Buddyhunter1 - Sungazer - "Cytherean"
Early Impression - "There is a lot of interest going on instrumentally, but I think the vocals are going to sink this one."
So what no one caught (or did and didn't point out), was that this is the exact same impression I gave for Crow's in the first round, but it was a fakeout, because it applies to this one instead (and one other, but we'll get to that later). Anyway, this track feels like the fusion equivalent of vaporwave. There is a vaguely nostalgic vibe about the square wave synthesizer parts in particular that bounce around the stereo spectrum.
The drumming is easily the highlight of the track. This is even more illuminated by the drummer having a playthrough video, which I watched, and made it more obvious what some of the more intriguing things he was doing were. In some parts I wondered if it was programmed because it didn't seem possible to physically execute the rhythms that were going on simultaneously, but the video cleared that up. The micro-piccolo snare is an unusual and charming texture, and with the side snare on the right in a different tuning, adds some welcome variety. I also enjoy the interplay between the hat and the stack.
I can't turn down saxophone, though it's not really given as much prominence as I'd like, with mostly just some line doubling, and only the occasional line where it peaks out on its own. Credit info says there is also bass clarinet on the track, but it's either another doubling texture or I just completely overlooked it.
But what drags the song down is the vocal. I wouldn't call it a vocal-centric song, per se, but in a round with a lot of instrumentals and where even the vocal songs sometimes have extended instrumental sections, it sticks out more. The pitch-shifted spoken parts I at first surmised were samples, and contributed to that vaporwave feel as well. But even in the sung parts, I just don't care for the vocal timbre, and applying pitch-shifting to it nettled me even more. So for my fourth listen when I began to do some research on the songs, it turns out that the culprit is Adam Neely of all people. I've watched a fair number of his videos, and he always has scintillating musical analysis in often unexpected directions, and is a killer bass player (not nearly as evident as I'd prefer on this track though). But based on this track I'd rather he stick to talking and playing than singing, it just brings me down, and the rest of the instrumentation is pleasant enough, but not sufficient to match the rest of the songs in the round.
Score: 6.5/10
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Crow - Poly-Math - "Alchemy | Terra Incognita"
Early Impression - "This does more with some risky musical elements than many similar songs I've heard, but I'm not sure it's going to be quite enough to gain a leg up on the competition."
So I don't know if I said it here, or it might have been in Luke's thread, but while I'm heavily leaning against eliminations at the moment, I do want to keep them as an option if necessary later on, but hopefully will find a way to avoid them. Well, it turns out that we did need one elimination....Cyril. That round 1 submission just wasn't up to snuff, so Cyril has been given the axe. I think we've found a better substitute though, I can already see that Crow has managed to stay out of last place, and hopefully that is portent of even better things to come later.
Like the song in the last round, there are certainly a few interesting musical elements going on here, but the two things that hold it back for me is that the buildups aren't quite effective enough, and there is a bit too much focus on noisy textures for my taste. They are better employed here than I've heard in many other similar songs, but it's just not enough to compete with the rest of the stronger songs in the round.
For a few positive aspects, in two submissions in a row of yours the bass has been one of the stronger points. I don't know if it's a coincidence or if you read my writeup on Renaissance, but I was pleased to find that this song has a music video, and the bass player has a Rickenbacker. No wonder the tone is so fat, with just a bit of grit to it.
I also really like the chorused clean guitar tone throughout this track. A micro bit I liked is the volume swell accompanied with a pitch rise of the guitar at 5:27, or the quick break for the ring-modulated guitar part at 1:39. The organ additionally adds some background atmosphere in spots. I wasn't expecting it from this type of song, but the percussion bits around 2:52 are unexpectedly delightful. The repeating tom fills at 4:51 and beyond are fun.
So one of the risky elements I referred to in some of my impressions is the use of noise as a significant musical component. A certain amount of it can add interest to a composition, but excessive amounts of it tend to irk me, and this comes a bit too close to that at times. I have a lot of effects pedals, and it can be fun to run a static tone or sequence through them and just spend hours twiddling knobs and seeing what happens. But it's more fun to do yourself than to listen to others experiment with, I've found. I've recorded a few of these jams, but I highly doubt I could ever release them.
So for example, 2:50 begins a portion of the song that structurally is quite bare, a 2-3 note riff that very slowly increases in intensity, a few chord changes with that bass riff as a pedal-tone to anchor it. Around 4:07 the most significant change is all the sound effects as the rate knob is being sped up and slowed down. It's interesting from an engineering standpoint, but doesn't add quite enough of melodic substance, making the build feel a tad overly long to me. There are similar examples around 2:03 (also with the hard clipping distortion), and 8:15 (though that one is fine since it's just part of the ambiance ringing out). In a way I appreciate being exposed to songs like this that are a little outside of my normal listening ambit, because that's how you make breakthroughs and discover music that wasn't even on your radar in prior years. But for the moment, there are just too many other songs I prefer listening to in this round to give it a higher score. But at least this is progress, pretty much only up to go from here, right? :-)
Score: 6.75/10
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soupytwist - mew - "Comforting Sounds"
Early Impression - "The layering and building of the arrangement is really cool, but the vocals aren't vibing with me."
