Dr. Zaius - soup lover, also crazy. (SSIV vote/reviews)

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 1:39 pm

Songskirmish IV

Go listen. Then, come back here and vote.

The order on my page is random, and I kept the same order for the poll.

EDIT: Ok, you can't hide the results of a poll here, so... that sucks. Umm... NO PEEKING UNTIL OCTOBER THIRD :/

bz£ · Post by **bz£** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 3:12 pm

I think I like puce's monkey best. Or maybe Jim O's.

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 3:53 pm

Also: 11 songs is the best turnout we've had for Songskirmish so far. I think the previous record was 7. That's awesome.

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 4:16 pm

Jim Tyrell: Good guitar tone, as usual. Nice harmonies. Your voice works better in a harmony setting than a solo setting, to my ears. This is quite solid. Watch out for the mic at the end. ::stupid-ass winky face::

Poor June: Well.. You got some delay going. That can be a cool effect. This ain't for me.

J$: This is silly. It seems to wander about.. don't think I like the cheese piano, really. The parts of this song don't really seem to add up to a solid whole.

Jack Shite: Shout-outs to young girls = cute. The tambourine sounds very much like it's in a different room. Put it in a similar room as the guitar or something. I just noticed something... IN THE JUNGLE, THE MIGHTY JUNGLE, THE LION SLEEPS TONIIIIIIIIGGGHHHHHHTTTTT.

Puce: Solid drums. This has a really good overall sound to it. Your voice is fucking badass. Damn, if you lived in Dallas, we'd rock people's faces off. This is a fucking solid-ass song.

Me: I've been feeling like rocking more as of late. Don't ask me about the chorus, because your guess is as good as mine. Lyrics.

Mighty Might Octothorpe: Nice drum intro. Woah, rythym getting out of control. The usual clippy sound issues that seem to plague you guys. Yay recorder. You crazy guys with your vocal processors.

Banananabominominousnana Revolution: This could be cool, I suppose, but it's just silly. Little kids' voices and sound really really creepy and scary if they're used right, or they can sound cute and silly. I don't know, it feels like there was more than one goal with this song, and that they were spread too far apart from each other to really reach more than one of them.

Redcar: I swear to god these worked earlier

Jim of Seattle: I swear

Charcoal: And he pulls through in usual humorous ballad stlye, but with more... STUFF. The recording sounds very... Octothorpe. Watch your recording levels. The piano is about the only thing that doesn't sound like it's clipping. I suppose the drums sound ok as well.

Definitely a solid skirmish. Jim Tyrell makes a solid showing, as he has in Skirmishes past. Puce makes a fantastic skirmish debut.

tonetripper · Post by **tonetripper** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 5:10 pm

By the way Sober, it's not Redcar cuz PinV and Leaf62 aren't involved. Just Tonetripper. That was a mistake by jim in hosting it on his site.

Pablo

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Sat Sep 25, 2004 6:06 pm

I enjoyed making a song in an hour so much that I've started an AAD. Will review these later.

Sober: Nice Sig!

EDIT: I have a cold and house-guests, so the AAD is officially abandoned.

Poor June · Post by **Poor June** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 8:07 am

wooo tough choices... i deffinately am the sucky one of the group... of course my song was worked on like a total of like 5 minutes... i didn't realize my time was up so fast haha...

anyways...

so many great songs
i'll give full reviews later...

but from what i've heard some def. contenders...
jim
puce
sober

puce your song floored me haha... so much cursing but it was awesome... but i think my vote is gonna go for sober... cause well just a really entertaining song (really like the mumbling grasping vocal part at the beginning)

tonetripper · Post by **tonetripper** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:11 am

Jim T - Real CSNY vibe going on here. Love the guitar tone. Vocals get a little stretched at points, but what do you want out of less than an hour. Great song, great lyrics.

Poor June - Crazy lip-smacking monkey business.

J$ - Love the lyrics and may just win for that alone. Typical J$ stamp on this one. I feel like Curious George on Acid.

Jack Shite - "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" ring a bell. On purpose or not, caught ya. Fun as all get out especially with the laughter. Hahaha was on purpose..... cheap Jack, cheap.

Puce - Stellar production for an hour. The lyrics are great and the delivery is so pop-power-punk. The cussing might disappoint Madi the real judge in the competition. Contender.

Sober - The similarities to Puce are uncanny in energy. I like this one better although I can't understand anything that is being said other than the obvious chorus. Love the mandolin part. That ruled with the distorted guitar. My choice for the tune that rocks the title.

The Mighty Thorpe - Awwww yeah. Groove and melody with the Thorpe is always a treat. This is the insane one of the bunch and seems to be best suited to the title in many ways. Pretty crunchy on the top edge. Fun. The recorder is great. Kind of a South American feel to the Buttholeness of it. Contender.

