Crow - the pAper chAse - "You're One of Them Aren't You?", "The Small of Your Back the Nape of Your Neck (The Blizzard)", "Dying With Decent Music"
Early Impression - "Now I know why people have eliminations. ;-)"
So of course the impression is tongue-in-cheek. Even if so far some of your submissions are totally missing me, they definitely aren't boring, and stand out from many of the others. I feel like in some future round you're gonna send something unusual that really connects with me. So even if I'm not really liking some of these I do appreciate receiving them, even if the payoff doesn't come during this roulette.
But as for this artist, I've listened to these songs way more times than I'd ever allow myself to outside of the confines of an experiment like this roulette, and I just can't get into them. I think I heard the first song a couple times since you sent it in Luke's roulette, but that was all I could tolerate at the time. Really dissonant music is highly risky for me. For the most part I like melodious music, even when it's quite aggressive, heavy and hard, and I can only put up with strong dissonance in smaller amounts.
I occasionally get into really bizarre moods where I'm up for really strange music, and usually at those times I just go full-bore into even more extreme music - 20th century avant-garde classical like Penderecki, avant-prog/Rock-In-Opposition like Univers Zero and such, that's even more dissonant and discordant. Or in extreme metal I generally can't stomach much dissodeath or dissoblack, though there are occasional exceptions like Gorguts and some of Deathspell Omega's work. Even then, those are rarely favorites, they just better suit my palate when I'm in fairly specific and irregular modalities.
TPC occupies a more challenging middle ground where there is a conventional song in the center of each tune, but the arrangement is designed to make it much more off-kilter on purpose. In my research, it was a bit discombobulating to see John perform a live solo acoustic version of "You're One of Them Aren't You", where he doesn't even try and keep the dissonant elements in, which makes it almost feel like a completely different song.
For what they're going for, this seems well-constructed and executed enough that I can understand why people who are into this kind of music would like it. A rather different genre, but it reminds me a bit of some of Bela Bartok's work, particularly some of his string quartets, where there's a similar juxtaposition of more traditionally melodic music with regular bursts of "something's not quite right" discordance.
So my challenge is twofold. First is the dissonance and strangeness of the instrumentation, which is its own struggle. The other is John's vocal style, which is pretty singular among anything I've ever listened to. And frankly, I just don't really care for it at all. I think with the right vocalist, I could grow at least somewhat accustomed to some of the more out-there music undergirding it over time. But the combination of the two is just too much for me, and it was a chore to make it through these each time, hoping maybe something would eventually click, but very little of it ever did.
1:23 of "You're One of Them, Aren't You?" is probably one of the relatively few moments I liked, it had a bit of a King Crimson feel to the guitar lead, which is another one of the few groups who semi-regularly explore dissonance that I love. Then there's the piano lick at 2:52 in "The Small of Your Back the Nape of Your Neck" before the playful irreverence of the chorus. And the rhythmic clacking at 0:20 in the same song is cool. Or the shrieking violin bit at 1:48 in "Dying With Decent Music" is rather fun.
John Congleton is kind of an enigma to me, since the number and variety of artists he's produced is pretty staggering, given how niche the appeal of this group is. Most of them are either ones I don't know or only know very vaguely, some with a small amount of material I've heard. But he has worked with some artists I really like, which makes me see more potential for incorporation of some of the more jarring elements.
In particular, he produced Chelsea Wolfe's Abyss, which is one of my favorite albums. I knew very little about Congleton beforehand other than occasionally hearing the name, but now having read more about him and listened a lot to these tracks, I can see some of his influence on that album, which gives me hope that perhaps smaller portions of this style can be effective. Chelsea's song "The Abyss" especially seems to have John's fingerprints all over it, with the out-of-tune, dissonant piano motif that plays throughout the first half of the song, and then the similarly unnerving chamber string work in the second half. It's far from my favorite song on the album, but I love her vocals and other work enough that I can get into it much more.
"Crazy Love" on the same Congleton-produced album has a somewhat more subtle incorporation of strangeness, with a reasonably conventional ballad structure, but a rather alarming string backing in the chorus, which I imagine could easily have been a production idea he came up with. So with the right artist, perhaps some of these ideas can work.
So in finality, I suppose that 5/10 is probably my lower limit for a participation score. These songs were a tougher listen for me than that, and I definitely like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard more than 0.5 more than this, but I suppose this is my threshold. I still don't currently plan to have eliminations, so I guess I'm stuck with your musical mad science lab for now and whatever concoction you come up with next. :-) Maybe I'll love it!
Score: 5/10
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Sacul - Have a Nice Life - "Bloodhail", "There Is No Food", "Deep, Deep"
Early Impression - "You have probably overcompensated this round in one direction, but pushed it too far in the wrong direction on a different dimension."
