his hypocrisy come across more explicitly as well. Either way, in a storytelling song like this, especially one with a strict poetic meter, one should always be looking for ways to make each syllable count and to most efficiently pack in more details, more details, more details.

Ominous Ride - I Am Iamb

I thought your R2 song was great, so I’m glad you’re back in the contest. Your day job is as an English professor, if I remember correctly, in which case I shouldn't be too surprised that you've crafted lyrics that meet the challenge with aplomb while also being about the challenge, filled with sly references to poetic techniques and analysis. 

The trouble, of course, is that if this is the only level that the lyrics are operating on, they’re bound to suffer in comparison with many other songs this round that dig for something deeper. In fact, this stanza seems to explicitly reject the notion that this song is a metaphor for a real person’s real emotional state:

Perhaps you think that therapy

Will help these troubled times

But no, my plague is poetry

A meter seeking rhyme

I enjoy the melody you’ve crafted; the verse melody has a great, memorable contour, and the chorus starts off with that long “I” which provides an excellent contrast with the more regular rhythm of the verses.

David Taro - Love Won’t Care

You’re in your element here, aren’t you? Welcome back to the contest after a tough cut in R2. Your voice sounds terrific, and I love the subtle melismatic touches e.g. on “moon” at 1:54. The song has a great sense of shape even within a fairly restrained overall arrangement; you have a great sense of exactly when you need to provide the listener with something different. (I suppose that’s a long way of saying that you write a great bridge.)

Your CM stanzas are mostly natural-sounding, although when you sing “And Louis Armstrong tunes”, the short-long rhythmic pattern you’ve established means that the massive pile-up of consonants that is “-mstrong t-” gets packed into a tiny rhythmic space. I’d suggest modifying the rhythm in that instance so that “Armstrong” is two equal notes, rather than long-short.

Hot Pink Halo - I Am

I'm assuming that “I am the inside of a tennis ball” means something like “I have unseen layers of complexity” and not “I'm tightly wound, under constant pressure, and I'll hiss at you if you cut me”, but I'm not about to listen to an entire podcast episode to confirm.

Otherwise, this is delightful. I'm here for the affirmations and the uptempo bounce, and you continue to do interesting and compelling things with your voice.

This is mostly a self-love song but also sort of an other-love song, and I think it works, though I do notice that we don't get any kind of sense of who the “you” of the song is.

Sunflower Bastard - EDMB (FCM Remix)

The chorus slaps; the verses are fine. Murder ballads are not particularly interesting to me without some other angle or hook to them; luckily this song has enough going on musically to keep me engaged. It’s a bop.

Jennifer Lynne and The Dandelion Rebellion - The Optimist

My eyebrows nearly climbed off the top of my head at hearing “FeeLING VulNERaBILiTY” and “If YOUR day WAS full OF hard STAIRS”, but your vocal delivery commits to the prescribed meter despite how I might argue the words “should” be pronounced, so I let you through the challenge gate. The vocal sounds great and the energy level is high, though you’re operating within a pretty well-defined genre with little in the way of innovation. Your most audacious creative choice is rhyming “optimist” with “chance” and “dance”, and somehow you pull it off.

traumadolls - Cycle of Sirens

That bass sounds awesome. A great sonic anchor to the song. The challenge is handled very well; the lyrics flow naturally and nothing seems crowbarred in for the sake of the challenge. Additionally, the strict poetic meter feels appropriate for the mythological allusions. 

Aside from the tasty bass, the vocal interplay during the choruses is another musical highlight. On the other hand, after the second chorus, around 1:50 it sounds like there are about four different guitar solos happening simultaneously. It's overwhelming and disorienting, which I suppose may be the point given your subject matter, but it's still overwhelming and disorienting.

Brother Baker - There Is Hope

Is there, though? This song is so relentlessly grim that I have to assume we are to take the title with a heaping tablespoon of salt. This one might suffer a bit by sitting right next to traumadolls’ entry, which is similarly fatalistic but has clearer imagery to grab onto.

You had some concerns in the Discord with playing fast and loose with the meyer but what you've done here is perfectly appropriate. The melody and text-setting are engaging throughout and nothing sounds forced or unnatural. (Well, your vocals are forceful, but that's an entirely different thing, and one working in your favor.)

Flintsteel - Belmont’s Curse

I know nothing about Castlevania, but Belmont seems to be a pretty bad guy. What I like about your treatment of the challenge is that you start line 3 of your CM stanzas a beat later than line 1, so that lines 3 and 4 run into each other and propel you into the long note that ends each stanza. It’s a cool way to avoid the monotony that a lazy application of the meter can lead you into.

I had to listen to the song before letting you through the challenge gate, to make sure you delivered “returned” as three syllables. I was not disappointed! The strict meter goes well with the fantasy setting, the ancient feel and the huge scope, bringing to mind epic proto-metal settings of ancient metrical Latin poetry like Orff’s “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana or Verdi’s “Dies Irae” from his Requiem (incidentally, that’s me on the far right side of the back row of the choir!).

Stefan Szabo - Mother

In all three of your entries in this contest, you’ve shown that you excel at writing songs with a strong emotional core, and crafting music and lyrics that work together to clearly express that emotion. Here, you set your sights on the parent-child relationship and the sacrifices that parents make.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the river in this song - it certainly serves as a welcome concrete visual image amid lyrics that are otherwise pretty explain-y. There’s a somewhat biblical feel to it, especially with the line “Swear I was born again”, and the inversion in the final verse “And when I take her to the river” evokes the role reversal in which the child must eventually take care of the parent. But I'm not sure if there's a layer of meaning to the river that I'm missing.

Sober - Make You a Headstone

It’s about damn time you pulled out that accordion! I forgot about “Celtic punk Sober” in my classification along “barn-burning bluegrass Sober” and “sedate country and western Sober”, but you pull off this genre very well indeed.

Obviously I think the accordion is great but my favorite instrumental moment is actually the fiddle’s chuck-chuck under “and when the” at 1:07 leading into the second chorus. The instrumental texture is thick but never muddy, and there’s lots of great interplay between the various instruments.