BananaNana Revolution - The metal lives in this one. Grindcore vibe with the children gives me a strange feeling for the title. I loved it........ so would the children...... not my favourite.

Tonetripper (me) - Was kind of wanky with the lyrics for this one, but I love the feel. Real throw down cuz I didn't start writing it until about 35 minutes after the title was set. Would gladly do it again if only for the exercise. It really is to create and record a song in short span of time. Production kind of loses.... but the crunch of the writing process makes things flow in a way I like.

JoS - Love the hand claps. Not much to dislike about this. Ostrich line is great. Raffi would love this.... as would most of his fans.

Charcoal - Holy hot Batman. Spacy underbelly to this one sonically speaking. The darkness with the spoken lyrics makes this song seem kind of scary in a House of Frankenstein kind of way.

So my vote went to J$ for the lyrics and composition. My favourite was probably Sober, but the lyrics were a little whiffled....... Cheers!!

Pablo

jack · Post by **jack** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 10:41 am

tonetripper wrote:
Jack Shite - "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" ring a bell. On purpose or not, caught ya. Fun as all get out especially with the laughter. Hahaha was on purpose..... cheap Jack, cheap.

it takes me more than an hour to come up with something REALLY original. at least by my standards. and the fact that i knew it would take half of my alloted time to upload the file meant i had to shite something out start to finish in a half hour. and the tune ended up being like maybe 8 tracks.

plus, i'm the king of quasi-covers around here. or so i've been told.

if madi liked it, then i'm happy. if she hates it, then i'm gonna eat some worms.

Jim of Seattle · Post by **Jim of Seattle** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 11:08 am

She loved it.

Jim of Seattle · Post by **Jim of Seattle** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 11:47 am

So Madi's listened to the whole fight 3 times now, the third time with her friend Kat. I corralled them afterward to give me their reviews. They loved every song.

Of course they claimed that mine was their favorite, but when I solicited reviews, clearly BananaNana Revolution was the winner, with Charcoal second place.

Here are Madi and Kat's reviews

Charcoal
I like it cuz I can understand them, and I like it cuz it's sort of wild. It's really good cuz it's funny and it's rock. One of my really favorite ones.

Jack Shite
I like it cuz it's not rock, even though I like rock. It's a certain kind of music that's not rock and I like it a lot. I like the voice. I like calm music when it's like that. (Editor's note: While making molasses cookies, this was the song they were singing to each other, even though they'd listened to the songs in the order they are listed here.)

Johnny Cashpoint
It's a cute song. I like the background music. I think it's cute because it has a bunny AND a monkey in it. I like the laughing.

Sober Irishman
I can't understand what you're saying. I like the music, but I can't understand what you're saying. But I like the tune and I like that it's rock. I LIKE ROCK!

Tonetripper
I think it's sorta like calm, but it's a good kind of calm, and I like the tune. I like that you put your soul in it.

BananaNana Revolution
I LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS ONE! I like the voice, how he sings it, and it's cool. I like it when he says "Monkey will destroy you". I like the kids saying those cute things.

Jim of Seattle
I love this one. Rocky, but not too rcoky. I can understand what you're saying. It's funny. I like it when you say "zzzzzzzoom". The laughing sounds like a monkey.

Poor June
I love the voice. It sounds like you're drunk. I like the tune but the sound is weird. I can't really understand what you're saying. I don't know where the laughing is.

Jim Tyrrell
Oh, this is a good one. I love this. I love that it's medium, sort of wild and sort of calm. And it's really cool. I like that there's guitar in it. I like that he's saying "If I were a monkey I would be thinking this" It's cool.

Octothorpe
I love this one because it's wild. It's really really cool and stuff. It's fascinating. I like the voice. Sometimes I can't really understand what he's saying. I like his laugh. I like the recorder.

Puce
They didn't get to hear it because of all the swearing. Sorry, gotta be a responsible dad.

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 12:03 pm

I don't understand all the complaints people always make against unintelligible lyrics.

Could anyone understand the chorus of RHCP's "Scar Tissue" without looking at the lyrics? No, you couldn't. I'd argue my case more, but it's breakfast time.

Jim of Seattle · Post by **Jim of Seattle** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 12:42 pm

TROPHIES AWARDED TO...

BananaNana Revolution
The lyrics crack me up. The kids work, and help offset the creepy lead vocal. This all works. Not keeping, but what do you expect for an hour? Very cool.

Jim Tyrrell
Very impressive that you got those harmony parts in there in the hour deadline. Nice chord progression. Possible vote.

