What do you guys think of these songs?

[Moff Chumley]

Several friends of mine started a band. The guitarist and bassist both play in my band, and their lead singer is a good friend of ours. The drummer is pretty awesome also. :smallwink:

They have two songs on their facebook page (and probably elsewhere on the internet). Between the two of them, various components include, but are not limited to:
-70s style three part harmony
-African polyrhythms
-Completely unexpected hard rock bits
-Jazzy walking basslines
-Completely impenetrable lyrics
-Banjo
-As close as you can come to being a hipster while still being a SSBB fanatic

And that's two songs. Linky (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Handshake/133756975973)! (Let me know if it doesn't work and I'll find another site.)

[Erothayce]

I found the songs to be interesting. Not really my cup of tea but I have nothing bad to say about them.

[Sneak]

I really like them. Being the cynical bastard that I am, I opened the link expecting to find another crappy teenage wannabe band, but this one's actually good.

[AshDesert]

Those were really good, especially the vocal harmonies. Good groove on both those songs, not exactly my cup of tea, but those were still really good.

[Moff Chumley]

Cool, guys. Feel free to, if you have a Facebook, add them as fans. They're very unobtrusive guys, so don't worry about a constant stream of messages. :smallwink:


So, any musicians in the Playground, do you have anything to say about the songs themselves? :smallbiggrin:

[Raistlin1040]

In my opinion, as a musician, I think they tried to jam too many styles into two songs. It's totally cool to do an album where every song is completely different. But if you've got a banjo, Beatley harmonies, jazz bass, and a random ass heavily distorted guitar part all stuffed into four minutes, that's too much.

They're obviously talented, if they really play all the instruments in the sidebar. They just need to iron out their songwriting a bit. There *is* a way to put most, if not all, of what they want to do in a song. I'm listening to a band that I know, and this song features jazz/funk bass, indie rock guitar fades, soft rock vocals, and a classic rock buildup and guitar solo that fades into the closest thing their vocalist does to a raspy scream.

It IS possible to do a song that's very diverse, but they either need to lengthen their songs a lot to make the transitions divided up more Prog like (as in segments of jazz, segments of hard rock, segments of banjo country, etc.), or work on making the different instruments and styles agree with each other in practice, rather than just seeing that it's in the same key and therefore "should sound right".

Sorry if I came off too harsh. It's interesting, at least.

[Moff Chumley]

I agree. And yes, they do play all of said instruments, albeit in the same way anyone with some decent musical knowledge and lots of curiosity plays eight different instruments. :smallwink: