Shadow Ninja's Homestuck roulette: obama's rap solo

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

Discogs is a lifesaver, honestly, for a person who's neurotically required to buy CDs. I've bought a ton of stuff from all over the world, and had zero issues with damaged or missing stuff.

Thank you Konrad! Glad to play for sure. I mean, I sucked it big time, but it's all good.

Hey you didn't do that bad. You're at least on par with my stellar performance in your roulette.

What a surprise a 7!! 

Glad you enjoyed some of my stuff though, definitely some things there to chew on.  Thanks for running, has been fun!

Hey, consistent 7s in a game where the highest score I routinely give out is an 8 is pretty good.

[Crow]

wholly unsurprised that the most normal thing i send you scores the highest
i could send better music i just usually choose not to in favor of more interesting/weird stuff

[soupytwist]

Well it's 2am here in the UK and I'm awake to check out these results! (Thanks for making me wait  ).   I'd kind off convinced myself I'd cocked up on this final round and the Roulette Supervillain would swoop in and pick me off!  So it's a genuinely super cool feeling to actually win one of these things.   

Shadow I think you are right I'm not sure we have interacted much if at all in these forums, I generally hover in the Movie/TV area and only ventured out more recently,  but as I said in my first submission your banned list contained a ton of stuff that lined with my tastes!  So thanks for running this and giving me my first (and I suspect only) win.

Since I became a frontrunner round 5 or 6'ish I've been thinking if I did win I'd put myself forward for  the waiting list to run one of these things myself hopefully later in the year.  So yeah I guess that's going to happen now!  (It'd be pretty cool if you'd join Shadow, no pressure  )

As always I enjoy do these roulettes but obviously this one is extra special because I'm the fucking winna bitches!!!  So suck it everyone   

 

[lonestar]

lonestar

KOIAI

Inside
One Way Or Another
Straight To My Heart
A New Picture
My Breath

6 points

I’m sort of mixed on this one. The first two songs seem to be mostly straight forward pop-ish rock, which is fine, but doesn’t really stand out in any way from a huge swath of that style of music, apart from having some occasional fancy guitar work, which is really nice. Straight To My Heart is much more interesting, with Polyphia-style mathy guitar work jutxaposed with poppy vocals, and then A New Picture goes even further with its drop-on-a-dime switches between riffy shred and a sort of offbeat piano driven pop sound. I’m really into both of those tracks, and then My Breath is somewhere in the middle; stylewise it’s more like the first two, but it’s also just a lot catchier and more fun. So this ends up with a middle of the road score, but a lot of this I’m really into.

Just looking at the submittals and scores from the roulette, you might conclude that female-fronted metalcore was a good way to game the system, but actually 90% of those were just your submissions. I’ve never had you in one of my roulettes before, but you sent a lot of really killer stuff, particularly on the metalcore side, but Gacharic Spin and Bloodywood I liked a lot and loved some, so I’ll be checking them out further as well. At least if I can figure out how to get a Gacharic Spin CD, which has been breaking my brain lately.

Yeah, Koiai is still finding their sound, but the two guitarist are definitely top notch. Based on what you said, you may want to check out Li-Sa X's first few songs, it's 4 singles with the same guitarist but a different singer, and they're all top notch. All the core bands I sent have at least two or three albums (I think you'll dig the majority of Nemophila's stuff especially, they hit like that on all three albums), Bloodywood just has the one. Gacharic Spin I think has seven, and they're sound is all over the board, they're easily the most diverse and unique band I know of. For their physical copies, CDJapan is your best friend. (unfortunately you'll have to deal with Japanese shipping, which can cost almost as much as the albums). Glad you enjoyed what I send, and thanks for having me!!

[King Postwhore]

Bump Tim below me. 

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

wholly unsurprised that the most normal thing i send you scores the highest
i could send better music i just usually choose not to in favor of more interesting/weird stuff

Well someone fucking has to. And you never know, sometimes it might work. Clarence Clarity's overall score aside, I love Cancer in the Water, and the Monika Roscher Bigband is a complete hit.

Although yeah, like I said, I think maybe people underrate how much I like relatively simple stuff, or maybe most other people here just don't listen to much of the stuff. But a good chunk of my listening is just really quiet, simple indie stuff.

