I heard that chord change at 0:06 and I got excited. I asked myself "Ooh, who is this? WHAT?! MANDIBLES?! WELL, HOLY CRAP!" Yes, I usually don't like your songs very much. This is far and away my favorite Mandibles song I have heard thus far. The chord structure and instrument choices are making me think of the first (and very likely the only) Buckingham/Nicks album. ("Crying in the Night" and "Crystal" from that album are examples). I like the acoustic guitar solo. The "I'm moving out" part does sound like the melody of "You Raise Me Up" by Josh Groban, which is distracting, but I absolutely LOVE everything about the verses. Vocals are still having pitch issues in spots, but not bothering me as much as in previous entries. Vocals do sound a bit compressed/distorted, and possibly a bit loud in the mix. Snare is a bit buried as well. Still, this is a Mandibles song that I actually LIKE! Good job!

LYRICS: [OKAY] 1 point
STRUCTURE: [GOOD] 2 points
PERFORMANCE: [GOOD] 2 points
CONCEPT/CHALLENGE: [GOOD] 2 points
DYNAMICS/MIX: [OKAY] 1 point
SCORE: 8 out of 10

There are a couple of songs in this round where extremely different vocal recording qualities impact on my enjoyment. I'm trying not to let it affect my rankings because obviously technical issues are hard to avoid. I hope you can get your guest vocal to re-record at some point though as the lo-fi quality of his recording really impacts on the effect when you're duetting! All that aside, I like this song a lot. It's very musical theatre but the melody is strong, lyrics are good and I like the instrumentation a lot.

First chords are really beautiful. The “You Raise Me Up” bits make me flashback to when my downstairs neighbor who taught at the Shanghai Conservatory got a series of gigs for Audi, teaching high rollers about popular music, so he put a band together that was my band plus him (piano/synths), his girlfriend (vocals) and a chamber quartet. We had to play a wide array of music, so we went from “Beat It” (where yes, I finally got to play that solo live in a situation where it was actually fitting) to “You Raise Me Up” and we discovered that his girlfriend was, um, not a singer. Anyway, I don’t like the chorus melody, call it PTSD. The singing is pitchy in the lead vocal, but I think where it is pitchy is in those little transitions, it’s those in between notes that are slurry and where they are accented is off pitch. The guest vocal sounds so completely from a different world that it’s distracting—I assume it’s the mic and such. In the chorus again, “home you used to know” that melody doesn’t work for me, what is it, the 9th of the main scale on the V chord going back to a I, something like that? It’s a little indeterminate and not a strong leading tone to my taste. Then there’s the forced “you’re moving on” phrasing. The timbres of the voices is kind of a strange combo to me, and the relative intonation sounds off. I like this solo though!