ROUND 7 RESULTSKing Puppies and the Acid Guppies
Deathspell Omega
The Shrine of Mad Laughter
III
3 pointsI guess I don’t really get this style, it just feels like stuff stacked on top of stuff without thought for how it meshes together, and the end result is just a sort of noisy mush. The drums are frenetic but they’re not mixed like they’re a supporting instrument so they get in the way of everything else. The guitars wander around doing all sorts of stuff, but never settle into anything interesting, and the harsh vocals seem not particularly good and also weirdly disconnected from the music, like they’re a commentary track over everything else. The first track and especially the second one also have a fair amount of quiet, interlude-y bits, but they also don’t really
do anything, it’s just some blank space with some creepy sounds in the background. I don’t hate this, but I also don’t know how to get anything out of it.
TAC
Dreamgrave
Black Spiral
Monuments
4 pointsSimilar to Deathspell Omega, the baseline style here just doesn’t really work for me. The harsh vocals aren’t very good, and the female vocals in the background are an interesting idea but melodically I don’t find them particularly interesting and they don’t feel like they meld with the rest of the music. Monuments is much more clean vocal-focused, and unfortunately the melodies just feel completely lacking there as well, although I do like the Serj Tankian bits near the end. I guess the songs feel a bit directionless to me, even though some of the individual interlude bits are actually really cool, like the piano into the synth solo in Black Spiral.
LithoJazzoSphere
The Phantom Elite
Conjure Rains
Eyes Wide Open
The Race
Titanium
5 pointsThere’s nothing about this that I actively dislike, I just can’t seem to connect to any of it in a meaningful way. On paper I like this sort of metal, there’s some heavy riffing, a good vocal performance, and a sort of modern/electronic tinge, but execution-wise there’s just something missing for me. The melodies don’t really do anything for me, and instrumentally it often goes into plod mode for the choruses, although the faster, riffier stuff in the non-vocal sections doesn’t really move me either. I don’t know, I can’t really explain it, it’s just not clicking at all.
Stadler
Oasis
Fade Away
Stay Young
I'm Outta Time
Roll It Over
5 pointsThis is perfectly nice rock music, but I think it’s lacking any sort of standout feature for me. The vocal performance is fine, not super strong but works well enough, the music is solid enough but isn’t really doing anything to take it out of the background. There’s definitely a few good hooks in here, but I find they tend to get repeated way too much. The main melody of Roll it Over, for instance, is quite good, but it feels played out by the end of the song because there’s not much else that stands out. I will say that I really like I’m Outta Time, though; I think his voice works much better in this context rather than pretending he’s a rock singer, and with an interesting lead to the song, the music works great as a support even though it’s still not doing anything exceptional.
twosuitsluke
Somali Yacht Club
Sightwaster
Up in the Sky
5 pointsThe real downfall of most of this type of stoner rock/metal for me is ideas seem to get stretched out far thinner than they should be. Sightwaster, for instance, is mostly instrumental and it’s fine, but like most instrumental music I find that it just feels like regular music that forgot to add any vocals, and Up in the Sky is sort of the same, even though there’s more vocals they don’t vary much, and just crop up for a bit and then go away for some more decent but not exciting stoner-y guitar wandering. It’s a shame, because the brief section at the end of Sightwaster where the half-yelled vocals come in is genuinely fantastic. I wish they would have turned that into a song.
Crow
Clarence Clarity
Let's Shoot Up
Those Who Can't, Cheat
Meadow Hopping, Traffic Stopping, Death Splash
1-800-Worship
Cancer™ in the Water
5 pointsThis one is kind of frustrating because there’s a lot of ideas I like here, but they’re pretty consisently either buried or surrounded by stuff I find really annoying. Let’s Shoot Up is one of two tracks I’d say I like. The main vocal melody is good; it’s broken up weirdly like someone chopped it into bits and rearranged it, but I actually dig that, and the semi-random musical shifts
largely work as well. What doesn’t work for me is when those shifts take it into something that sounds detuned, like Those Who Can’t, Cheat, or dissonant, or just plain noisy like 1-800-Worship where (like Deathspell Omega) there’s just a bunch of stuff playing on top of each other. I don’t mind chaos, but I do need to to be musical chaos. That’s really the frustration for me, because a lot of stuff here I like, like the weirdo kazoo + vocoder intro to Meadow Hopping, it just gets drowned by the stuff I don’t. Cancer in the Water is where everything comes together; it’s still chaotic, but everything is
in tune and melodic and works together. I genuinely love that song, I wish the rest of this was more like it.
