Stadler - Replicants - "Ibiza Bar"
Early Impression - "I don't remember taking LSD, but I somehow must have."
I don't think I've ever heard of this band, but I am a casual Pink Floyd fan, so I may have heard the original at some point, but it's not a song of theirs I knew well, certainly. I did listen to it for comparison though. Conceptually, it's an interesting idea, to take some classic songs and revitalize them for a newer era. I can enjoy a good cover, either sticking fairly close to the original but adding a dash of a band's own flavor, or totally reworking the song in a thoughtful way. But unfortunately, this seems to be the first true misfire from you, because it doesn't quite capture either the things I liked about Pink Floyd originally, or what can make the 90s alt rock bands unique in the musical ecoscape.
So this group is comprised of members of Failure (a band I've heard some rave reviews about, but nothing from the limited amount I've sampled has stuck yet), and Paul D'Amour, formerly of Tool, one of my favorite bands, though more for the Justin Chancellor era.
The intro is rather clever, both incorporating a heartbeat, as Dark Side of the Moon does, plus a sample of an orchestra tuning to A440, which is hardly a novel trick, but both together is a bit different. The ending is also rather unique, with the audience applause gradually turning into static. The baby cry might be another reference of sorts (perhaps a track on The Wall?, or possibly another ending of a PF song/album), but I'm not quite a big enough fan of theirs to be certain.
Perhaps one of the elements that they replicate (wait, did I really just type that?) is how PF were integral in bringing more atmosphere and audio manipulation into rock, that you could do more with the texture of notes and sound in a studio environment. More specifically, my favorite thing about it is easily that psychedelic tremolo guitar chording that propels much of the song. I've always loved effects pedals on guitar, and that is a really cool sound. It seems blended at times with another track of more normal clean electric strumming, which gives it a bit more bite through the chord changes so it's not just an amorphous cloud.
The more lead-ish reversed guitar bits are all over the place, both in the stereo spectrum, and in how they alter my enjoyment of it. At times they add a bit of spice, and in other moments they might go a bit too much into the realm of atonal-ish noisy noodling for me. I'm not generally a fan of noise rock or adjacent styles, though I admittedly haven't heard a ton of them, but as I've noted in various earlier writeups, those sorts of elements generally only work for me in limited doses to accent an otherwise already well-working track, and this wasn't quite to that point yet, as I'll go into further.
The vocals are also a bit of a challenge. They've always been one of my least-favorite aspects of Pink Floyd, and here they kind of mimic that descending pitch fall-off that PF does a lot, and it doesn't really work any better for them. The organ in the background is a tad bland, but it's not that prominent, and without it the track would be even more sparse, which would likely be to its detriment. Given that the original is a full-band arrangement, I'm curious about their decision to strip it back so much, and whether other covers on this album are like that. It just seems a bit long to plod along as it does without drums and not much in the way of dynamics, which was one thing that alternative rock bands tended to excel at.
Score: 6.75/10
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Puppies_On_Acid - Chrome Waves - "A Grief Observed"
Early Impression - "The harsh vocals might be holding this back some."
Instrumentally, this tune is pretty solid. I love the sound of the synthesizer filter sweeps in the opening, and the violin throughout creates a beautiful atmosphere. I wish it was used for a bit more than mostly just held note drones, but it does elevate the song a bit. The clean-ish chorused guitar tones have a nice texture to them, and the short melodic leads like at 1:39 and other spots are nice. I also like the cymbal work on the ride, bell, and China in the section at 5:15.
But the vocals unfortunately aren't doing much for me. The cleans are alright, but the harshes just aren't really the type I like, they're too much in the hardcore-influenced direction for my palate.
Score: 7/10
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Crow - Midnight Odyssey - "From a Frozen Wasteland"
Early Impression - "I like the spaciousness of the atmosphere, but the guitars have no weight to them."
I'm starting to suspect that you have no end to the variety of different ways your submissions are going to challenge my tastes. They're mostly not scoring that well, but they are certainly making me think more deeply and in different ways about why I do and don't like various musical elements, which is useful in its own right. So now the challenge isn't noisiness or hard to swallow vocals, but length, cohesion, and guitar tones. I've heard one Midnight Odyssey album before, and it was alright, but didn't entice me to explore any further. Conceptually, the idea of the general genre of the band is intriguing. I like some ambient music, and I love space and cosmic themes.
As I've noted a number of times, it's fairly rare for a song much past 10:00 to be an enduring favorite of mine. I'm not entirely sure why, if I try and deconstruct it. There are plenty of full albums I love, and those are quite often more than a half-hour in duration, sometimes well over an hour. My times of actually sitting down for that full duration and doing nothing but listening to the album are pretty nonexistent though, even less so nowadays than in the past. Part of the fun of this roulette has been forcing myself to do nothing but listen to the songs and take notes for the first three plays.
