This voting process is the most difficult and painful part of these competitions. Especially as we have only four submissions.
When I first listened these three submissions, I couldn't find any way to put them into any specific order. They all sounded great to me. Depending on what criteria to emphasize I could put these three submissions to any order. After that I decided to listen them many times in the row during my long walks. Only through repetition I started to hear things that bothered me, and things that lasted repetitive listening.
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TrojakEW - Ignorance is Bliss
The opening sounds like an opening to some Bela Lucosi’s Horror movie. Cool sound!
When the rapping starts, I get a picture of Homer Simpson laying on his sofa, drinking beer and commenting news stream.
The more I listen to this, the more I like it.
Small ear candies and sound effects here and there work very fine. When the ear expects and wants hear something new, it’s offered. Those effects suit fine with the cartoon like imagery I get out of this. Well done!
Horns tooting on fourth beat work very nicely. They are coming out very strongly, but still they don’t interrupt the story line.
Drums are very strong and fit nicely the horror sound. But next to those drums bass feels a bit weak, and also bass note articulation is a tad unclear. The bass riff could be very nice but now it doesn’t come out clearly. Maybe there's also too much compression with bass, as it feels that the tail of the note starts to grow stronger than beginning.
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becsei_gyorgy - Ensayo
This one was difficult for me to judge. On the other hand it was the strongest and maybe the only real rap among this month's submissions, but on the other hand there are some problems that started to bother me.
Music-part
Opening has oriental influences, but when horns come in, the music part becomes very beautiful latino ballad. Well, I don't know latino music that well, but it reminds of some Mexican trumpet song.
But when the rapping starts, the music turns into a background music. Rightly so, for focus should be in rapping, but as rapping doesn’t offer any breathing moments for the listener, there are no chances to put focus temporarily to the music. Focus is too long periods in rapping and it starts to bring rapping fatigue for the listener. So I miss some short moments here and there where the focus could be on music details, and listener could safely inhale. Short musical focus moments after every second line could have given more power also to rapping.
But the melody line behind the rapping is very beautiful. I would suggest you to make it an instrumental ballad.
Rapping-part
At first listening this was the most convincing rapping part. There's a right kind of attitude or somethings that makes it work. We have here an artist with something real to say, and I'm willing to listen and believe him. But with further listen some rhythmical lyrics things started to bother me.
- Too many words on each line: there’s no time to breathe. As it's not live performance the rapper can solve that problem by recording lines in separate takes, but that doesn’t help the listener. At least I started to get breathing problems.
- Verses overlap: the start of the new verse happened before previous has ended. It could be a nice effect for once or twice, but as it’s happening more often it starts to sound like a problem of lyric’s writing.
- Speedy rapping parts (1:05-1:14) don’t make a nice speedy rhythm. Now it sounds like an unsolved ”too-many-words” problem.
- Rapping rhythm is too static and too much in the same rhyme scheme throughout the song. Rapping would benefit if there is weird but natural rhythmic changes.
All those problems were text related. This rap would have probably been impossible to perform live. But if the rapper solves these kinds of text-related problems, I'm sure he’ll become a great rapper with a right attitude.
Ad libs are now quite repetitive and coming through a too anticipatable pattern. I think this way they don’t enhance the rapping, but rather they start to disturb. I would have trusted more rappers own voice alone. Now also these ad libs mask the nice music behind. When music goes stronger, also ad libs go stronger.
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gaurav.talreja - That Is Sick
This sounds like some kind of rap mantra to me. Or a spell, with which you’re trying to solve some bigger problems. Great! Maybe it’s more modern than what was intended by the genre of this competition, but I don’t mind. It works very nicely.
I like how the beat track is done with a just couple of instruments. It gives room to small nuances that you have used nicely. For example those speedy bass-lines are very nice, and there’s a great space offered to them naturally. Tremolo-effect great! Music part is very convincing and coherent.
The rap part and beat are woven together very nicely. Some lines are rhythmically a bit clumsy, but it doesn’t matter in the long run as long as the spell works.
The text part is maybe too sparse. It doesn’t open to me. But probably your target audience in some other sphere get it. Perhaps you could have painted more images with words. Couple of more clear or mystical lines could have given new dimensions to this rap.
► Show Spoiler
01 (10 pts) - TrojakEW
02 (9 pts) - gaurav.talreja
03 (8 pts) - becsei_gyorgy
and maybe would have been more submissions.
How do we go from there?
