FAVORITES:
MAGNETIC LETTERS AND WRECKDOM AND BROWN
Berkeley Social Scene: I would have mixed the vocals a little bit higher in the chorus and turned the guitars down just a smidge. There’s something about the way the vocals are mixed that just doesn’t sit right with me, but I can’t place exactly what. There’s just something kind of muddy about them? Maybe I’d EQ out some of the low end and put some light compression on them. That chiming guitar line on the other hand, I would love some more of that! I would also love a fish fry every friday night.
Brown Word and the Big Whine: Knowing that this is just the audio from the living room recording makes it a lot more charming. I know I’ve said it before, but despite my usual tastes, I find myself usually liking your more stripped down songs more than your more experimental/production heavy ones. I had to look up what “Torsk” was cause I really had no idea, apparently I’m not scandinavian enough to know! Ditto for poor man’s lobster. Though I find it amusing that there’s a dish called that cause a long time ago lobster *was* poor man’s food. Oh well. I find this very charming.
Cavedwellers: Good melody. Good progression. I can’t really complain much about it. Personally I find the chord progression a bit too cookie cutter, but then again complaining about too much I IV V in songfight is a fools errand because – well, it works, and me complaining about it is probably a bit pretentious. Ending seems a bit sloppy and abrupt, like what happened with the drum recording there? Guitar solo is well executed, and I get why this did so well in the live stream.
Hot Pink Halo: I complained that the Berkeley Social Scene entry had kind of muffled vocals and yours suffers from the same issue - I would turn up your vocals just a bit and turn the guitars down a little bit. The hard panning on them also seems a bit extreme. I love the little electronic beep doops. And also I just found myself wishing for a bit more harmonic complexity and moving away from I IV V chord progressions in the Cavedwellers song and this song is just as heavily I IV V so it triggers my inner snob. I think it’s probably cause that’s the first chord progression I ever learned about and so I always consciously avoid it but it works so whatever. Just as I learned about torsk from BW+BW’s song, I learned about kedgeree from yours. So much regional variation in fish dishes!
Johnny Cashpoint: Okay this is wonky and lo fi and very wonky and very lo fi. Did you bit crush the entire mix? It sounds like this was encoded at a low enough bit rate to be in the backgrounds of a newgrounds video I washed 20 years ago. This goes on a little bit longer than I feel like it should given the nature and simplicity of the song. And maybe it’s because nearly all of the other ones this week are very short. That said - I must disagree with your insinuation that spending your last days playing scrabble would be a boring way to go, as I positively love scrabble and wish that more people would play it with me. I used to have this friend Tim who I’d play with all the time, and he would always kick my ass and nearly triple my score. Then he moved away. Sigh.
That upwards modulation in the instrum ... ]Night Sky[/b]: You said you borrowed a traditional melody here but I can’t for the life of be tell you what it was! It reminds me of something that I’ve heard in maybe a Doobie Brothers song or something? Maybe it just has a “traditional sound to it”. I personally would have liked to hear a bit more done with the unison in the guitar and the whistling, or just turning down the guitar a notch relative to the whistling. This is charming and I enjoy it a lot.
Phlub: My coworker told me about how his mom worked with the poisoner/serial killer Michael Swango briefly in the 1970s and it got me wanting to write a song about a guy who poisons a bunch of people at a fish fry and disappears. So yeah that’s basically what this is about. If I had to do something differently, I’d have turned the bass down slightly, the guitar up a bit, and not hit that Db major chord at the end of the guitar solo and left it minor. And maybe done something different with the bass during the solo, cause that chromatic modulation sounded wrong right before coming into the third verse. And maybe screamed a bit more at the end, drawing out my demise a bit.
Pigfarmer Jr: Well this is quite a departure from the aesthetic in your life performance. Much more distortion! Much more enunciation too! Anyway, this was short and sweet and made me giggle then and it remains short and sweet and still makes me giggle so three cheers for writing songs for songfight.
Rocktronik: There’s a specific song –
https://vrsex.bandcamp.com/track/sacred-limousine-2 – that has a remarkably similar chord progression and rhythm running through the first verse that I can’t shake the resemblance to. Maybe because I’ve specifically ripped it off before (The Password is ____, minus the vocal cadence). Your track is way more melodic and maybe I’m just trippin in hearing a resemblance. All that aside, I enjoyed this – would have picked a slightly different set of drum sounds, but all in all pretty enjoyable.
WreckdoM: I told Mel you better enter and I’m happy to see this here. Double kick! Echo-ey death growls! Some grungy/sludgy riffing that takes over the song halfway through. And I love the way the bass is mixed here. This is exactly what I wanted to hear from you, so A+! And pinch harmonics galore. Good job, thank you for your service.