Nur Ein XIX Round Five- "House of Cards"

[starfinger]

thanks for all the congratulations.. i'm too busy pinching myself over here to respond to you individually.



-craig

[furrypedro]

Congratulations to Starfy! 2 weeks in a row!
I have now equalled my (solo) personal best, woot!

I wrote these the other day but wanted to wait until the results were out before posting. There's few things worse in Nur Ein world than getting a negative comment which stokes your fears of getting cut. I have tried to be constructive, but please let me know if you'd like me to expand or rephrase.


Starfinger: The brooding atmosphere in this one is awesome. That gritty bassline is the shit and the synths add this oppressive dystopian feel which reminds me a lot of Futureworld/Redline-era Trans Am. I think I'm probably in a minority here, but I'm not totally in to your vocal stylings/lyrics. I appreciate the exhuberance and swagger. I would love to get an instrumental mix of this though. Bonus points for keeping it tight and to the point.

Moss Palace: Makes me think of Sheryl Crow covering the Ramones. As always, your production is very crisp and clean, and for this style I feel like a little more dirt and grit in the mix would suit it perhaps. Like when Karen O uses distorted vocals for more punky songs. I like that it zips along at a good pace, and the half time at the end of the chorus is a nice touch. Also, bonus points for you for keeping it nice and concise.

MechaKarp: There are things about this that make it amongst my favourite of the fight. The mathy use of 6/4 is great, and the guitars have that clean-yet-gritty sound that is reminiscent of Unwound, for example. The second section also sounds cool and the piano and strings help augment the arrangement. While it's a good transition, I'm not sure theres anything here that I would describe as a breakdown, so I'll be interested to see how the judges approach that. Also, it feels like it goes on forever; there's a bunch of moments where I think it's ending, and then it just keeps going and going. So, probably a little bit of restraint and editing would have helped.

Glennny: Kudos for taking me by surprise; electroclash wasn't what I was expecting from you, so well done for keeping us on our toes. I like when the first guitar comes in and the level of distortion fits perfectly with the electronic backdrop. In fact, the mix is one of the most impressive things about this, how you've fit various unusual elements together into one seamless whole. I like the song as it's playing, but it feels like it's missing a good hook. Even after a few listens I struggle to recall any refrains or lyrics (other than the title) once it's over.

The Friends: I think of all the songs in this fight, this is the one that hits me in the feels the most and has the most memorable lead melody. It feels well formed, the breakdown isn't in your face but it definitely helps the development of the song. Probably considering the relatively slow pace of the track I wonder if even a little more dynamic change like that would have helped. The guitars and drums all sound good, but I'm concerned about the mix, which is a little thin, everything sounds a bit far away and lacks the punch of most of the other songs in the fight. I know, it's not mix fight, but these things are still a consideration. I think with more of a slick production it would've been harder for judges not to rank this highly. If there's one thing I've learned from Song Fight it's to not give people a reason to dismiss your song. I'm probably focusing on that too much, and I'm sure the strength of the song will be enough to carry it through.

Frankie Big Face: I appreciate your guts in sampling such a well known riff; go big or go home amiright? I like the rest of the arrangement. The percussion stuff going on is cool and the harmonies in the chorus are great, although (what I think of as) the chorus is a little too short to leave much of an impression. The breakdown sounds like you copied and pasted the intro into the middle of the song. I do like the various sonic manipulations you did on that percussive sound, but as a breakdown it sounds like one of the laziest of the group. Normally I don't care too much about the challenge, but I think this one gave a good opportunity for dynamic shifts and I expected you would do more with it than you did (though I may be missing something that you did, in which case I apologise!). Your organ work here is really good, and evokes "Fly Like an Eagle" to me.

Wading into the discussion above further, but in this day and age I feel it's ridiculous to decry a piece of music for sampling. Samples can be used incredibly creatively to progress music beyond the original scope of a recording, and I think Frankie acheived that to a certain extent by cutting up the riff and employing it using a melody that was in places different from the original. Also, even if somebody writes and records without sampling, they will always be influenced, or even borrow, from previous compositions. I have definitely done this and from an intellectual property perspective it's not really different from sampling. It's only from a performance perspective that it differs. All that being said, the challenge of sampling effectively is to attempt to surpass the original, and by choosing such a famous song Frankie set himself up to fail. I find it highly unlikely anybody will ever listen to "Heartbreaker" and think to themselves that they would prefer to here "House of Cards" by FBF, though I hope for Frankie's sake that I'm wrong about that. The "Under Pressure"/"Ice Ice Baby" example is 50/50 because they're both very famous, but a better example of how to do it right would be (at least for my generation) Len sampling Andrea True's "More More More" for their song "Steal My Sunshine", or almost any Daft Punk sample - I will always think of the song that uses the sample over the original song from which the sample was taken. One other thing to note is that, as somebody who samples from time to time, getting a sample to fit properly into your new composition is harder that it sounds. One pitfall Frankie has encountered is that he has taken a song with quite a straight beat and tried to fit it into a song with a shuffly rhythm. Getting the sample to fit the basic rhythm was always going to be tricky, and while Frankie has made a brave attempt which almost works, the rhythms don't 100% match and this is ultimately why the sample fails in my book, and why it works on the Ice-T song Glennny shared, because that track has a much simpler rhythm which matches the sample. Crate diggers famously spent days and days searching for just the right loop, and the luxury of time is something we don't have in Nur Ein, so Frankie can be forgiven for fluffing that one aspect of his song. What I probably would have done is to try to make a song that matches the rhythm of the sample I plan to use, rather than the other way around.