Yeah, so this is one of the risks of arguably overreacting to one particular type of comment I've made. Here we have music that has more of a melancholic vibe and atmosphere I like, but it's just too raw and underproduced for me. I've known about this band for a long time, and probably even sampled something from them before, but I can see now why they don't quite hit for me. There's a superficial similarity to other music I love, I know there's some overlap in the fanbase for them with fans of Katatonia's late 90s-era work, for example. And this is one of the earlier albums people tend to cite as "doomgaze" (in particular the droning style of "There Is No Food"), an emergent niche that has been proliferating more rapidly in recent years and I've enjoyed music similar to, so I've kind of wanted to explore HaNL more, so I appreciate the submission even just for that alone.
But this is just too lo-fi for my tastes. I read that it cost them only $1,000 to record this album, and unfortunately, it sounds like it. Not that great music has to be expensive, there's some excellent recordings made with nothing more than a laptop, but generally I prefer music to sound more polished, and while there are exceptions, this isn't one of them. It's a bit of a shame, because there are definitely good songs and ideas buried in here, and tidied up and/or covered by a different band like The Cure or someone like that, this could be a substantially stronger entry.
Let's first look at a few things I liked. Even as murky as it is, the chorused guitar tone early in "Bloodhail" is pretty cool, as is the slow lead at 3:24, and the line opening "There Is No Food". The bass is pretty audible, which I'll rarely complain about. The synth notes with a rapid decay starting at 3:50 in "Bloodhail" are splendid. I'll talk more about other concerns with the vocals later, but the backing vocal interplay at the end of "Bloodhail" is rather intriguing.
"Deep, Deep" is kind of a frustrating song to listen to. The basic post-punk-ish groove of it has a nice energy to it, and I like the synth melody that plays over it at 1:32. The chord progression and guitar playing is messier than I'd prefer, but I sort of dig the vibe to it in spite of myself. The vocals are double-tracked, but not quite in unison, which is kind of a fascinating sound. But for a song that's almost five and a half minutes, it becomes too repetitive and overstays its welcome. It either needs to be shorter or it needs some type of other section in the middle to break things up and give it some variety. Also, even beyond my general issues with the production of the songs overall, the mix on "Deep, Deep" is really odd. It seems to randomly become brighter at times and more muffled at others, with the snare in particular suddenly becoming significantly louder, probably most easily heard around 2:30, though the first verse at 0:34 is similar, and I found this really distracting.
Also, this is going to be a recurring theme, and I'm not sure of an easy solution to it. The vocals on these songs, as well as others later in the round, are buried in the mix and pretty boxy-sounding. On one hand, I tend to be picky about vocalists, and somewhat hiding them in the mix if I don't care for their voice is a way to make it less of a negative. On the other hand, I generally tend to like vocals that are a bit more forward, and if there's not, it tends to make songs less memorable and more like background music, which this leans towards too much of the time. The vocal melodies in general verge on the monotonous, so when I think back to these songs, I tend to remember the things that bugged me more than the elements I liked.
Score: 6.75/10
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Elite - Agent Fresco - "Anemoi", "He Is Listening", "Eyes of a Cloud Catcher", "Angst", "Yellow Lights"
Early Impression - "The drumming is fantastic. The guitar tones and vocals are not. And will I remember any of it?"
So here we have a band I'd heard an album from before, but didn't really remember anything about. And unfortunately, I think I now know why. The drumming is quite impressive throughout, and there are aspects and moments here and there that I really enjoyed, but overall this isn't connecting with me.
"Anemoi" started out fairly auspiciously, the piano intro and using tom and/or snare rims for a clacking rhythm is a rather underused technique. It actually reminds me a bit of The Reign of Kindo, a promising band I need to spend more time with from earlier rounds. I like the ride bell work at 1:39 as well, along with the piano harmonies there, and earlier at 0:40. The intro of "Eyes of a Cloud Catcher" is really cool, the drumming reminds me of some Minus The Bear songs, and the piano with it is a charming bonus. In general there's a lot of cool rhythmic interplay driven by the drumming and sometimes the guitars. The bass playing is also fairly solid. Some of the slow ascending glissando string work is useful in building tension, like at 2:05 in "Anemoi".
But most of my issues center around the vocals and the guitars. Vocal-wise, I just don't really care for the timbre of them. It's a bit of a challenge to listen to throughout, but it's most noticeable in the upper ranges. "Yellow Nights" is probably the best song to illustrate this. At 1:09 he goes up quite a lot into his falsetto range, and that's just a very risky style for me in general. And then at 1:55 when things become more intense, he does more caterwauling, and all that warbling just tends to be grating for me.
And then most of the guitar tones are just a miss for me. When they try to go heavier, the tone is just really scratchy and brittle, across a variety of different rhythm sounds. Karnivool in a later writeup will occasionally use sounds like these for contrast, but here they're the main focus, and just feel really thin and weak. Even the more Meshuggah-ish low tones like at 0:42 in "Angst" lack the power they need to sound more effective. The acoustic at 3:11 in "Eyes of a Cloud Catcher" is nice, but it's such a brief section. And then "Yellow Nights" at 0:04 probably has the most acceptable electric ones, there's a compressed funkiness to them that works better for that rhythm part. And then while I don't love the tone of it, the seesawing riff at 0:36 is pretty cool.
Score: 6.75/10
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twosuitluke - Coheed and Cambria - "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3", "Gravity's Union"
Early Impression - "You may have sent the wrong songs."
