WALRUS (congrats to the winners / go join heltris walrus)

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Request for clarification!

In the paired vocalists category, what about songs where it’s hard and/or impossible to believe it’s all one vocalist? I am realizing I have more of those than paired vocalists, and my prior submission was subpar as those things go.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

No, more like one vocalist just switching to wildly different voices. Sorry, hah!

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I can guarantee you no one submitted even one song that I also did, so

[MUSHSHAGANA]

my chances go up, perhaps my abysmal paired vocalist submission will not hurt me


EDIT: Although I'm glad I sent it anyway because that band deserves more people being introduced to them

[MUSHSHAGANA]

wait
are we trying to win
i thought the goal was to annoy schaddington with William Joel songs

MY goal was to annoy schadd with songs by total unknowns that also were solid enough category entries to have a chance of winning. What sweeter success than "I hate that I have to give this one the win here oh my god why"

[MUSHSHAGANA]

i plan to do categories week by week so the first reveal will probably be next weekend or sooner

i don't have enough cringey thom yorke videos to fill this much of a programming gap

I can just post tons of nu metal to stretch your Thom Yorke queue, if that helps. But that requires it to not /totally/ chase people away either... damn.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

That Ed Rush song was also a definite weak submission on my part egh

[MUSHSHAGANA]

It was weak, no point making excuses for it. I thought of a much better option (a Tear Garden song, Ka-Spel is good for inscrutable) only after you had posted the scores.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

And no before the obvious gets asked I wouldn’t ever force someone to sit through You and Me and Rainbows no matter how fucking tempting it would be to submit that goddamn helltrip in that category

Was thinking Circles in the Sand. Not asking for (in fact refusing in case one is offered) a rescore, just... yeah.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Regarding that Loathe track -- it's two vocalists on the cleans only, and one dude does all the harsh vocals IIRC. I just was like ... crap, these guys sound VERY MUCH ALIKE, this is not as good as it could be. I was going to change the submission to some A Million Dead Birds Laughing (Yeti maybe? Or Quantum), but that isn't really multitracked -- just one dude rapidly changing his voice with little to no attempt to make it sound like multiple voices.

I can confirm that the Loathe vocalists (and a LOT of my favorite nu metalcore vocalists in fact) do the rapid switches from screamed vox to cleans live. I've been working on that in my own vocal practice -- didn't even occur to me that that might be impressive, since it's not remotely the most surprising instance of that in my experience, and I can easily match the vocal shifts myself.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

You'll have a blast with that album. It has some of the scariest, darkest tracks I've heard in my life (especially the title track), some out-and-out alt-rock bangers, two incredibly emotional tracks that I think stop just short of being ballads, and a nice heaping helping of fun, artsy nu-metalcore drawing from Deftones-style shoegazey nu metal and Converge-esque chaotic metalcore, but conceptualizing itself to a higher level than those bands ever have. The musical interplay across tracks is more in line with mid-late period Swans, which is a wild outlier in metalcore or nu-metal alone, let alone put together.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

I'm legitimately surprised you caught me for Psychic Graveyard. Not nearly as aggressive or vicious as my normal fare, and unafraid to sound ridiculous (most of my music is relentlessly self-serious).

I think you'll probably catch me on two others, but I don't know about the remainder. If you manage to catch me three more times, I will have to know what stood out (so that I can recognize my own music tastes better for the future).

[MUSHSHAGANA]

All I can say about that Loathe album is if you think about it the same way you think about a classical opera suite, with leitmotifs and characters represented by instrumentation, and you listen to it a couple more times, it becomes a rabbit hole you can fall into.

There’s also some brilliant transposition involved that twists the emotional meaning of a couple songs. Theme, Is It Really You and the title track are, I’m certain at this point, based around transpositions of parts of each other. The band has also outright stated there’s a connection between New Faces and A Sad Cartoon, though I haven’t found it yet.

I could go on, but eh. I agree with that score more or less, because it really takes repeated listens to wring the most out of it all, and I’m that obsessive but most people are decidedly not. The most impressive part to me is that there’s that much depth without the surface level listening experience being anything less than great.

