Oh, Dawling! What's for dinner? (The Idle Rich reviews)

[Pigfarmer Jr]

"When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich". - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[Pigfarmer Jr]

Please place the lyric to your song here: viewtopic.php?t=12762

[Lunkhead]

Songs posted!

[jb]

Berkeley Social Scene:

Dunno about the resolution to that chorus chord prog... and I am undecided about the phase effect on the vocal in that chorus. I am just a ball of questions.

Chumpy:

Needs a shaker.

EDGE STREET BOYZ:

I do not like this poem.

Grace Falls:

30 minutes, a bunch of Logic Studio Players, a vocoder, and one AI male-to-female vocal transformer, et voila. I was happy that by cranking the Complexity and Fill settings on the Logic Studio Keyboard player plugin I could kind of get it to make a piano solo.

Hanky Code:

There's an obvious comparison, but I feel like this is too good to diminish it. I loved this. The harmony lines work really well. The offset phrase rhythms are fun to follow.

Johnny Cashpoint:

The best rhyme for "rich" is definitely "ditch". I am on board with that. "I won't outlive the idle rich, you'll find my body in a ditch."

V4nnim3l:

This feels like a throwback to early Song Fight. I dig the fast chorus. Fun, and well done song.

Yaks of the Industry:

Me and Mo. Mo did the Santana-style guitars. Let the world around me wither away.

[Jerkatorium]

Would've been a great time for a 2J1V review podcast but at this point it looks like that won't happen.

I feel like this fight must have been a mix: a couple of bands who took the typical SF composition time period (approx 10 days) to generate and submit a song, and then a bunch of artists who hadn’t planned on entering the fight but responded to Lunkhead's 05NOV call for more submissions by scrambling to generate something with no clear new deadline, all the while fearing that every extra minute of work on the song could result in missing the turnover. I can’t help but approach these reviews with that in mind.

I also want to commend all of the submitters for their efforts. It’s fabulous to submit a song by deadline, but it’s also heartening to know that the FightMaster can ask this community for more original song compositions and just… get them. Like, “Hey y’all, I’d love it if some of you out there would spend hours working on a SongFight title that you’d dismissed out of hand, kthxbai,” -- and a half dozen folks run to their DAWs. Pretty awesome.


Berkeley Social Scene:

I really like the line, “They don’t feel the weight / of a world that’s burning at the gate.” Some really neat stuff is happening with the guitar notes in my right ear. Very enjoyable. Good dynamics, good variety, good expressive vocal performance. Excellent, stylish guitar solo. It somehow seems like there’s a minuscule lag here and there with the guitars and sometimes with the vocals, and honestly I like that a lot too, Elvis Costello occasionally does that to great effect and I dig it.

Chumpy:

I wish Chumpy had sent this to me, and I wish we’d had 10 days to turn this into a rock anthem. I can hear that rock anthem within this track, within this G&G demo. We would add another verse or two, a guitar solo, clav and arpeggiator. I know we could still do that, but c’mon, let’s get real, there’s always another title a few days away. Anyway: Great melody, great chord progression. I love the drive, the attitude, the gutsy vocal delivery, the lyrics, and the potential.

EDGE STREET BOYZ:

There is plenty of good variety in the backing music. If this song was done on the fly in response to that 05NOV call for more submissions, then this is an impressive accomplishment. Part skit, part spoken word poetry, part rap. I guess the lyrics are funny? Occasionally unpleasant and sour. The flow is not great, and I believe practice, experience and repetition can improve that. Regardless I don’t really need to listen to this song again, but I’m happy and thankful that it was submitted.

Grace Falls:

This is the best song of the fight. I had no idea this was jb until I read his review above. The dearth of female artists in SongFight has long been a point of discussion, I think everyone is pretty much in agreement that more female artist submissions could improve SongFight quite a bit. But maybe not - maybe we just need more female artists who are male artists.

Just kidding, I’m not here to reinforce the binary, nor am I here to undermine it. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, and we’re all the better for it. The song is excellent, a laid back and enjoyable listen. That vocal delivery is sultry and bewitching, but I think Grace should cut back on the cigarettes.

Hanky Code:

This is me. Typical clav and arpeggiator.

Johnny Cashpoint:

No moment of this song is pleasant or enjoyable. That second verse is kinda brilliant though (no offense to Cher). I’m curious about the feedback in the background, it reminds me of Big Black.

V4nnim3l:

I suspect that the mic is of poor quality. Also the mixing needs some work; the vocals and lead guitar are much louder than the drums and rhythm guitar. There’s no bass, no low end. But it’s easy enough to ignore all of that and simply enjoy this uptempo, manic, dizzying song. It’s got a great, aggressive start and a heck of a drive. It’s a weird mix of talk-singing and melodic singing. I feel like the talk-singing of the title line might be better screamed or growled instead of the semi-shout that it is, but hey it’s not my song, you do you.

Yaks of the Industry:

Fun and stylish, really captivating. I love the vibe, the Carlos Santana guitar fills, the synths and the super-clever lyrics. This is an awesome song from the Devo intro all the way through to the grandiose cinematic dafuq outro. “I wanna wake up dead inside.”

[Lunkhead]

The results are in and the fight has been won by ... Berkeley Social Scene and Hanky Code!