The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Collin Cunningham
Breaker Breaker
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CollinMel

What's your favorite song by this bloke?

Honorable Mention:
Listen Close (Breaker Breaker)
Skyline (Metalmags & Narbotic)

My Favorite:
Repair My Heart (Narbotic)

For me it's a tossup between Apple Smooth Crescent (from the submit-a-title experiment that eventually turned into Song Fight!), Vacuum Cleaner Satellite (same), and I LOVE YOU (the original version when he did both the male and female vocals, which was charming and the lyrics were IMO a bit funnier, and unfortunately this one's been lost to the sands of time and I don't think anyone else currently in Song Fight! has even heard it).

Niveous wrote:My Favorite:
Repair My Heart (Narbotic)

Heh, that one is pretty good. It's got a Velvet Underground meets Jonathan Richman sorta vibe.

fluffy wrote:...and I LOVE YOU

Heh, also good. The size of disk drive dictates the size of the drive bay. If he really did both the male and female parts, color me impressed, the female vocalist sounds totally distinct to me.

I wish that the old Dumbrella forums were still around, I would like to back and read old reviews. I've been kicking around the idea of reviewing every fight, working my way backwards until I reach the oldest fight thread on the SFBB. It's a lot of work, and it would take a looong time, but it'd be a great way to discover all the hidden gems in the archive.

Chumpy wrote:

fluffy wrote:...and I LOVE YOU

Heh, also good. The size of disk drive dictates the size of the drive bay. If he really did both the male and female parts, color me impressed, the female vocalist sounds totally distinct to me.

You misunderstand (probably because I worded it poorly) - the original version he posted on Song Fight! was different, and the female parts were also him (singing/speaking falsetto). A couple years later he rerecorded it with a band (probably Breaker Breaker) and replaced the file in the Song Fight! archive. This would have been sometime between 2001 and 2003. Unfortunately, archive.org only goes back to after Spud+JB took over.

Aaah, that makes sense. I think your wording was fine, I just didn't read very carefully. Interesting. Was this part of a larger effort to reconstruct early fights lost to the sands of time, or was this a one-time kinda thing?

It was a one-time kinda thing where for whatever reason he decided to improve a song of his in the archive. I don't know of any others that he replaced outright, although "It's Charging" was another similar thing where he "found" a "lost fight" from 1987 (all the entries were recorded by drew).

A couple years back I asked him if he still had the original recording anywhere and he said he'd try to find it but he probably didn't have it anymore.

The way I remember the original being, compared to the current one:

• Way less effect processing on the male vocals; I think there was just a flange effect (and not the static crackle thing)
• The percussion and instrumentation sounded more like a Casio keyboard, and there were fewer incidental riffs
• The female vocals were just Narbotic in falsetto (as stated previously)
• "Well.... I stay away from warez" was originally "Well... I stay away from cracks" (which I think is much funnier)
• Charmingly lower audio fidelity

For some reason "120 MPH" wound up in my mp3 library many years ago and so has come up for me many times. Not sure it's the best or my favorite on listening to Narbotic's Song Fight songs again now, but I like the Connecticut references. I like "Black Hole" now when listening.