I meant to finish my reviews when I got home from work last night, but a long call came in near the end of my shift, forcing me to stay an hour and a half late. Boo hoo; pity me. Or don't, I don't care. What this means, however, is that rather than finishing the reviews at home, I'm again at work, again listening on cheap earbuds. Here's part two...
Feat - Your intro reminds me a little bit of something I probably heard on Overclocked Remix back in the early aughts. The vocals make it sound amateurish, and the lyrics don't do much better. Good flow, clever rhymes, but it feels to me like you're putting some kind of affect on your voice to make it sound "tougher." Maybe I'm completely off about that, but I do feel like you're more likely to sell the delivery if you just embrace the way your voice sounds instead of trying to overcome it. I actually like the approach to the title, as it takes shape in the "chorus." I would have liked to hear that chorus again instead of the silly studio-messing-around noises that you fade on.
Hoglen & Wages - If you're going to use an ID3 tag, please include the "artist name" field. The mandolin (or is that a banjo? My headphones kind of suck). Wages turns in another good vocal performance, and the lyrics scan well this time. The drums are obviously fake, but not distractingly so, as they're not given much to do. The fake horns that come in during the bridge are waaay too loud. Even though they're hard-panned left, they STILL manage to distract from the vocal. That's quite a feat. The mandolin isn't played very well, and it feels like it gets worse as the track goes on. This one starts out promising, but it's all downhill from there.
Jon Eric & Friends - The Friends this time are Signboy on drums and Christopher Cogott on electric guitar. Their contributions this time around were indispensible. I'm not entirely happy with my organ tone, and the breakdown in the third verse doesn't "feel" right to me yet, but other than that, I'm rather pleased with how well this song came together. Hey, near the end of the second chorus and during the bridge, Cogott does some particularly cool things on the guitar; check it out! I'm voting for myself!
Josh Millard - I find it interesting how sometimes, fighters with alphabetically proximate names wind up constantly following each other. Your songs and mine seem to form interesting compliments. I'm slightly bothered by the fact that this song can't seem to decide whether it's in a major key or a minor key. Oh well; your lyrics are great. I was expecting a second verse; got a fadeout instead. I wish it were a touch longer, but that's way better than wishing it were shorter. you get a vote! (You're three for three with me so far!)
King Arthur - Is this your idea of Bollywood? Still sounds like King Arthur to me. Not that that's a bad thing. Your lyrics are, as usual, spot-on, though not particularly ambitious this week. Well done. You get a vote!
Masterhyde - Part and parcel of the genre is a heavy low-end, but the bass in this song isn't doing much, so it seems disproportionately high. I like the flow here, though your voice seems to be self-consciously "performing," which masks the emotion in the story. Listen to "Looking at the Front Door" by Main Source and try again.
MC Charlie-0 - I slagged Masterhyde pretty hard just now, but he did exemplify one aspect of songwriting that you may never have been told: Rap songs don't have to be all about cussing and talking trash. In short, I don't like this song, and the reason I don't like it is because I'm not at all interested in anything you have to say. Part of that stems from the fact that this kind of braggadocio is self-defeating when it comes from a guy who's spitting his rhymes too close to a computer mic, but part of it is that this kind of braggadocio usually isn't worth getting into. I just don't care about you at all, so why would I care about you rapping about how awesome you are?
PigPEN - Distorted organ? Nice! When did you know you were turning into WreckdoM? Is that your real voice? I like the surrealist quality of the lyrics, though I find the accent somewhat distracting. If that's your real accent and/or you did a whole album of songs with this voice, I'd get used to it, so I guess I'm griping about nothing. Interesting lyrical approach; I can honestly say that, no matter how much thinking I did, I would not have thought of that approach. Nice ending You get a vote!
Ross Durand - What a strange segue from PiGPEN's entry! Well, heck, from the whole rest of the fight. In terms of non-rap songs, we've have BSS, Wages, me, Josh, and you. Psssh. I'm just rambling because this song is perfect. There's two Ross Durands; Ross the guy-n-guitar expert folk singer, and Ross the pop-band frontman. This is a flawless example of the latter. Fun, catchy, well-performed, well-mixed. I love the harmonies. You get a vote!
The Social Commentaries - Nice drumming. The horns feel a little rough, but whatever. Interesting "harmonies" on the rap. "Let's have a motherfucking baby" is one of the scarier Songfight lines I've heard in a while. This is another one of those songs that feels like it's obscene just for the sake of obsenity. It's probably going to get under my skin. I can't tell whether or not you're sincere about wanting to have a child, or whether you're just taking the euphemism for sex waaay to far, and that's really killing the song for me.
Steve Durand - My earbuds don't like your grandiose intro. I don't have a problem with it, myself, but my left phone buzzes pretty badly unless I turn the volume down. I don't think there's anything you can do about it, so whatever. This piano lick sounds familiar; did you intentionally gank it from somewhere? I love the line "You're gay as a party hat / Not that there's anything wrong with that." There's something borderline offensive about asking someone when they knew they were gay, but you frame it against the implied subquestion "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" which excuses it, at least in my book. I'd have liked to hear the vocal in this song a little bit softer, but emphasized with harmonies. Esepcially in the end, near 2:24, where you take the voice down a few steps chromatically, I'm aching to hear something else punctuating that. Trombones might have helped as well. Yes, that's the ticket. Trombones. Oh well. You get a vote!
X0 - Yeah, I'm not looking up how to type a subscript just for this tripe. I wish you had something more interesting to rap about than how awesome you are. Listen to
MC Frontalot's "Braggadocio" if you haven't already (I hear echoes of his flow at some points in this track); it's a good example of how to do a trash-talk rap. What Frontalot does - and what you've neglected is litter his swagger with actual jokes. "I'm so bright, it's like, redundant to have the sun out." There's nothing like that in this song, it's just bragging about how you're going to win this fight - which, by the way, you won't.
(Full disclosure: I've done a track like that before, myself. Check out
MC Baccarat's "Step Up" for another example of how NOT to do this type of song. My chorus had the line "So give it up, you know [I've] got this fight in the bag." Like your entry, I think there were moments of good flow in mine, but overall it was disposable. What can I say; I was 17. Are you 17? If so, this track may be forgiven, in time.)
Ziplore - Oh, come on! Were you intentionally trying to do a sequel or companion piece to BSS's track? I guess I should thank you for not turning in a 9-minute BSS track, but... Eh, I'm not a fan of long-winded jams like this in the studio. My tolerance for them increases exponentially when I'm watching the band on the stage, but I generally don't like to listen to five minutes of soloing on my headphones. There's some playing in this track that reaches a VERY HIGH level of technical profiency, which is laudable, but we're barely past the two-minute mark when I'm getting bored. Sorry guys.
***
Other than
myself, I'm voting for
Josh Millard for his short, dark, philosophical musing;
King Arthur for his Arthurian take on Bollywood;
PiGPEN for their bizarre approach and weird imagery in the lyrics;
Ross Durand for his perfectly-crafted folk rock; and
Steve Durand for his okay-to-be-gay anthem. Nice fight, guys!
Just FYI: back in the old days, we used to only get to vote for one entry. If it were still that way, I'd be torn between Josh and Ross.