June Contest: Gossip

[Max el Belga]

Barnadine, what an interesting info on that coal !
I thought that was just a Latin tradition; I've never seen it in Belgium.

The guy is a lot worse in fact : I asked him once a Lamborghini, behaved myself during a very long year and he gave me one indeed, but after 5 years I'm still waiting for the keys !

Laura, please give us another Michael Jackson joke, 'cose TV is driving me mad with 'news' about wacko Jacko...

Cheers,

Max... .. .

[Wyatt]

Thank you everyone who took the time to write reviews. That's really cool..getting feedback like that. I really dig that.

Thanks also to OffTheWall, EchoVoodoo, Wavephonic, Jerru, and Bounce4ToAudio, (holy cow!! a number one!) for your votes.

I appreciate you.



Wyatt

[elderlybrothers]

Thanks for the lovely reviews and we really appreciate the votes.

Bobby G, Nikp2000, DHMiltz, Laguna, Jerru, Folderol, and Shrikatprabhu.

We will be remembering you all as we tap out another rhythm on the back porch tonight!

[wavephonic]

again thanks everyone for the encouraging votes, I really had a blast with this theme.

[wavephonic]

it's a mystery to me,

you to..

[folderol]

Damn Internet just ate my last comment

Anyway, thanks for the vote Bouncetoaudio, and also thanks Baranardine for the review.

Some of those 'seeds' are taking a rather long time to germinate, but I shall keep watering them I also do indeed rather like using reverb (although in the winter sometimes this house feels like it's a abandoned cathedral). I have to be quite severe with myself on occasions - rather like a kid in a strawberry patch!

[Laguna Rising]

it's a mystery to me,

you to..

Many thanks to D.H.Miltz, Nikp2000, Bobby G and Shrikant for the votes

Cheers

[Laguna Rising]

laguna rising - always amazed how much you fit into a song. preferred the latter two sections to the driving opening stretch. the high-freq triangle/hihat sound in the intro and midsection was pretty distracting and irritating, but otherwise a nice batch of sounds.

Cool thanks ! I listened to my entry many times and I never noticed it, but after your comment I listened again and I agree the ride-bell/hihat sound is really too loud in those sections
Thanks for the heads-up

btw I really enjoyed vocals on your track

Cheers

[oddbod]

oddbod - i wouldn't rank this with your finest

Spot on sir. I must admit I struggled with this theme. This was my 4th different start as the previous 3 tunes gave me no lyrical inspiration. I wasn't really convinced with this one either but decided to persist just to get something posted. Hoping next month will be less of a struggle.

[Markleford]

didn't get any genuine menace off the 'threatening' vocal bits (few things less scary than someone trying to sound scary - see e.g. pretty much all death metal), but that just aids the tongue-in-cheek undercurrent.

I'm not one to 'defend' musical choices, but you've hit on something: perhaps the chorus of the original version (kept intact here) was targeted at undeniable genre parody, but the framing of the (newly added) verses here changes the intended tone to more of a "desperate admission" than anything. Not so much "scary" as "*I'm* scared of what *I* might do".

After doing freelance music software development from home off and on for years, I'm back to commuting 2+ hours per day downtown to an office of a multi-national corporation with lots of grey cubicles. I feel that this is time and life energy stolen from me in exchange for money.

It wears at me and leaves me feeling impotent, like a faceless cog in a machine. By way of over-compensation, this brings up feelings (or a fantasy) that the only way for me to differentiate myself from the rest of the cogs is my willingness to kill or die (as life loses its value), and the only way I'll be remembered is not by penning a toe-tapping ditty every month, but rather by committing some office atrocity for a brief news headline.

Of course, this isn't something I want to follow though with! But I imagine this might also be the mindset that planted the seed for a seemingly increasing spate of murder/suicides around the globe.

So tongue-in-cheek? Not really, at its core. An exaggeration through the lens of fear, certainly! But wrapped up in a layer of obfuscation by metaphor I can't really blame that interpretation. That's the risk one takes with such writing style, but I suppose sometimes also rewarding in learning how people can interpret the same lyrics in different ways.