I think maybe the challenge is the unit of consumption. It's a bit easier to just listen to a few songs at a time, having the ability to pick back up on the next track later if necessary than it is to just pause at a specific timestamp and resume later in a single song. But I have no issue doing that with podcasts, long-form videos and such, so it may be some kind of mental block, I'm not sure.
I just have to wonder how much more digestible this would be as 4-5 separate movements, or even just a couple. As it is, it's also challenging to give it as much time as other songs in the roulette. While I did listen to it a fair number of times, I'm not sure I've quite reached the dozen+ I usually try to go for. 22 minutes is just a big meal to take in all at once, since I prefer listening to it when I can hear it in full to properly contextualize it.
So more specifically about the song itself, I really like how it begins - the first four minutes or so have a great ambient vocal quality, and I could probably enjoy a whole album of just that if done well. Honestly, the key probably helps a bit too. The second quarter of the song is just ok, but it introduces probably my biggest problem, which is that guitar tone. It's just such a thin, staticy sound, and it's ubiquitous among many second wave, raw black metal, and other atmospheric black metal bands I've checked out. I mostly like chunkier guitar sounds, and this one bugs me. The closest I come to liking them is in the section starting at 8:28. For the next minute or so they have this fascinating digital oscillating grind to them that is actually kind of piquant.
The guitar work also puts it into a weird realm, where it's a bit too abrasive a sound to make for effective ambient music, but it's too weak (and without drums at this point) to have the power of good metal. The third quarter of the song improves a bit, although once the drums enter it continues to exist in that liminal space of being way too intense and frantic to be properly atmospheric, but there is so much reverb that the murkiness keeps the metallic aspect from being hard-hitting and punchy enough. Conceptually I love the idea of combining metal with more atmosphere, but I find it much easier to execute in death-doom or even some prog/djent-adjacent material than in black metal. Although I do have a few other potential candidates to try out in your next roulette, assuming I don't get bounced in a prelim. 14:23 is probably the high point of the song for me, with the most epic feeling, though the guitars continue to hold it back.
Score: 7/10
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Buddyhunter1 - Thy Catafalque - "Molekuláris Gépezetek"
Early Impression - "This song only has enough ideas to support half of its runtime."
Well, so here we have another super-long song. I suppose you could apply some of my same qualms with this type of tune from Midnight Odyssey to this one as well. I guess this one of the ways that I'm less of a prog fan than some people here, because I know you guys seem to eat these up, but they rarely connect with me as much. A lot of my favorite songs are more in the 5-10 minute range, with a smaller but decent number a few minutes over that, but I historically haven't had much success with durations longer than that. I've been willing to explore them some in this roulette, but so far nothing has really changed my paradigm there yet. But this song is also challenging for somewhat different reasons.
I've heard a bit of Tamás' work before. There was some hype about him back in the mid-00s, and between that and curiosity about the odd name I know I listened to at least one album at the time and remember liking it, but it wasn't something I came back to. Fast forward well over a decade and I decided to dip my toes back in with Naiv, which made me question my memories of his earlier work a bit because of its flaws. Then Vadak resonated with me a bit more, but what I'm hearing in this track is a tad closer to Naiv, which had a lot of interesting ideas, but felt half-baked.
Going along with the length, I think one of the challenges of auteurs like him that are primarily responsible for much of what you hear on the album is that at times he's badly in need of an editor or outside voice. There is a better 10-minute song buried in here, but he lets some of these ideas run for too long. And as with Midnight Odyssey, this song is a lot to take in, so it's harder to get in quite as many listens compared to others in the roulette, which hampers it from having as much of a chance to grow on me.
The drums are pretty obviously programmed, which is quite common with these types of projects, and while they sound ok, I always tend to wonder, particularly for projects that have been going on for as long as this one has, why he couldn't wait a bit longer and hire someone to perform them, which would have a better chance at elevating the material. The drums sound best near the ending, which has more of an industrial metal feel, so the synthetic quality is more amenable to that vibe.
But this plagues other elements as well. For example, that saxophone motif that pops up at 8:41 and other spots is kind of a cool melody, but it's so blatantly unnatural-sounding that it really detracts from my enjoyment of it. Especially when some of the other instruments in that section are much better handled. The sine wave-ish synth sounds cool, and the violin and clarinet in that part are actually played, which helps a lot. And then the guest vocals are great.