Sacul
Anna von Hausswolff
Mountains Crave
Discovery
The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra
5 pointsMountains Crave is a great song, with a really unique pipe organ backing, great vocal melodies and a great vocal performance. I really like this sort of Susanne Sundforcore when it’s done well. Discovery is a 7 minute instrumental build up with a sort of interesting section right at the end, but feels a bit like a wasted opportunity. The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra has a cool PJ Harvey vibe, but then it just sort of does the same thing for the whole runtime, and the singer relies
way too much on that woooooo up to the really high pitch trick. It’s cool once, over and over it gets pretty tiring.
Dr. DTVT
Kyros
In Motion
Rumour
Illusions Inside
6 pointsI really like the core sound these guys have, it’s like 80s pop but with more engaging instrumentals. In Motion and Rumour are both really good, the melodies are catchy and the vocalist’s got a great voice, and the music keeps changing up enough to keep it interesting, but not so much that it takes over and distracts from the song. Illusions Inside kind of goes the other way; the vocal melodies aren’t nearly as strong and it feels like there’s a lot less sonic depth to them, and the instrumental work is less interesting, especially the weird fuzzy/industrial riffs that crop occasionally, they feel really out of place tonally. It seems like I should pick up the album the first two are from, and give the last one a miss.
Buddyhunter1
death's dynamic shroud
What? to be human
The Bleeding of the Sun
In the Clouds Hearing Voices
6 pointsI really like a lot of the sound here, but I think a lot of the best ideas get kind of bogged down in repetition. Like, What? to be human has the great ‘I can’t do it - I’m only human’ buildup, and when they get the end, they just decide to squander it by repeating ‘human’ over and over again at different pitches. Why? It just kills all the momentum of the song. In the Clouds Hearing Voices is similar in how it repeats the main nonsense lyrics melody, but it is actually a pretty good melody so it sort of works. Musically I also find them to be oscillating between interesting and kind of boring; the pseudo-orchestral stuff I really like, the plodding electric maybe-guitar really suck the energy away. The Bleeding of the Sun is the best track here, maybe because it’s structured like an actual song, although there’s less of the off-the-wall weirdness that I did like in the other tracks. I wish they could bring those two together and drop the uninspired stuff. I seem to remember you saying different band members play on different albums, is there one that has just the stuff I like, or am I always going to be taking the bad with the good?
King Postwhore
Dada
Dizz Knee Land
Mary Sunshine Rain
Scum
Baby Really Loves Me
6 pointsI definitely like this sort of grunge/post grunge (pre-post grunge?) sound when it’s done well. The upbeat (for grungey stuff) Dizz Knee Land has really great vocal melodies and understated guitar work and it really works for me, although the instrumental break in the middle feels really out of place and kind of forced. Mary Sunshine Rain and Scum pull it down for me, they’re not terrible, but the vocal lines aren’t as interesting, and they’ve got that characteristic almost unpleasant grungey style of harmonies that’s never really worked for me. But then we’re back to being great again with Baby Really Loves Me which starts with quiet, eerie guitars and vocals and builds into grungey heaviness and a surprising guitar solo. I’m giving this a middling score since that how it evens out, but the two tracks I like I think are really strong.
wolfking
Mors Principium Est
Departure
Monster in Me
We Are The Sleep
7 pointsThis is just really good, solid metal. Harsh vocals are great, guitars are heavy, and it’s varied enough to stay interesting but nothing ever feels forced or random. In particular I like how the guitar keeps riffing underneath the vocal sections, where I feel like a lot of metal dumbs down the guitar parts when there’s vocals in top, which sometimes works, but often for me at least ends up robbing the songs of momentum. That’s probably one of the things that drew me to prog music in the first place; that sense that every instrument is doing its own thing rather than just sitting back. I guess nothing
quite pushes this into the higher scoring zone, but the flipside is there’s really no weaknesses here, it’s just quality all the way through.
ariich
Whispered
Tsukiakari
Victory Grounds Nothing
Unrestrained
7 pointsThat Wintersun-y power metal influence in the keyboard work is right up my alley (actually the Japanese influence feels kind of Wintersun-y too, weirdly). It’s a simple equation, the more power metal something is, the more I like it.