Sober Irishman
Lots of cool instrumental stuff here, but I hate that I can't understand what you're yelling. Wins the award for most convincing laughing. The Irish lute thing was an inspired little detail tossed in. Possible vote.

Tonetripper
I love this. That surprise chord on "how long" at the end of the chorus is so suh-weet. I'm jealous of your voice. "How do you evade the sun king"? Hmmm... Possible vote.

EVERYONE ELSE

Charcoal
I like this better than the regular Charcoal songs, because this one has more energy. Kind of silly, but it made me laugh and you had my undivided attention.

Jack Shite
Hard to fault a song that starts off like that. I don't care that this is a cover, because it's not a real fight, so who cares anyway. Your voice really sounds good when it's double-tracked. I love the octave doubling at the end. Very nice.

Johnny Cashpoint
I love these lyrics. This is actually one of my favorites of your songs. The hard edits from guitar to harpsichord cracks me up.

Octothorpe
Cracks me up. As everyone said, the recorder is terrific. The drum part is also pretty cool, though apparently no one else in the band can hear him! Glad to hear you say that you're going to work it up more because it's going to be good. "Conflict no longer ensues" is a delightfully awkward lyric.

Poor June
This isn't really as bad as you think it is. Good beginning of an eventually cool song. The echoes help it along, the percussion sounds are neat.

Puce
The swearing bugged me because it meant I had to manually edit my playlist so Madi could listen. This rocks of course, and your vocals are fantastic.

LASTLY, ME

Reasonably happy with this. Sounds cheesy to me. I'm pleased with that little surprise 2/4 bar with the bass slide. I took the percussion out right at the end of each verse, so when it comes back in right after the 2/4 bar I think it's really effective.

Jim of Seattle · Post by **Jim of Seattle** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 12:45 pm

The Sober Irishman wrote:I don't understand all the complaints people always make against unintelligible lyrics.

Maybe it's one of those things where you like it but a lot of people seem not to, and you have to ask yourself who you're throwing the party for when you're singing a song. you don't have to understand why people complain, just take it in and realize that they do!

j$ · Post by j$ » Sun Sep 26, 2004 3:43 pm

Haven't heard all of these yet (bad johnny

) but how great is Octothorpe's? I love it! Excellent excellent stuff. Great drum & recorder parts. Cool vocal performance. it's got a feel of Swell Maps about it to me (although tonetripper's butthole surfer's comparision might be more apt.) Anyway just wanted to say that.

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 3:17 am

Crazy Crazy Monkey reviews.
(Note: It IS 'monkey', isn't it? The Songskirmish page says 'monkeys', and I hate to think I'd gotten it wrong in my haste.)

Poor June - Neat. Love the 'percussion'. Kinda creepy. If this were Creepy Creepy Monkey, you'd get my vote, I bet.

Johnny Cashpoint - I'm impressed. There's a good amount of structural variety in here for a song written in an hour.

Jack Shite - Dropping names? That's low.

Just when I'm about to accuse you of ripping off another song, you admit to it with the 'wimowep' bit, and that makes it funny. My kids would probably like this one, I'll have to throw it on their SongFight comp cd.

more later....

Bolio · Post by **Bolio** » Wed Sep 29, 2004 1:40 pm

DAMN I wish I would have been in on this! Very sick last weekend. A couple entries really worked for me:

OCTOTHORPE How fun is this. I'm at work laughing like mad, kind of like Mad Dog. After talking to that guy face to face a couple times, I really think he is a god (Mad God?) Tempo issues & then a perfect recorder solo. A+

PUCE What CAN'T you do, man? Very impressed you came up with this in an hour. Great melody, great lyrics, perfect attitude & a great performance. This is my new 'morning wake-up' song, (sorry Hoblit.) Keep up the great work!!

Eric Y. · Post by **Eric Y.** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 1:03 pm

The Sober Irishman wrote:Banananabominominousnana Revolution:
I don't know, it feels like there was more than one goal with this song, and that they were spread too far apart from each other to really reach more than one of them.

care to elaborate on this?
this song was mostly improvised, except for the lyrics, although there were a good many ad hoc changes to those during recording as well. i'm not really sure that there were any "goals" ... so i'm wondering what you thought we were trying to do, and what you think we accomplished?

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 10:45 pm

Warning: poor grammer and weak english follow.

Voice: Like the baseline. Do not like the vocals. Kids are too loud. I'm not a fan of the (deliberately) distant sounding guitar. Could this song be creepier?

Sober: Man I love this song. The drums sound good (samples or loops?), but the cymbals are oppressive. Amazing structure, considering the hour restriction. I really like the guitar work here, especially during the crazy "I've been a smoker for 40 years" screaming parts. The chorus is infectious and the instrumental breakdown at 1:24 is perfect. Fadeout, ugh.