Last round it was Galahad, this round is was mew. Will someone complementing a song ahead of time in round three and that song scoring relatively low be a third time's the charm situation, or do bad things come in sets of threes? Maybe we'll find out! I often like this epic sort of building structure, where a song begins in a very barebones fashion, gradually adding layer after layer, culminating in an explosive finale. And it obviously has this effect for fans of theirs as you can see in a number of live videos. The better post-rock works do this well, often multiple times in a single track. And that is certainly the stronger side of this song. As this entry went along fairly early I suspected it might try and do just that, and it executed it almost precisely like I thought it would.
The arrangement is quite well put-together, with the left and right panned-guitars interlocking, sometimes in a call and response fashion, other times harmonizing with each other, and then slowly adding keyboard textures into the mix as well. The keyboard pad underlaying the driving 8th notes in some spots also adds contrast and rhythmic interest. There is additionally a lot of variety timbrally with the guitars, such as the very slight crunch in the beginning, the chimier parts at 1:17, the mellow higher tones at 3:33, the increasing levels of saturation as the end approaches, and the biting tremolo picking at 7:57. The ascending pitch of the grinding patch at 7:42 is one the better uses of a noisier element in this round as well.
But ultimately, two things held this song back for me. First, it is quite harmonically simple, and even after numerous listens none of the melodies really latched onto me. And second, the vocalist's style and timbre is just not for me. These frail tenor falsetto deliveries work wonders on some people, should I dare say they find them "comforting"?, but with the occasional exception, I'm not often one of them. My hit rate for Nordic bands is higher than average, so I was really hoping maybe this would grow on me more, but alas, not enough.
Score: 6.75/10
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Puppies_On_Acid - Ne Obliviscaris - "Forget Not"
Early Impression - "The first third is magnificent, but the middle section is a bit fatiguing due to overuse of [redacted], and the final third doesn't quite make up for it."
So this is another band that isn't unfamiliar to me, but other than one album I enjoyed but don't know well, and the odd other song or two here and there, I'm certainly not well-acquainted with them. They are sometimes billed as "Opeth with violin", but despite Opeth being one of my absolute favorite bands, I don't actually tend to seek out other Opeth-esque bands that actively, most of the ones I run across are only very superficially similar and don't really give me the same vibes.
There was a lot of greatness in the first third. A song this long tends to bask in setup, and I'm quite fine with that. My favorite element by far is all of the violin work. It's such a marvelous instrument, and it is played superbly here. The way he plays with blending in harmonics at 2:00 is spectacular. The bass playing is also quite excellent, with many complementary lines. There is a playthrough video that I watched, which helps to highlight some of them. It's a bit sloppier than the studio take, but I'm not here to grade that part.
The vocals were mostly kind of just there for me. Neither the cleans nor the harshes really moved me, though the melisma at 6:42 and a few other spots started to nettle me a bit. I expected to see some female background vocal credits for the section at 8:19 on the right, but either online credits are incomplete or that's an impressively blended falsetto. Like Chthonic last round, the vocals generally sounded best in the sections where the cleans and harshes were in unison. The electric guitars did their job and for the most part didn't particularly stand out, though I did enjoy some of the nylon-string work in the first few minutes of the song. The sliding 5ths on the right at 5:24 are kind of fun. Also, the fills such as at 10:03 are more entertaining than the actual solo.
However, the drums are the facet that really overstayed its welcome. Most of the first half is copacetic enough. The China as heard on the right at 2:32 even sounds very similar to one of my own Sabian Holy Chinas, with a very distinctive thwack (he's definitely using a different kit in the playthrough version though). The ride and bell work like at 4:13 is scrumptious. But at 5:24 the double bass drums come in, and they're ok for awhile, but they kept going, and going, and going, and I was starting to look at the time to see how long those constant 16th notes had been hammering away. Well, as it turns out, they end at 9:15, for almost four minutes solid. It was actually almost a relief that the drumming went even further into overdrive with blasts at that point to have something different, but I kept not looking forward to this whole section and being distracted by them.