Two of my later submissions come off of albums that, for me, are 5 of 5s, but I think you’ll only agree with one of those.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Okay, now that one surprised me. There's gotta be something to my submissions that they have in common now and I can't draw a throughline from Ed Rush to Loathe to Psychic Graveyard to Cuneiform. You'll need to explain this to me.

Also, I think you might have missed that that song had a lot of digitized instruments intended to sound vaguely ethnic (gong or temple bell or unusual trumpet?) but not belonging to any culture, a Middle-Eastern flavor to the songwriting, and that the lyrics, while admittedly mostly indecipherable, do mention things about place in the majority of the parts in which they're audible. The massive reverb drowning everything was actually only a small part. The place I personally get out of it is actually the ashlands of Vvardenfell in TES3:Morrowind -- somewhere between Molag Amur and the Dwemer ruins of Dagoth Ur. It's vaguely desert-feeling, but choking, dark, desolate and strangely beautiful.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

if i had to like blindly throw out a term for your songs it would be post-industrial (probably minus the ed rush one). or just generally, like, "core". it's mostly a contrast with the rest of the group.

so like you'll probably get pissed at me for getting this last one right. in particular it was pretty much a wild guess - i just saw the name xploding plastix and thought it was gonna be, like, metal, and then it wasn't, but i just like didnt move past my first impression. also poe here: i could have just as easily picked cheeto for this - you described it as jazz idm played by humans, which is apt, and also strongly describes something he would like (and did like). but i knew he likes badbadnotgood

Not pissed, just flabbergasted. I never thought of my music taste as being this identifiable. Even though admittedly I've mostly picked stuff in my recent rotation for this particular thing, there's stuff people I know would throw me out the window for and stuff they'd obsess over in about equal measure, and I tend to find that to be a fairly reliable indicator of variety.

I will FIGHT about post-industrial though -- the only thing you can put that evil* on is Cuneiform, and only at a stretch (it's more coming from classic 80s synthpop (e.g. Erasure) and nu-shoegaze (e.g. A Place To Bury Strangers) than say, NIN). Everything else belongs to a totally different genre.



*How the hell did you figure out I like stupid goth stomp oontz bullshit, I didn't even include any, I could cry


EDIT: If you do this again I will need to dig REAL deep. Fortunately, my external harddrive with my giant music library on it will be arriving today, and I will be prepared to throw out the wildest crap.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

That was definitely one not meant to slip past you. That song was one I literally heard less than 30 minutes before I sent my thing along your way, which I did minutes before my sleep meds knocked me flat on my ass for the night, and I never reconsidered it -- never even doublechecked it. So by the time you got to it I was thinking to myself: "this score is gonna be absolute dogshit".

So you surprised me /anyway/.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Justin as an annoying man vocalist DID NOT even come to mind.

Ready for the real reason?

Tallah is nu metal.

And the one take thing is impressive, but ready for something even MORE impressive about it?

Better than the studio version. Audibly. Without even trying to listen for the differences. That's the only reason I chose it. I'd have picked Murder Seed if I had to use the studio version and wanted to really stick with Tallah, and if I'm being honest I'd have picked Simon Says - Blister instead of any Tallah song if I was limited to studio versions.

EDIT: Oh yeah, also, Justin ABSOLUTELY is from Pennsylvania and does the British voice for the sake of effect. Spot on.

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Damn! I was hoping that my final one would be one you wouldn't guess. Everything's RUINED. I'm going to go dump vinegar in my laptop case now



(No I actually am going to do that, it's a long story)

[MUSHSHAGANA]

Wait there were screams? I was almost 1000% sure there were only cleans. Ohhhhhhhh that's so frustrating. I am a caricature of myself.

EDIT: That wasn't a typo, specifically I would say it was 987% certainty, which should be enough to not be thrown under the bus by my music tastes!

[MUSHSHAGANA]

This was fun. I was surprised I didn't score higher for this last one, but then I saw there was a tight race for it.

I just got my external back two days ago, so let me know if you do another one of these.

Now I await the helrisrus.