It’s best used on Tsukiakari, where they give time to really build those epic sections. But this is still mainly a melodeath band, and the riffing and the harsh vocals are really killer everywhere, and the unconventional Japanese instruments both mix into the metal surprisingly well, and give it a really unique flavor (for all that I just compared it to Wintersun, they’re still pretty different). The only thing that doesn’t really work for me is the (shockingly) power metally clean vocals on Victory Grounds Nothing; this is a very specific thing to dislike, but I rarely find that sort of ‘medieval bar song’ type of melody works for me, for whatever reason. The rest of it, though…
jingle.boy
Triumph
Hold On
Fight the Good Fight
Magic Power
7 pointsThis is what Rush would sound like if they’d been a bit less proggy and bit more straight forward arena rocky, and it’s a really great. The vocalist (Rik Emmett? Am I remembering that right?) isn’t super powerful, but he puts so much energy into it and he’s got a nice, Steve Perry-ish smoothness on the really melodic lines. The music’s great too, it never plods or stagnates, but it doesn’t get in the way of great songs either. Fight the Good Fight I’m not totally in love with, there’s some really nice guitar soloing but vocally it’s not as strong as the other two, but the other two are really damn strong, and I feel like it might grow on me.
hefdaddy42
Jason Isbell
Cover Me Up
Elephant
24 Frames
Hurricanes and Hand Grenades
7 pointsGoddamn this guy is a great singer. He’s not necessarily much of a wailer, but there’s just so much feeling that he puts across when he’s singing. The lyrics are really good, like you mentioned, enough that I actually noticed whereas I’m normally not paying that much attention to lyrics. Maybe that’s why I don’t like a lot of country stuff, because the relatively stripped down instrumentation draws more attention to the voice, and a lot of country lyrics are just kind of stupid? Or it could have nothing to do with that, who the hell knows. The point that I’m wandering away from is that I really like this, or the first three tracks at least. Hurricanes and Hand Grenades isn’t terrible, but that sort of style (the name of which I’m completely blanking on now) rarely works for me. It just feels sort of hokey, I guess? In contrast to the rest of the songs here which feel really directly sincere.
lonestar
Nemophila
AMA-TE-RAS
ZEN
炎天 -ENTEN-
OIRAN
8 pointsOriginally for first impressions I was going to do a band each submission reminded me of, but then I ended up being really busy and had to focus on work that Friday so I didn’t end up following through on that, but the group I was going to compare this one to is Dir En Grey. Not necessarily musically, but just in terms of her harsh vocals; it’s a really interesting strained kind of scream I hardly ever hear outside of Kyo, and she sounds fantastic. Like you suspected, this stuff is just really up my alley. I love the heavy core brutality, and I think they get the balance right by leaning more into that, but the clean sections are really nice too, and there’s some really great shredding which I really like when it’s used sparingly like this.
soupytwist
First Aid Kit
Stay Gold
Fireworks
The Last One
My Silver Lining
8 pointsSoupy, you’ve done it again.
This is just really lovely stuff, it’s got a really lush, full sound even though it’s relatively sparse instrumentally. I can’t tell whether they sing lead on different tracks or if one always sings lead and the other harmonizes, so I’ll just say that whoever is singing has a really great, expressive voice. This all sits pretty comfortably in the indie rock zone, but it’s got more range than a typical band in that genre does, and it’s that kind of variety that really seems to get me interested a lot of the time. You’re kind of running away with the roulette at this point, honestly, just got to nail that last submission! (no pressure)
STANDINGS:soupytwist 53
ariich 50
lonestar 50
hefdaddy42 47
Dr. DTVT 46
King Puppies and the Acid Guppies 45
LithoJazzoSphere 45
wolfking 44
Stadler 43
Sacul 43
Buddyhunter1 42
TAC 40
twosuitsluke 39
jingle.boy 39
King Postwhore 39
Crow 37
All right everyone, that's a wrap on round 7, and now it's time for the final round of the roulette! In technical sense some of you are extremely dead beyond hope of resuscitation, but on the other hand, who gives a shit? It's not like I was actually going to give out that cash prize anyway, so what do you have to lose? Besides, I might decide to award 20 points to someone next time, or zero out TAC's score for fun. Anything can happen. Submissions will be due at roughly 7:00 this Thursday evening in local shadow ninja time, so feel free to over or underthink your final submission as much as seems reasonable to you.
Round playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3hGmwbff85I47MI3a56RRK
Topic: Shadow Ninja's Homestuck roulette: obama's rap solo (Read 33675 times)