JoS: Nice keyboard work. You abuse a nylon-guitar patch near the beginning, but thankfully it never comes back. Hmm... I thought my song had improvised sounding lyrics. The music is perfectly composed and arranged; I really wish brilliant piano could flow from me this easily. Dude, you have a creepy laugh. After several listens I noticed this song really makes my head bop, giving you the edge. What's a bowl of zoom?

ToneTripper: Vocals sound great. The song is very simple; I never thought I would have cared under the circumstances, but almost everyone else had a more complex arrangement. No laughing!

J$: I like the description of the titular monkey, wearing "only a fez, a bowtie and a nappy". I really don't enjoy the instrumentation. I wish this had a chorus. I like the first 1 second the best.

Poor June: Short short short. Your voice sounds nice in this. Like this review, overly short. Like always I wish you'd directed your efforts a bit more.

Jack Shite: Sober, PJ, JimT, Octothorpe and now you all somehow managed to double up your vocals. How almost half of this fight had time to rerecord their vocals, let alone get more than one good take done, is beyond me. The pseudo-cover doesn't entirely work for me, but I'm not about to jump on you like people have once before. Holy crap, is that four voices I hear? Your voice sounds fantastic, and the lyrics are among the best in this fight.

JimT: Well, now I'm blown away. You've practically got three part harmony here. Sounds like America. I can't even make a 3 minute song in a week; you've pulled it off like it was nothing. This whole thing sounds great. It's not my thing, but it's very well done. Congrats: you did a 3 minute guy and guitar song in an hour and it's not boring.

Charcoal: Really hot mix. I have a feeling I am not this song's target demographic. Nice full arrangement. Tossin' does not rhyme with lesson.

Octothorpe: Wow. This is a full fledged Octothorpe song. The recorder solo is friggin fantastic. Hey, this song doesn't make any sense.

My Bad Self: I took an enormous chunk of my time coming up with that baseline. I originally played it with a moog patch and it sounded like a bouncy children's song. When I started adding guitar to it I stumbled upon a great sounding chorus, and the song turned into what it is now. With about six minutes left I had no vocals, no lyrics and no melody, so I quickly improvised a take, then did a good second take. The only thing I kept from the first take was the "fucking up your life" part, which was so random it had to go in. Note that Curious George should have been "skipping rocks and jumping rope", as opposed my spontaneous juxtaposition. I apologize to Madi and Jim about the subject matter; I have no idea what part of my brain came up with the idea, but I think applying the formula of the Curious George books (George is told not to do something he thinks would be fun, but his curiosity overpowers him and he decides to do it anyway, which gets him into all kind of trouble) to drug experimentation is obvious and hilarious. He's curious. It was either that or bisexuality, so I think I made the right decision. Listening again I realize that my vocal delivery doesn't make this song sound very funny. I don't usually cuss in my songs, but when I reached 0:33 I realized three things: a) I didn't have a line ready, 2) this had to be the good take or I'd run out of time, and 3) profanity rhymes with everything and doesn't have to follow conventional semantics or syntactics. I'm glad people enjoyed the result.

The half that I liked: Sober's, Jim Tyrell's, Jim o' Seattle's, Jack Shite's, and ToneTripper's.

The Median Award (of eleven songs this one is right in the middle): Octothorpe

Hey, did anyone else notice that all together we clock in at 20:44? This means that we have completed a new challenge, the Album-in-an-Hour, or AAH. Well done everyone!

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 2:16 pm

Congratulations, Puce.

Great fight, everyone. Til next time...

Eric Y. · Post by **Eric Y.** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 2:42 pm

Puce wrote:I'm not a fan of the (deliberately) distant sounding guitar.

well it wasn't exactly deliberate. due to the time constraint (made worse by the fact that we spent the first half of the hour discussing lyrics), we pretty much had to record everything in one take. basically we had a bass amp and a guitar amp next to each other, with a condenser mic in the middle of the room; i hit record and started improvising something on bass, then the guitarist joined in and we played through that basic rhythm for like two minutes, then quit. recorded the vocals on top of that, moved them around a lil bit so they (mostly) fit together, and then that was that.

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 3:30 pm

Horray!

Maybe this tells me I should spend less time fretting over my mixes and more time actually writing and recording songs.

Voice: thanks for the enlightenment. It's really not fair of me to criticize the mixing in a one hour fight.

Dr. Zaius - soup lover, also crazy. (SSIV vote/reviews)

Best Skirmisher?

Dr. Zaius - soup lover, also crazy. (SSIV vote/reviews)

Madi's Reviews

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A+

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