Well it's 2am here in the UK and I'm awake to check out these results! (Thanks for making me wait  ).   I'd kind off convinced myself I'd cocked up on this final round and the Roulette Supervillain would swoop in and pick me off!  So it's a genuinely super cool feeling to actually win one of these things.   

Shadow I think you are right I'm not sure we have interacted much if at all in these forums, I generally hover in the Movie/TV area and only ventured out more recently,  but as I said in my first submission your banned list contained a ton of stuff that lined with my tastes!  So thanks for running this and giving me my first (and I suspect only) win.

Since I became a frontrunner round 5 or 6'ish I've been thinking if I did win I'd put myself forward for  the waiting list to run one of these things myself hopefully later in the year.  So yeah I guess that's going to happen now!  (It'd be pretty cool if you'd join Shadow, no pressure  )

As always I enjoy do these roulettes but obviously this one is extra special because I'm the fucking winna bitches!!!  So suck it everyone   

 

Also hell yeah, I'll join. I don't know that I'll send you anything good, but I'll join.

lonestar

KOIAI

Inside
One Way Or Another
Straight To My Heart
A New Picture
My Breath

6 points

I’m sort of mixed on this one. The first two songs seem to be mostly straight forward pop-ish rock, which is fine, but doesn’t really stand out in any way from a huge swath of that style of music, apart from having some occasional fancy guitar work, which is really nice. Straight To My Heart is much more interesting, with Polyphia-style mathy guitar work jutxaposed with poppy vocals, and then A New Picture goes even further with its drop-on-a-dime switches between riffy shred and a sort of offbeat piano driven pop sound. I’m really into both of those tracks, and then My Breath is somewhere in the middle; stylewise it’s more like the first two, but it’s also just a lot catchier and more fun. So this ends up with a middle of the road score, but a lot of this I’m really into.

Just looking at the submittals and scores from the roulette, you might conclude that female-fronted metalcore was a good way to game the system, but actually 90% of those were just your submissions. I’ve never had you in one of my roulettes before, but you sent a lot of really killer stuff, particularly on the metalcore side, but Gacharic Spin and Bloodywood I liked a lot and loved some, so I’ll be checking them out further as well. At least if I can figure out how to get a Gacharic Spin CD, which has been breaking my brain lately.

Yeah, Koiai is still finding their sound, but the two guitarist are definitely top notch. Based on what you said, you may want to check out Li-Sa X's first few songs, it's 4 singles with the same guitarist but a different singer, and they're all top notch. All the core bands I sent have at least two or three albums (I think you'll dig the majority of Nemophila's stuff especially, they hit like that on all three albums), Bloodywood just has the one. Gacharic Spin I think has seven, and they're sound is all over the board, they're easily the most diverse and unique band I know of. For their physical copies, CDJapan is your best friend. (unfortunately you'll have to deal with Japanese shipping, which can cost almost as much as the albums). Glad you enjoyed what I send, and thanks for having me!!

Thanks for playing man, it was great having you! Will do on the recs and if any of these bands are selling CDs at shows you go to, just pick some up for me and I'll pay you back.

Bump Tim below me. 

It's done. I never make a promise I won't keep.

[TAC]

Oh great. Now I can see up his skirt...and it's not pretty.

[Crow]

Crow   45
King Postwhore   45.01
TAC   45

also i guess my actual score is 45.02? 

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

Motherfuck. Fixed. Anyone else want some extra points while I'm at it?

Crow   45 & 4/10
King Postwhore   45.01
TAC   45

[King Postwhore]

Oh great. Now I can see up his skirt...and it's not pretty.

The breeze feels great.

[lonestar]

Motherfuck. Fixed. Anyone else want some extra points while I'm at it?

I'll take 3.000000001 pts please...

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

FINAL STANDINGS
lonestar   52.999999999

[Buddyhunter1]

Man, I love Greet Death's distorted guitars, that tone makes me wanna take a shower (in a good way). You might like their EP New Low, it cuts most of the distortion for more clean/acoustic instrumentation and the songs are still great.

Thank you for having me! Yeah, the scores were middling, but you're at least one of the people on here I can send my weird shit to and there's at least a chance you'll like it.

That Chapel Of Disease album is awesome, definitely check it out and their new one from last month. Parannoul is great too, especially To See The Next Part Of The Dream.

