I've been lurking for a little while, so I figured it's time I post some reviews
I've spent quite a lot of time writing these, so I probably won't be able to do such in-depth critiques every week, but I hope that they're helpful nonetheless. Just be warned, I'm fairly direct, and you'll find little to no sugarcoating here: my goal isn't to make you feel bad, it's to help push you to become even better songwriters.
grock:
The Leslie rotary speaker-style effect on the guitar is awesome, I must admit; congrats, you get bonus points for that.
However, your vocals are a little low in the mix. Your focus is definitely on the instruments, which is fine when you have the guitar solos (what I assume to be replacing the chorus); otherwise, it's just plain hard to hear your lyrics. (The guitar solo is mixed
waaaay louder than your vocals.) So that, combined with the effects (reverb and, I assume, overdrive?), made the vocals generally difficult to distinguish.
The tone of the song is very cool overall, though; not quite 60s rock, not quite blues rock, but not quite modern, either. And there's something very hypnotic about that simple driving rhythm. This is actually one of my favorite songs, not even so much for the content as it is just because the track sounds so damn cool. However, as a pianist, I was immensely bored by the plug-and-chug i-i-V4/2-V7 that was played almost entirely without reprieve.
With the exception of the midi piano (*ahem*), the mixing on this track is very good. And I absolutely love the guitar part.
Give Our Regards (and so on):
You win my prestigious award this week for "Best Mixed Vocals"; the lead, left-panned backing vocals, and guitars are mixed very well; the right-panned backing vocals are a little quiet, perhaps, in the bridge; I know they're only backing lyrics and you have two other vocal tracks playing over it, but even listening for them, I couldn't make the lyrics out. The bass is perhaps a tiny bit too quiet for my tastes, as it's fun to listen to.
Finally, your drums are just terrible. Sorry. They're way too quiet, so much so that - aside from the cymbals - they're almost inaudible. The snare just lacks any punch, which is a necessity in punk-rock tracks like this. The kick has a lot of beater/attack, but nothing else, which makes it sound hollow and weak. When using sequenced drums, you really want to take the extra time to play around with the velocities of each snare and hi-hat trigger: it can make the track sound a lot more realistic and can help alleviate the 'machine gun effect,' which is especially noticeable in your snare fills/rolls.
Intentionally Left Blank:
Right off the bat, your mix is very... lacking in bass. The drums sound washed-out and weak; there's no oomph in the kick, and there's so much reverb on the snare and toms that it sounds like it's my next door neighbor playing in his garage. The acoustic guitar dominates the left channel, but it isn't balanced out by anything else: meaning that the whole mix, for most of the track; is very left-heavy; the vocals are, comparatively, very quiet.
I feel that the verses would sound better with only one vocal track, rather than two: the timing is a little sloppy, and makes some of the words a little hard to make out. If you want to keep the double tracked vocals, at least in the chorus, then there should be some more harmonic interplay between them (counterpoint for you Bach fans); you don't need to go to The Beach Boys/The Beatles-level of vocal harmonies, but at the moment it's just octaves.
The strongest point of your entry, by far, is the outro, where you have reversed guitars playing over a mini guitar solo. This part I really enjoyed. (I enjoyed the whole song, but the guitar playing at the end was where it really shone.)
Foobar:
First things first, love this track. The tone is ominous, the intro synth is great, and when the guitars come in? Oh, yes!!
Ahem, but that doesn't get you off the hook. As I'm sure you know, your vocals need a little work. (As do, well, basically everyone's.) I was never really quite sure how your lyrics would tie into the theme, and you sort of lost me a little bit with the repetition of "California night" (yes, I know there were forest fires there); but it doesn't really seem to have much to do with the bridge/chorus.
When the distorted guitar first enters, and it starts playing the staccato stabs at the end of the verse, it's a little...distracting. They just sound out of tempo. Your guitar also lacks much low-end, which is what would give it its crunchiness – and also, perhaps, why others and I expected a big payoff, where the guitar kicks into crunchy, delicious overdrive.
The arrangement is very good on the whole, and the choice of synths used is excellent. Your vocals are mixed well, and the echo is really nice and complements the rest of the arrangement. (My only suggestion would be to mix them a little dryer, i.e. turn down the volume of the echo a little bit, so it's still there - and audible if you listen for it - but not getting in the way of the following lyrics.)
TRJones:
Sort of sounds like the rhythm of a Pink Floyd single with Pat Auberbach's vocals and guitar solo work from The Black Keys.
Honestly, the lyrics come off as a little desperate at times, mainly in the chorus. (And, lyrics or not, I'm afraid I simply cannot condone the poor grammatical structure of "so you know exactly where I'm at." Please, don't end your sentences with a preposition! Hahaha.) You seemed uncomfortable with the lyrics at some points or, at the very least, it didn't seem like you had quite practiced enough to fit them perfectly to the music. And, while the harmonic-rhythmic accompaniment was indeed very cool, there was little in the song that stood out to me as being particularly memorable.
