Interesting take...oddly enough the latter two songs are from their '23 release, and the others are from their first album, so I guess that's growth as a band. Unlike a lot of the Japanese bands, Saiseiga is completely independent and don't have outside writers or production teams, so their growth is a lot more organic and transparent.
Yeah I gathered that about the songs I preferred coming from the second album - as you say sounds like they may be already growing into their style really nicely, but I'll obviously need to give both albums a listen to hear that myself!
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Anyways, glad you enjoyed, definitely check out the rest of that album, it's awesome.
I'll take an 8.0. Hope you get a chance to check out the whole album.
Oh yeah no question I'll check out these albums. Other than cases where I've literally been unable to even find a youtube stream of an album, which has been incredibly rare, I'll always check out every artist I rate 8.0 or more and this time I imagine I'll extend that lower this time - in my fogey roulette I think I checked out at least something by literally every artist no matter how low they scored and it was good fun. Not sure I can manage that this time with 24 players and 7 rounds, but I think something like 100% of 7.8+ rated submissions and then for things that score lower but interest me enough to err on the side of checking those out too (from this round it would be Moon Tooth for sure and maybe an album by Caroline's Spine).
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The Finnish MDM well that you don't already know is kinda running dry, admittedly They have a new album coming out in a few weeks.
Yeah I noticed that one of the songs was a single - you've done that a few times with me now!
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Middle of the pack - with this crew I'll take it!
Yeah the competition is fierce in this roulette. Interested to see if the consistency of quality can be maintained in the first Light round.
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Also holy shit that was some quick turnaround for this amount of music.
Is it that crazy? It was about 9 days from when people first started sending me stuff and I started listening pretty much straight away. I got in a good 5 listens to every submission, with only the 5th listen (which was the one where I was doing write-ups and making any final tweaks to ratings) involving occasional skips, e.g. where I felt I knew the rest of that song and should skip to the next.
As I've said before, I'm able to listen to a lot of music. It's just been that in that week-and-a-bit, I've not really listened to other stuff apart from a couple of new albums (including the new Mystery which came out on Wednesday and is rather nice).
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Dunno, it's probably factored in a little, but I might have made the same choices regardless, so far anyway. I don't really have a great mental profile of your taste despite skimming bits of some older roulettes, so I'm sort of treating you like an alternate universe version of me who has somewhat similar tastes but somehow hasn't heard any of the same artists. I'll probably keep somewhat going with that for a bit until/unless I can figure out an even better strategy.
That sounds pretty great to be honest.
I also wonder about factoring the style of each host in how they listen to submissions (possibly just more overthinking though), and wonder if some songs fare better than others depending up how much time is devoted to them, possibly avoiding songs with hooks that are more subtle and could take longer to sink in. That's all so subjective though it's hard to make a science of it. "Sleepwalkers" took slightly longer to grow on me, but I wanted something from the latest album with the more reverb-laden sound.
So, on this point, although my commitment is a minimum of 3 listens, I'm going to try and ensure I maintain 5 listens like I did this round and did most rounds in my last two roulettes too. I've rarely found that things have materially grown on me in a concentrated timespan by just listening more and more. The passage of time and coming back to something fresh can absolutely do that, but that's not really an option in a roulette (or in a timely one anyway!). I've definitely got to a point where around 4-5 listens is the sweet spot - I'm familiar with the songs, I know what's going on, they've had a good chance to grow on me and I can form a clear view of my opinion on it - beyond this is very much diminishing returns.
Do at least check out "The Wretched Tide" from Sovran, the same album "Dishearten" is on, I really wanted to include it as well but didn't want to kick anything else out.
As I said above, I'll be properly checking out everything that scores 7.8 or higher and for those that are 8.0+ I imagine it'll often be multiple albums. In Draconian's case, for sure I'll check out all three.
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let's GOOOO
that entire birds in row album is really good tho imo i did kinda send all the best songs off it
...which is like, almost half the album by runtime, so
Can't wait to check it out!
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I had a feeling I might be in for that kind of score and response. Although I think the music suits the lyrics/theme well, I can understand why you might find it lacking. As you said, it's not inappropriate for the context, but that doesn't mean it's good. I think what it boils down to—maybe—is that I place more weight on the lyrics, which as you say are terribly affecting.
Yeah this was the hardest one to rate. When considering how much I like music, I don't generally place that much weight on lyrics other that "by exception" - evocative lyrics can elevate something to even greater heights, or particularly annoying or bad lyrics can detract. This was a weird one where I just wasn't feeling at all that the lyrics were actually elevating the music, but I found them so moving in themselves that I needed to reflect that in my overall opinion.
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Anyway, thanks to everyone who's already sent your first "light" submissions! I'll make a start on some listening tomorrow.