Alright, I guess that's about what I expected. I'm glad it grew on you later on. I think it's one of the great prog instrumentals, but I understand why you wouldn't like something that sits on one or two themes for so long. I really like those kind of songs—Stream of Consciousness is probably in my top 20 DT songs at this point and all four Metallica instrumentals are for sure in my top 20 of their songs—but I get why someone wouldn't love it as much. But I do appreciate that you got into a lot of the super Rush-y elements and flourished, which are of course an essential part of what makes it so good.
If you haven't, listen to
La Villa Strangiato. It's their other big instrumental and is probably less repetitive and way crazier with the guitar stuff. I was debating whether I should send it or YYZ. I can understand not being wild about Ged's voice, but Rush is just so crazy awesome from an instrumental perspective that I gotta love them anyway.
I'm fine with that score, too. I'm hoping for a little better the next two rounds, for which I plan to send bonuses, but there's still one person in the top five who has the same raw score as me, so I can't be doing too poorly.
I'll send tomorrow, I'm basically looking at two artists and 2-3 options for each one—but in each case one is over 11 minutes and the others are not, so I need to decide a) which order I'm going to send them in, and b) which one is going to serve as my 11+ submission.