And unfortunately, that whole middle portion of the song from a little before 6 minutes to a little after 15 is just way too long for what it accomplishes. There are a few captivating segments scattered about it, but so much of it is either highly repetitive or just feels like filler without much progression. Maybe it would sound better in an altered state of being. It's paradoxical, because in ways it feels like not enough is happening, and in other ways particularly with the first and last quarters of the song added back in, it feels like he's just throwing in every idea he can think of, including the kitchen sink, and not quite enough of it really lands.
There are elements I enjoyed more though. For example, the bass solo at 3:00 is pretty cool. The rim clacking at 14:34 is nice. I like the guitar tone at 4:16, and while it probably wouldn't work as a rhythm tone, it is effective for that type of part. There is an tasty melody at 1:33, probably from a synthesizer, but it's regrettably buried too much in the mix. The aquatic sound textures in the section starting at 5:49 are pretty delightful. I enjoy the timbre of the one at 7:40 as well, and the sparkling pad on the left at 8:57. The one at 7:09 simultaneously makes me feel like playing a fantasy video game, and also sounds kind of like the instrumental middle of Type O Negative's "Red Water (Christmas Mourning)".
Score: 7/10
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Vmadera00 - Forest of Shadows - "Self Inflicted Torment"
Early Impression - "This seems to have most of the right elements, but for some reason isn't clicking with me."
On paper, I should enjoy this more. A Swedish doom band, a low tuning, solid growled vocals mixed with some cleans, occasional acoustic guitar, a few melodic leads, audible bass playing, and a lot of Mellotron throughout. The clean vocals are a bit weird but oddly comforting, sounding a tad like a cross between Mikael Stanne and Tom G. Warrior. And running through them through a Leslie speaker at 0:29 is an intriguing effect.
So this song was a bit of an enigma to me. It seems to have most of the right ingredients, but it just didn't all quite come together for me and wasn't quite memorable enough. Maybe it's just not the right song from the artist, because the combination of everything else makes me think there's a higher possibility for me to like something from them than most entries that typically score in this range. I could say it felt a bit overlong for the amount of different ideas it has, but I suspect if I liked the ideas more I wouldn't mind marinating in them for longer. The Mellotron is an especially unusual timbre to have in this type of song, so maybe another tune with it but which focused on the lower range of the tuning more would hit better.
It looks like at least on this album, this is a one-man-band. Conceptually I should like that a lot more, given that I'm a multi-instrumentalist myself. And while listening to it, it's not obvious that it's all coming from one person. But for some reason it's pretty rare for projects coming from a single individual to be my favorites. It just seems there's some ineffable chemistry that's often lost in that setting, and it generally sounds better when you have contrasting ideas from multiple people happening simultaneously, at least for my tastes. I don't know, when something isn't quite working, I start looking to more tentative possible explanations like that to try and make sense of things.
Score: 7.25/10
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twosuitluke - Drewsif Stalin's Musical Endeavors - "Mirage"
Early Impression - "The guest vocals seem rather underutilized."
And the winner for the weirdest band name of the round goes to... I can see why he just goes as DSME or Drewsif now, the full name is kind of cringey and probably concocted after a night of way too much fun. But the music is what's most important for me anyway. I'd heard a few of his tunes in the past, including this one, but hadn't really spent much time on them yet (maybe because of the name?, hmm...these sorts of bands have a habit of shooting themselves in the foot in that fashion).
A lot of people on this forum and elsewhere in music super-fandom seem to be over and done with anything too djent-related, but honestly I still enjoy it quite a bit when it's done well, as it is here. The opening drum figure is pretty cool, and pretty well-programmed. The Anup Sastry drum cover of an early demo of this is fun to watch as well, it's too bad he couldn't have hired him to record it originally, since Anup has done great work for a lot of similar bands.
As the impression notes, Nikki seems underused for just a 20-second interlude and some backing harmony vocals. I think it's a case of expectations, when a guest vocalist is listed as being featured, I generally anticipate they're going to be incorporated more. Drew's voice is ok, and doesn't knock the score down any, but it's not quite strong or rich enough on its own compared to the best bands in this style, though certainly much more listenable than the worst exponents of it. The growls might be a smidge better than the cleans.
That transition at 3:44 from piano to the heavy riff and guitar harmonies is a lot of fun. And then I love how much mileage he gets out of the tapping harmony riff starting at 4:32, starting with the slow filter sweep, having another guitar harmony become more prominent for a bit at 4:39, and then that slicer effect at 5:11 is thrilling.
Score: 7.75/10
Topic: LithoJazzoSphere Roulette V1: Variety & Reciprocity (Post-Roulette Playlist) (Read 117030 times)