Gotta love those drums man, the moods they bring are great. They evoke secret urgency at the beginning and by the end are just really energetic and coolio. Iz nicely done my guy
Reviews for "sun soldier"
very nicely done :)
Hello! This is a review for the NGUAC competition.
I've gone over one or two general categories of issues specific to your song, and... yeah, there's no way I'm gonna be able to do the same review format here as I did with everyone else.
The thing is, this... is a very difficult track to critique due to its extremely experimental nature. After having listened to some of XoArK's work for comparison, I can say that you've essentially achieved the style you wanted to create. Since the style is so firmly intended towards atonality and fast, sporadic drum loop changes at uneven intervals, there isn't really anything to criticize in the composition as it's not based on being listenable to more than a highly specific audience. To look further into this style you may want to research atonality, or alternatively you might find some inspiration from older music genres such as serialism or even microtonal experimentation since the actual notes used don't matter, as long as they exist and repeat enough to be recognizeable as a theme.
At this point, my scoring essentially needs to come down to what I value in a piece of music. What I value tends to be harmonicity, narrative value, and clear intent in decisions made. This genre of "advanced dnb" is, evidently, intentionally fairly "random" and deliberately disregards concepts of harmonicity. I find that this results in a surprisingly bland style of music, where atonality is pushed so far with minimal contrast that it doesn't have much of any impact in the end. Similarly, the "random" shifts in drums are... interesting, but not very impactful as there isn't much of anything to cling onto there as memorable either, aside from it feeling "random", as is seemingly intended. It reminds me far too much of music that is avant-garde for its own sake rather than to serve an emotional or narrative purpose.
That said, I do appreciate the atmosphere in this, and a lot of the specific drum loops have some pretty tasty samples in them. The reverb, while perhaps a bit too intense at times, does add a lot to the atmosphere, and there's some really neat space to this track. It honestly feels like the type of theme I would find in a similarly experimental video game during a jungle-themed level.
Final score: 6.5