For death's dynamic shroud I'd start with the two albums I sent songs from. I'll Try Living Like This is also great though it's definitely a weirder, more atmospheric one. Their fan club release from last month is also one of their best - it's not on streaming but I can hook you up if you want it

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Congrats soupy!

LithoJazzoSphere

Mind.in.a.box

Stalkers
Whatever Mattered
Escape

7 points

Is this the first electronic submission I’ve gotten in this roulette so far? I think it might be. I really love the vocoder effect on the vocals; I think it’s a perfect fit for this kind of music and it gives them such an interesting sound. Whatever Mattered has some (mostly) vocoder-less parts and they’re not really working for me as much, although it does make a nice contrast for when the vocoder comes back. Honestly I really like the core sound here a lot, the only real negative for me is the songs sometimes give a bit too much space before something interesting happens again, particularly on Whatever Mattered where I feel like some spacey synth wandering could probably have been lost without much detriment.

I’m honestly not sure if your method has been sending me stuff you like, or just trawling through hundreds of gigabytes of music for stuff you think will match my tastes, but either way you’ve done a pretty good job of finding stuff I enjoy. Not every submission has been a bullseye, but there have been at least a few (Dirt Poor Robins is still one of the best submissions of the roulette), and you rarely sent me something I wasn’t into at all.

Figures the best thing I sent is the one band that soupy sent to me in mine last year.    Totally makes sense now. 

I got the idea for sending m.i.a.b. from you sending And One in Sacul's.  They're not exactly the same, but I have a truckload of that sort of thing, though I frequently worry it won't do well in roulettes.  I might try some of it in Buddy's upcoming one though. 

Mostly my strategy was pretty reactive to things you'd put in the other writeups, they made me cross a bunch of candidates off my list, and add others I wasn't initially thinking about. 

Since I became a frontrunner round 5 or 6'ish I've been thinking if I did win I'd put myself forward for  the waiting list to run one of these things myself hopefully later in the year.  So yeah I guess that's going to happen now!

Ooh, looking forward to that.  I have a suspicion I'll wind up sending stuff I don't normally get to send in other roulettes. 

wholly unsurprised that the most normal thing i send you scores the highest
i could send better music i just usually choose not to in favor of more interesting/weird stuff

Well someone fucking has to. And you never know, sometimes it might work.

The funny thing is that you initially struck me as being kind of similar to Crow, and I had a bunch of stranger music picked out.  Turns out you are somewhat more like ariich in actuality, so I went a bit more conventional.  I get thrown by people who say they like weird music in their OP's, but when I send it, it's not the kind of weird they're looking for half the time.  Someday the stars will align in some other roulette. 

It was fun playing, I might send a post-roulette submission that I almost sent several times except that a writeup would send me in a different direction. 

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

Yeah, it's definitely a specific brand of weird. Like, for reference, this is one of my all time favorite songs. But other people have a pretty different idea of weird, I suppose. I still like music to be in tune, I still don't like shit production. Stuff can be weird and still catchy and fun, which most of the time is probably what's going to resonate with me most, like the Igorrr song Sacul sent me forever ago (tout petit moineau), or even something like múm that's not abrasive or atonal in the slightest but is still pretty strange to most listeners (as I've found out from the people I've tried to introduce them to).

But at the same time, for all I talk about melody, The Dillinger Escape Plan is probably my favorite band, and they're often completely non melodic, so maybe I'm just a bunch of contradictions.

Also, random fact, The Beatles aren't on my banned list. I kind of expected someone to try sending them.

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Yeah, the weird I like isn't usually "fun" per, se. 

[Crow]

i mean, you did pretty well in my weird round, anyways 

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

Man, I love Greet Death's distorted guitars, that tone makes me wanna take a shower (in a good way). You might like their EP New Low, it cuts most of the distortion for more clean/acoustic instrumentation and the songs are still great.

Thank you for having me! Yeah, the scores were middling, but you're at least one of the people on here I can send my weird shit to and there's at least a chance you'll like it.

That Chapel Of Disease album is awesome, definitely check it out and their new one from last month. Parannoul is great too, especially To See The Next Part Of The Dream.

For death's dynamic shroud I'd start with the two albums I sent songs from. I'll Try Living Like This is also great though it's definitely a weirder, more atmospheric one. Their fan club release from last month is also one of their best - it's not on streaming but I can hook you up if you want it

Whoops I forgot to reply to this. Getting tired. time for bed

Appreciate the recs, and is some kind of blood pact required to take you up on that offer? If so, I'm in. If not, I'm still in but slightly less excited about it.

