=== This is an NGADM Round 2 Review ===
I'm about to say a thing. Please humor me and laugh. This is very important to me.
"The idea of the song is wandering from a tranquil area into a cave that gets progressively deeper, danker, and more dangerous"
I AGREE. THIS SONG GETS *EXTREMELY* DANK TOWARDS THE SECOND HALF.
Haha, get it? Thanks, I'll be here all wee- mont- until whenever NGADM is over. ima slave. ;_;
Alright, on to the review.
Whenever I see a song that's 7 minutes long, I instantly freeze up with fear. Not because I hate listening to long songs or anything! (Some of my favorite songs are long!) It's just that, on the portal, long songs almost inevitably are arranged poorly - they generally repeat the same ideas far too often, or alternatively arranged in a haphazard way that makes no sense to anyone but the author.
So I am happy to report that you NAILED the arrangement! This piece progresses like a professional track. The first half is this gradual move from acoustic to heavy thrashing, but it manages to stay compelling and interesting the whole way through. Like I said, this is super rare, so good job. You do an excellent job of combining together a bunch of sections with different energy levels in a way that is so cohesive I don't even notice it happening unless I pay super close attention, simply because it all fits together so naturally and so well. This right here is a big reason why I ended up scoring your track so highly.
Let me point out a few specific moments that I really enjoyed from that first half:
The sweet sweet bass at 2:15. Have you ever heard of Porcupine Tree? This sort of bass work (and just the whole progressive feel of your track) gives me a feeling you would like this band. I was actually kind of sad that I didn't hear more bass work along these lines.
Ooh, yes, the playing at 2:37. Changing into this new timbre is super satisfying. And then the drum work, which is fantastic, by the way. EXCEPT. That AWFUL snare noise. I'm sorry, but even from the beginning of the track, the snare just stood out to me like a sore thumb. A crisper snare would make a big difference. It's kind of a shame, honestly, because your drum work is otherwise lovely.
3:56, when the song suddenly changes into a completely different beast. And yet it all feels completely natural thanks to the wonderful arrangement. YES! This is how you properly arrange a song.
Now, here's my main criticism. It seems to me like once we get into the heavier riffing section of this song, that the song begins to get a little too repetitive - we stay on that one riff with only a few minor variations essentially until the song ends. And the truth is that I'm not convinced that that riff is *that* good to play out for a good 3 minutes. Which isn't to say it's a bad or offensive riff, but I really do want some more variation towards the end of the song. There is one great solo in there, and that helps a lot, but overall, yeah, I wanted some more variation.
So, overall? You did a *really* good job here. This song flows in a way that I very rarely hear, and that's definitely impressive. I'd like to have heard melodies that were a bit stronger, admittedly, and the song is just a *tad* repetitive towards the end, but this is still one heck of a song. Keep it up.
Score: 8.0