as above, I was going for a kind of doomsday cult vibe in this song. It's way out of my comfort zone doing this much vocal layering for the whole song but I quite like how it came out. The guitar part is unusually complicated for me, but it turns out if you actually practice songs before recording them, that's not necessarily a bad thing!

I have a few comparisons that popped into my mind. The sound of the acoustic reminded my of Iris. I am also getting a bit of Idlewild in the way you are playing the guitar. I admire what you are doing with your vocals but it doesn't quite hit the mark for me, I think it is because they all sit kind of in the same level of the mix and I want a single lead vocal to pop out. Also, I have really been enjoying your raw guitars and I want some more damn it.

I do think the mood of the track fits the theme of your track very nicely. It puts you on edge and that could be to do with the vocals that I have just critised.

You hit the challenge squarely on the head. I like your lyric.
I like the guitars. That acoustic sounds good. Maybe a few hand scrapes in there could be eliminated. I typically don't dislike them, but I noticed them quite a bit. The rhythm and bass drives the song along nicely. Your mix is less clear than usual, especially in the vocal. On my shitty work speakers the vocal was not good. At all. It's better in the studio, but I don't think you hit the effect you were going for.

So, you mentioned that you hoped I'd be okay with you changing genres a bit, and I joked that you'd better start over just to be safe. And then I stressed that I was joking... but now here I am putting this song third from the bottom. That's a pity, but I do feel the need that it's not just because of your genre shift. My biggest gripe is the vocal mix. I get that you're doing the collective narrator thing and they're supposed to sound like droning cultists, but just think there are several key elements of this mix, particularly the group vocals and the drums, that sound TOO distant, and it interferes with my ability to hear the lyrics, to engage with the story. I do like the i-VII-IV-i chord progression, where the major fourth contrasts with the minor tonic to build tension, mystery, and a slight religious connotation (that's why it worked so well for Madonna, too! 😉 ). The weird disengaged handclaps also worked in a way for me, even though they suffer from the same mixing issues as the vocals and the rest of the percussion. But overall, this big swing didn't land very well for me, maybe because you were working in a style that wasn't as familiar to you.