[ariich]

Oops.

Yeah we align well when avoiding metal, except maybe metalcore and post-hardcore I guess which has gone quite well in both roulettes. For other metal styles though, I seem to have an incredible knack for finding a specific feature you actively dislike.

Anyway still pleased to have done well and sent some stuff you liked a lot! Whenever the next one is, I'll try and remember to stick with metalcore and non-metal.

Oh and congrats soupy, very well deserved!

[twosuitsluke]

Cheers for running this dude! I may have sucked hard qt times, but the finale confirmed my suspicions, I should've been sending more punky stuff from the start. Glad you liked The Flatliners. Try and give Cavalcade a go, it's an all time top 50 record for me, it's so damn good, and for all the reasons you stated.

[Sacul]

I completely disagree about Portishead having no melody, they're just not 'Murican enough for you

Thanks for having me! Yeah I seem to keep sending some of the worst and best music in roulettes recently . But that's just me trying to push the host into listening to cool new stuff. Congrats soupy!

[Stadler]

That was great fun! Thanks for having me! 

[Buddyhunter1]

Appreciate the recs, and is some kind of blood pact required to take you up on that offer? If so, I'm in. If not, I'm still in but slightly less excited about it.

I was gonna say you can just send me a PM and ask for the mp3s but I'll take your blood too, fuck yeah

[hefdaddy42]

hefdaddy42

Punch Brothers

My Oh My
Three Dots and a Dash
Familiarity

6 points

This is a really fun listen, since I don’t have too much else in my music library that sounds like this. I think it just never quite goes from good into great for me. The songs are a bit too freeform and don’t totally come together, so while there’s bits I really like and I enjoy the listen all the way through, I don’t end up taking too much of it with me. My Oh My is probably the most complete song here, and perhaps not coincidentally is also my favorite. The vocalist is still great and really fun to listen to, and the mandolin + cello makes for such an unconventional but enjoyable instrumental section. The other two songs have a lot of good stuff too, but like I said don’t feel totally coherent to me.

Glad you liked it, but I actually thought you would like this more than Nickel Creek.  I got it backwards lol

Hef, I’m glad you broke your years-long roulette fast to join this one, even if I did immediately give you a crappy score on the first round. You’ve sent a lot of artists that I not only wasn’t familiar with, but probably hadn’t even listened to anything in their entire genre. That’s one of the best parts of roulettes; people send me stuff I know I never would have heard on my own.

My pleasure!  I'm glad you liked some of the weird stuff I like!

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

As was foretold, I have returned, bearing stats and music updates. I meant to get to this sooner, but I've been surprisingly busy lately, and I tend to check out new music pretty slowly when I'm not in roulette mode anyway, so expect updates to drag on for years until my next roulette starts.

OK, let's start with the good stuff. I went through and tagged every entry as either metal or nonmetal and then compared the amount that scored more than a 7 versus those that didn't, to see if there were any trends. Here's the results:





And then here's the two together in a bar chart to make it easier to contrast:



This appears to suggest there was an advantage to sending nonmetal entries, but the margin is so small I think it's probably statistical noise, especially considering how many judgment calls went into classifying something as metal versus anything else. For example, I put Moron Police as metal because I feel like they share a huge amount of their DNA with progressive metal, even though they're also quite different and not particularly heavy, whereas UFO I considered nonmetal, since they're not, but at the same time they're not really 'lighter' than Moron Police are. Which leads to the conclusion that's no discernible difference in scoring whether you stick exclusively to the metal portion of the periodic table or not.

Also, so people will actually read this post, I ordered a bunch of CDs from the artists you sent me (because that's how I listen to music), based in part on how much I liked the artist, but also took into account price, availability, and whether I happened to think of it when I was clicking buttons online. So here's some brief thoughts on some of the albums I've listened to so far.

Fellowship - The Saberlight Chronicles

This is really right up my alley, it's super fun, catchy power metal that's very silly but also endearingly sincere. It's not super varied, but I guess I find I tend to like that in power metal; just stick to the big melodies and fast guitars, and they really nail that. I think you made a good choice in your song selection; Glint and The Saint Beyond the River are pretty clearly the best songs on the album, but there's no real weak points either, and I enjoy this all the way through. I think this is their only album so far, but I definitely grab the next one whenever it's out.