In terms of mixing... eh, this just didn't do it for me. Everything in the mix sounds so closed in. You could double track the rhythm guitar, and then pan them far left and far right. Simply doing that would really open up your mix. It would give each instrument a little more room to breathe, and the music would seem like it was around me (esp. listening on headphones); otherwise, it just sounds like the band is standing in a straight line in front of me.
Banana Dan:
If there's one thing I really love (read: hate), it's a midi piano. Luckily for you, that sparkly synth that appears in the intro and occasionally through the song is awesome (it kinda sounds like a cross between bells and a synth from my really old Casio keyboard). There is a sort of warbley/wobbly bass that sounds like it *wants* to be dubstep, but never quite gets there - which I also like a lot. It sounds like a Hammond organ, or something, but it wouldn't sound out of place in the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Original Series. In general, your mixing is good, although there are perhaps a few instances - mostly with the swelling orchestral synth - when the kick sets off the compressor, which makes the track sound, for just a moment, a tad overcompressed and flat.
It's cool to hear tracks in these contests that attempt to work to the theme without using vocals; however, while the arrangement is good, it's quite simplistic on the whole. The absence of lyrics, I feel, is a missed opportunity for the week's theme, and the lack of any major key changes or adventurous chromaticism somewhat prevented me from quite getting that sense of going somewhere, or - in other words - a sense of wondering "what might happen this week?"
Tyler Zahnke:
This was a joke, right? I hope it was a joke. Please tell me it was a joke.
I would go into detail in re the things that are wrong with this, but that would take too long. So, here's a basic rundown:
1. The lyrics are quite abysmal.
2. Stylistically, the song is all over the place. You go from sort-of-rocky, to bluegrass, to the driving repetition of punk.
3. Midi instruments are generally awful. (The complete lack of humanization suggests to me you either used Finale or some similar notation program.)
4. There's no real melody to speak of, which is bad. If there's not a strong, memorable theme or motif, what am I supposed to whistle, hum, or sing to myself? And if a piece of music lacks a melody that's catchy enough for me to recall later, then it has - in my mind - failed as a song. (Bear in mind, I'm no musical amateur. Some of my favorite themes are by Tchaikovsky - and sometimes his main themes go on, and on, and on for minutes; yet they're very memorable, and I can recall many of his themes in their entirety.)
5. The mixing and arrangement are terrible. Your vocals sound like they were recorded on a phone inside a shopping mall; there's no harmony to speak of; everything's centered in the mix.
Hortus Ortus:
I implore you: please, please,
please buy a metronome, or run a click track through headphones - something, anything! - when recording drums.
A couple of odd things I noticed in the mix. First off, strangely, your backing vocals are louder than your lead vocals, which were positively buried behind the bass. Which leads me to point numero dos: the bass line is cool, and has a great tone, but the is pushed way too far forward in the mix - it sounds loud even on my headphones, so I dread to think how much low-end would be cranking through my monitors! Third, and back to the vocals, I don't know what microphone you were using, or if it was just some weird mixing job, but the vocals sounded very tinny; while that works fine for backing vocals, there was absolutely no low-end to the lead vocals. Fourth, pretty much everything sounds like it's panned dead center: while I understand wanting to keep the mix simplistic, the only thing that's really panned is the wah guitar.
Berkeley Social Scene:
I love the crunchy double-tracked and wide-panned guitars, and your chorus is very good overall - the first half, in particular, is extremely catchy - not necessarily for the lyrics (I can't actually understand the first line), but certainly for the melody.
Unfortunately, what you have working against you are some fairly cringe-worthy lyrics: e.g. "the bleep-and-blip of morse code," "didn't check the brakes now your knees bleed through your denim," and - as mentioned before - the "anti-venom/denim" rhyme seemed desperate. You're also stretching a lot of your lyrics to fit the music, which makes it sound almost like they were either written separately of each other. In general, the vocals sound strained.
As for mixing, it's pretty good overall. The guitar solo at/near the end of the song just sort of...appears out of nowhere, center-panned, which is a little jarring the first few times you listen to the track, simply because the guitars have always been off to the sides. I would have liked a more rounded-sounding bass drum (maybe smoothen out the attack?), but it's not necessarily bad. The high-pitched synth, when it first appears, is awesome: after that, my personal preference would be for it to only appear in the instrumental pre-choruses and actual choruses. The only last recommendation I have is that the vocals be a tad quieter: not because they're by any means bad, just because the guitars seem to have the more interesting harmonic/rhythm, and so that the guitar solo at the end is a little more audible.
So, as far as voting goes:
- grock;
- Foobar; and,
- Berkeley Social Scene
There was some stiff competition in Nur Ein, and I thought you might even be in danger of getting eliminated. Here, you got a vote from me. 