Cavedwellers: Great guitar sound and the call and answer bit in the intro is cool. The song is very meat and potatoes and there's a couple of lines that I'm not a huge fan of, but the chorus has an earworm quality more than a lot of the songs here. The breakdown is very obvious, and because it's a whole new section with no back arrangement at all it sounds a little disconnected from the rest of the song, but there's no denying you hit the challenge square on the head.

Balance Lost: This is me. I had these ideas about the transitions I wanted the song to go through, but I also wanted it to clock under 3 minutes, as a result it technically only has one verse. As Frankie pointed out, the chorus sounds a bit too similar to the verse, so once this is all over I will probably return to this to rewrite the chorus so it sounds more like a chorus when I have more time.

[frankie big face]

@furrypedro

Yeah man, I hear you. Solid points all. I did my best using Flex Time to line up that riff with the shuffle beat, but you’re probably right. Now that I have some extra time on my hands, I’m going to rework this song without the sample and see what I end up with.

P.S. I went big *and* went home!

P.P.S. I didn’t set out to use a sample at all. (Addressing the last part of your discussion — write the song around the sample.) I just found that my own guitar part was developing into something that sounded a lot like “Heartbreaker,” so I thought “Why not?” (The answer was “Because you’ll lose, dummy!”) So now I’ll go back and see what I can do to fix it. The shuffle is essential — the sample isn’t. Plus, now I don’t have to worry about licensing before releasing it to the masses.

[Siebass]

MechaKarp: There are things about this that make it amongst my favourite of the fight. The mathy use of 6/4 is great, and the guitars have that clean-yet-gritty sound that is reminiscent of Unwound, for example. The second section also sounds cool and the piano and strings help augment the arrangement. While it's a good transition, I'm not sure theres anything here that I would describe as a breakdown, so I'll be interested to see how the judges approach that. Also, it feels like it goes on forever; there's a bunch of moments where I think it's ending, and then it just keeps going and going. So, probably a little bit of restraint and editing would have helped.

Thanks for the review, I definitely could have used more time on this, and I think I agree with the editing pen as well. A lot I would have liked more time to get right (the vocals especially) but life was happening this round. That's an interesting point on the "breakdown" vs "transition" that I hadn't considered, as I have three build-up sections, (four if you count the intro) where I build up the arrangement from 1 or 2 instruments back up to full, but you are also correct in that I used them as transitions to different parts... I honestly hadn't considered a transition vs breakdown angle on it at all, as I figured cutting all the way down to percussion would count as a breakdown, but it is true that it happens to transition between the different parts of the song. It's interesting to think about at least, and perhaps that factored into the scoring (though I think song length + subpar vocal takes and timing more likely sunk the good ship MechaKarp this time).

If I come back to this, per your suggestion as well I'd probably tighten up the first breakdown part, and try to trim a bit of the in-between connecting tissue from transitions and between verses to get back closer to 4:30 or 4 minute mark where I prefer to be. Really I'd rather be in the 2-3:30 minute zone, but for this song I think I need more time for the builds to build; and FWIW, I do like how in the last part, you can think it's ending before it goes balls-out, as I think that's part of the fun surprise with the song. When I'm at my best, I'm trying to find interesting and oddly satisfying ways to surprise the listener, like all the key-swapping in Crush Season. If it was getting tiring for you, though, that means I probably need to get a cleaner trimmed version so you're not hoping for the song to end when that stuff is happening.

Thanks for taking the time to write reviews, and best of luck for the rest of the contest to you (and those that remain)!

[furrypedro]

"breakdown" vs "transition"

Yeah, you make good points and when I listen back I agree that technically what you've done is as legitimate a breakdown as any in the fight. Probably then, the issue is with the effectiveness of the breakdown. I think stripping away everything but the drums counts, but it doesn't feel like a breakdown because the percussion is still there, and personally I feel that for a breakdown the drums should be the first thing to go. So, you're right on a technicality, but it doesn't work as well as other breakdowns. Regarding the guitar breakdown, I'm getting into semantics and hair-splitting now, but that part feels more like a false ending, and then it goes into another verse instead of taking the song into new territory. It's just rehashing the intro all over again. I want to emphasise at this point that I think those are good parts in the song, but for the context of this fight and the challenge they're just not that effective, so don't go overboard with the editing hatchet too much. Outside of this fight, listeners will probably be a lot less nit-picky. Maybe a little trim might work, but it's a good song dude, so don't mess with it just cos it didn't work out here.

[Aciniform Artifice]

. I think stripping away everything but the drums counts, but it doesn't feel like a breakdown because the percussion is still there, and personally I feel that for a breakdown the drums should be the first thing to go.

There are many different valid ways to do a "breakdown" -- the one example video specifically provided by the judges has a breakdown where all instruments drop out EXCEPT percussion and vocals.