The Last Dinner Party - Prelude to Ecstasy

Another debut album, and I'm really enjoying this one too. When Rich tried to send this to me he described it as part baroque pop, which wasn't a term I was familiar with but exactly captures the impression from the music that I would have described as refined or stately, but I wasn't sure if that was a genre thing or just because they're British. I really enjoy the sense of dramatics that all the songs have, either the bombast of songs like Caesar on a TV Screen or the quieter, atmospheric stuff like On Your Side. The only real downside for me is I think sometimes they get a bit too bombastic, or at least they're not quite able to balance the bombast properly and it ends up sounding a bit messy. But it's still really strong, especially for a first album.

Electric Callboy - Tekkno

This is exactly what it seems to be, and I love it. This is really just the perfect combination of styles for me, I really can't fault any of it and it's something I can put on almost any time and enjoy. Their songs are just so damn fun, and the balance between the pop and the metalcore is perfect. I also highly recommend everyone go watch some of their music videos, they're clearly just having the time of their lives making them and playing their music and it makes an already stellar group even more enjoyable.

Dirt Poor Robins - Firebird

I downloaded all the Dirt Poor Robins albums from Bandcamp (well, almost all, it seems like some of them were released in pieces and then in full, so I just got the full ones, but I'm not sure if I've missed some extra tracks in there somewhere) since I wasn't able to find any CDs, although if any ever pop up let me know, I will definitely grab them. Firebird's the only one I've listened to so far, though, and I'm really digging it. I never really pay attention to the stories of these sorts of narrative albums, and this is no different, but as I mentioned I really love that vaudevillian sound that this sort of storytelling lends itself to. The album is also surprisingly varied, and I don't feel like every track has fully sunk in yet, but their sound is really unique and absorbing and I expect to listen to this one a lot more.

Emily Jane White

This was a post-roulette submission Litho sent me that I've also been listening to off and on. I really love this dark indie/folk sound; it almost feels like music crafted specifically for me. I'm not in love with every song (Heresy hasn't quite clicked with me), but the advantage of being out of the roulette is I don't feel obligated to give equal attention to all the tracks and can just listen to what I like the most. Battle Call and Drowned I really like, but Show Me the War in particular is just amazing; something about the atmosphere and her voice and the main melody I find completely entrancing. It's hard to say exactly how I'd score this since I'm out of the roulette mindset now, but I'd think it would have been an 8 or so.

If anyone else has submissions they considered sending but decided against for whatever reason, feel free to shoot them my way as well, and I'll check them out too, in my normal slow way. I've got a number of other albums, but I'll end this here for now because I'm tired of typing, and also so I'll still have material for post #105 of silly stats I've put together.

[LithoJazzoSphere]

Glad to hear DPR is connecting.  The full version of Deadhorse is probably my favorite of theirs.  Also check out my question and Soundscape's response (though of course it was soupy who earned points for them) about DPR's discography when I asked about it after a round in my own roulette, it was useful.

https://www.dreamtheaterforums.org/boards/index.php?topic=51832.msg2980597#msg2980597

Fascinating, if only I'd sent Emily and not Hiromi, I'd have potentially ended up in 3rd place.      (Though of course it probably would have shifted my entire strategy going forward).  I'll probably cook up something similar in the next few days that I might have also considered sending to see if that would have been an anomaly or if I was sitting on a goldmine.   

[soupytwist]

Fellowship - The Saberlight Chronicles

This is really right up my alley, it's super fun, catchy power metal that's very silly but also endearingly sincere. It's not super varied, but I guess I find I tend to like that in power metal; just stick to the big melodies and fast guitars, and they really nail that. I think you made a good choice in your song selection; Glint and The Saint Beyond the River are pretty clearly the best songs on the album, but there's no real weak points either, and I enjoy this all the way through. I think this is their only album so far, but I definitely grab the next one whenever it's out.

New one is definitely coming this year     In the meantime ff you are craving more power metal in a similar vain to Fellowship, a band called 'Glyph' released their debut last week called 'Honor, Power, Glory' it's 30 minutes of solid cheese music (not as good as Fellowship, but worthy of a listen).

And agree with Lizzo - Deadhorse is DPR's best IMO too.