Back in the 00s there seemed to be this massive wave of all of these bands coming out of the post-hardcore and emo scenes that were a bit in the alternative rock direction, and also had elements that appealed to progressive rock fans. Coheed and Cambria seems to have become one of the ones with the most staying power and has maintained a more revered status for a lot of people. I'm not sure how much is simple longevity and how much is the musicianship and proggier musical tendencies. I sampled a lot of these bands back then, and found interesting elements at times musically, but one fairly constant turn-off for me was how many had this thin, nasal, helium vocal style, and C&C fall right into that. I know I listened to at least one of their albums at the time, and saw a few videos. I've mostly ignored them since then, though Claudio in particular has popped up on a few other things I've heard here and there.
My musical preferences have evolved a fair amount since then, so are things any better now? Well, not really. There are a lot of engaging guitar parts scattered throughout their work, and I can see their appeal in that regard. But Claudio's vocals don't resonate with me any more now than they did back then. They're not as bad as some of the other vocals in earlier rounds or even in this one, and there are some fairly catchy melodies from time to time (the section at 5:02 in "Gravity's Union" is especially hooky), but I still find them distracting on the whole, and wonder if they would connect with me more with a different vocalist.
I suppose it's hardly a new problem for prog bands, many of the OG ones had polarizing vocalists as well. The most obvious comparison here is Rush. Part of what has held me back from being a superfan of Rush is Geddy's voice, which I perhaps had an advantage in hearing fairly early on, so I had more time to acclimate to it, but it's always been a sticking point for me with them, and C&C have a similar, but arguably even worse problem, since the gap between the vocals and the instrumentation/songwriting is even larger. I'm not sure how much of it is inherently Claudio's voice vs. their background in post-hardcore/emo, which are genres I've historically found very little from to be compelling, so far anyway, I haven't explored them deeply.
But in these songs, there's an additional issue, in that the mixes for the albums are really muddy-sounding, most noticeably on the guitars, though a bit on the drumming (particularly the cymbals) as well. And it's not like sludge metal where the murkiness of the tones is part of the point. There are some razor-sharp riffs and playing, but the opacity of how they're recorded renders them a lot weaker than they could be. You're definitely going to have to read my writeup for Vmad's selections to see what happens on an album where they finally get that facet right.
Someone earlier pointed out that TAC called the opening tone of "Gravity's Union" the worst sound he'd ever heard a guitar make. Well, I have a whole lot of worse sounds I've heard that I could show him than that... I don't actually find it all that bad other than the general issue with how it sounds like there's a blanket over the speakers, particularly for the guitar tones. That sound is just from an octave fuzz pedal, very similar to the one Jimi Hendrix used in the 60s and many artists have employed since then. The more frustrating one is at 0:20 on "In Keeping Secrets", which sounds like emphasizing the harmonics with an E-Bow, but the tone is more brittle than in various songs from earlier rounds with a similar tone.
Drum-wise, I particularly like the snare ghost notes at 0:19 on "In Keeping Secrets". The bass playing is pretty solid, with some nice independent lines from time to time. There are also some tasty synth parts here and there, though they mostly tend to be buried. I imagine the "whoas" at 6:51 are intended primarily for live crowd participation, Iron Maiden-style.
Score: 7/10
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SoundscapeMN - Apes & Androids - "Make Forever Last Forever", "Johnny & Sarah", "Riverside"
Early Impression - "Uh oh, did you get jinxed?"
Well, I guess it had to happen eventually, that you'd send something I'd only like mildly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Instrumentally, there are some intriguing elements, but the vocals really pull it down for me. They're arranged pretty interestingly, with a lot of harmonies and layers going on, but they're mostly in a falsetto range and tone that doesn't really work for me. Even when they're in a more moderate range like some of "Johnny & Sarah" they have a weird feel to them that doesn't really appeal to me.
The songwriting in general is certainly interesting, with some unusual chord changes at times. On "Make Forever Last Forever" they have quite a lot happening in terms of synthesizer, organ, electric guitar, and percussion parts (particularly at 1:55) coming in and out of the arrangement. The overdriven clavinet is an especially piquant tone. The funky vibe in general is quite refreshing. I also like the synth arpeggio at 0:48 that pans from the right to the left, those types of audio engineering tricks are often delightful. Additionally, the shuffle beat also has a nice vibe to it.
On "Johnny & Sarah" the opening guitar riffs are pretty cool, but they have a similar thin and brittle tone that Agent Fresco's from this round did that isn't really to my taste. "Riverside" is rather unique with the incorporation of horns and acoustic guitar, I particularly enjoyed the opening fingerpicking bit. The guitar harmony at 3:38 is pretty nice - kind of Queen-like.
It's just that the number of thrilling elements isn't as high as it was like with say, Pepe Deluxé, and the vocals dilute the enjoyment of what I do like. Well, maybe we can just write this round off as a chance for a few others to prevent your lead from becoming insurmountable. :-)
Score: 7/10
Topic: LithoJazzoSphere Roulette V1: Variety & Reciprocity (Post-Roulette Playlist) (Read 119446 times)