I like double bass in smaller doses, with more rhythmic variety, and this portion of the song just kept wearing me out. I read that the drummer won some competition for Australia's fastest feet, and apparently that's sort of a risk, with the need to put them on display constantly. Even more noticeable from watching the playthrough is that there is this snare, high tom, snare, high tom, lower tom roll fill such as at 5:08, and it gets overused a bit. I did like the tom pattern at 9:46 with the bass and acoustic though.
Score: 7/10
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romdrums - GoGo Penguin - "Seven Sons of Bjorn"
Early Impression - "The piano work here is excellent, but I'm not sure it's going to make up for the missed opportunity regarding another instrument with unactualized potential."
This track started really well. The piano parts are intricate and vibrant, the drumming is propulsive and tasty with the ride and snare interplay, and there are some nice upright bass fills and accompaniment. But after a couple minutes while it was feeling agreeable enough, I kept wondering if it was going to build to something grander.
Well, that began the more vexing aspect. The most frustrating thing about this piece is that it felt like it was setting up for a majestic violin or cello solo. Early in the song I had been hearing higher string parts in the background, so when the overdriven and delayed bit came in at 2:19 I started getting excited. But it never came, just a whole minute of sliding and bowing noises. Those have their place in more limited usages to add some tension and pulpiness to a song, but when they're the whole enchilada, I stare at my plate and surmise that the runner brought the entree for the wrong table. If there had been 30 seconds added of something more melodic in the middle or the end of the solo maybe I would have considered it worth the wait.
For many years I've tried to appreciate some of the more noisy styles of music that don't have much to grasp onto melodically. One way to do that I suppose is to acquaint yourself more with material that incorporates smaller doses of those elements, and this song actually ends up accomplishing a dash of that. But like with Poly-Math, it isn't going to contribute to scoring as highly as other tunes. Earlier I had thought it was a separate instrument playing the solo, but based on the double bass drop out and the credits, it must be the double bass itself. So ultimately I like the sparkling piano playing and basic groove enough to keep it from the bottom, but the missed opportunity with the upright bass leads me to hearing a version of the song in my head that I would have preferred, but wasn't what the band was going for.
Score: 7/10
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senecadawg2 - Floating Points - "Movement 7"
Early Impression - "Some delightful and dreamy ideas are teased, but there's not quite enough payoff. I think (hope) the album might be better than the song."
This is an album that I saw mentioned quite a lot in 2021, it was on all kinds of end of the year lists. I wanted to hear it because it was so ubiquitous, but never got around to it. Curiously enough, my first exposures to Pharaoh Sanders were from his time in some of John Coltrane's later quartets. Earlier Coltrane is some of my favorite music ever, but while people really into the free jazz and avant-garde scenes eat up his last few albums, for me it mostly just goes off the rails. Sun Ship is probably the album I appreciate most from that era, as the experimentation is more reigned in, always coming back to stability and not completely devolving into chaos. So part of my delay in not checking out this album earlier is that Pharaoh was never one of my favorite players. I respect his legendary status, and it's unfortunate that the world lost him since this album came out. But like later Coltrane, his oeuvre tended towards the avant-garde and free jazz scenes, which I probably unfairly and hypocritically have tended to dismiss as "hipster jazz".
Well, I am happy to confirm that this is mostly not that. It's on the minimalistic side for my tastes, but it is very well-performed, and Pharaoh's saxophone playing blends well with the Tangerine Dream-esque electronics. I especially like a lot of the background violin-esque gliding swells from the synthesizers. They're in moments reminiscent of organ (which is also present in a sprinkles here and there elsewhere), but more clearly become their own voice as the track goes along. In on particular spot the synth line blends into a very piquant timbre gradually starting around 5:14, where it's clearly two separate parts and sounds, but they blur together in a sonic vortex. Other moments are more theremin-esque. I'll have to look into the making of this album more to see if Floating Points describes any of the process of creation for this album.
Overall there's kind of a relaxing and meditative vibe, and some of the synth textures are reminiscent of bird chirps. At times I felt like I was levitating in a dream. There is a good sense of space, probably in both senses of the word. Pharaoh's playing stays on the softer, breathier end for quite awhile, and I wondered what it was leading to, whether there would be an maelstrom of sorts closer to the end. Well, it never quite came, though it was hinted at. 7:27 is where it gets more intense, though not for long. It's on the squawkier side of what I prefer, but it doesn't reach too extreme of levels, like I was worried it could given the history of players like him associated with the more out there jazz substyles.
This is also billed as featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, but they don't seem to be particularly present on most of this track. Perhaps they're responsible for a few of the moments of chromatic percussion. This will definitely be an album I'll have to investigate at some point to see how the saxophone, electronics, and orchestral elements blend together.
Score: 7/10
Topic: LithoJazzoSphere Roulette V1: Variety & Reciprocity (Post-Roulette Playlist) (Read 115149 times)