I really don't know why I felt compelled to write this 'defense'. Perhaps I'm moreso worried that there's probably more than one listener out there that thought, "He says he's a robot. I know he's not a robot. This is supposed to be *personal*: FAIL!"

Thanks for the ears and words,
- m

[Psy-T]

Has Psy-T settled in back home?

yep, give or take a week of jetlag and one hellish day at the customs office, to pick up my belongings.

Psy-T - I Am
Except for a sound like the last of some molten metal is being forced--squirted, really--out of something like toothpaste from a tube, I like the sounds here; and if I set aside my problem with that one sound I can say the whole thing sounds like a job well done.

Psy-T - I_Am
Buddhism definitely left a stamp on you. These arpeggios are creamier than any cow extract. Effects and strings feel like a forbidden unhealthy pleasure, like a large greasy burger in the middle of a diet.

psy-t - for me there's often a disconnect in your stuff between the vocals and arrangement, which at its worst feels like a lazy lack of interaction and at its best lets elements glance off each other in surprising ways - there are examples of both in this, i think. i like how the big ambient aphex strings push the horizon out later on.

thanks for the reviews all

also, thanks to jerru, max el belga, khepira, me109, bounce to audio, oddbod, and zombie queen for the votes, and to wopelka for the honroable mention

[Barnadine]

I'm not one to 'defend' musical choices, but you've hit on something...

Didn't mean to put you on the defensive, Markleford.

Hmm, maybe we come at things from a different angle, but for me 'tongue-in-cheek' and 'serious' aren't mutually exclusive at all. Take the whole talking blues thing, for instance, since it's on my mind this month. It's always been a mix of upbeat music, gallows humour and dark social commentary - Woody Guthrie used it to sing about people starving to death in the dustbowl, Dylan did a talking blues about the nuclear holocaust. So when I see a tongue-in-cheek undercurrent in your song, it doesn't mean I think it has no serious intent - it captures the dehumanisation and desperation of corporate existence pretty eloquently, but I thought I covered that in my comments. Let's see...

nifty lyrics

Ah, there you go. Beyond that, I thought I saw an element of parody in there, laughing at the absurdity of it all as the ship goes down. Maybe that wasn't intentional on your part, but for me it adds a layer to the song, and needs no defending. Humour and despair often sit side by side. I mean, my entry this month contains a couple of the bleakest lines I've written, other bits of it are pretty light-hearted, most of it's pretty stupid. The listener can handle a bit of contradiction, a mixed tone.

But if you're uncomfortable with that and are aiming for something 'purely' serious, (a) why? and (b) you'd probably want to re-sing those growly choruses and let the desperation in the lyrics speak for itself. For me at least, overtly menacing vocals are always going to carry an element of humour. Listen to yourself at 0:42+ and tell me that isn't fun.

Wait, what?

He says he's a robot. I know he's not a robot.

You mean you're not a robot? Take back everything I said. You lied to us through song! Mongrel.

[xh3rv]

An exaggeration through the lens of fear, certainly!

My favorite quote this year so far is: "Art is a lie that reveals the truth" -Picasso

Are Bounce to Audio and zh3rv going to sing in a future song?

I'd rather lie

[D.H. Miltz]

d.h. miltz - strong stuff, hunched-in and lean. in some parts the sparseness is a real virtue, other bits have a placeholder feel. damn fine lyrics, though i could only tell by reading them - looking forward to you getting over this muffled vocal phase.

Thanks, Barnadine, for the review and the vote.

Thanks also to oddbod, Zombie queen, Patrick9, and xh3rv for the votes.

[Bounce2audio]

Thanks for all the great music again this month and thanks to all who voted for my track,
I really don't have the time to comment on each of the tracks I voted for this month, I'm really sorry.
But to Wyatt (my number one vote) I have many reasons for voting for different tracks and I found your track to be a very cool mix of sounds with a vocal style that worked really well together.
Once again a great selection of music with more individuality and style than any one day of commercial radio crap.
People who love music make the best music!