Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Song of the Week 36: 'Damn Those Turks!' by Daniel Baranowsky

Hey, it's time for another Song of the Week. This song is another from Final Fantasy VII and is titled 'Damn Those Turks!'. Also, this is from the same FF7 album that had the song reviewed for SotW 35. It was remixed by the artist Daniel Baranowsky. I really don't have anything else to say, and I'm already writing this at the last second, so let's get this started...

The beginning starts out with three notes hit by an acoustic guitar, and then the song will play a slow, western-like rhythm (to define "western, I mean the "wild west"). At 0:08 the guitar Linkcomes back in, although this time it's an electric guitar. This plays a twangy, little melody that ends at about 0:15. There's a buildup that happens at 0:17, and at 0:19 the track will burst with some strong percussion hits and a very twangy, electric, western guitar-like synth. I can't exactly describe it. At 0:28 the normal acoustic guitar gets the pickup into the leading melody. Here the melody is controlled by the guitar (with possibly some harpsichord), and the electric guitar plays as the bass. The percussion plays rather slow here, and throughout the entire song (it plays the rhythm that everything played at 0:19). At 0:37 the acoustic drops back a little bit, and the electric guitar will take over as the melody. The twangy guitar synth...thing that I really couldn't describe in words plays that same rhythm from 0:19 as the electric guitar jams out. At 0:46 the acoustic takes over the melody again, and it goes back to the way it was at 0:28 except for the "twangy guitar" (which is what I'm going to call that sound from here on). At 0:55 the song will go back into that western groove it had going on back at the beginning of the song. The acoustic will play the melody here, which is simply it playing various arpeggios. At 1:01 a synth can be heard slowly stretching it's pitch up one level. At 1:11 you can hear some bass playing a small counter melody, and at 1:13 the percussion will play a couple times each second. The bass will also quicken to the speed of eighth notes (which isn't all that fast considering how slow the tempo is). At 1:19 that synth from 1:01 will come back again and repeat the cool, sliding sound it made from when it played earlier. At 1:28 there's a quick buildup, and at 1:30 there's a new section. Here, everything that had played before dropped out, and new stuff will take over. A male vocal will now rise and sing the notes in the melody. No words are spoken, just voice. A bunch of synths are added to harmonize with the voices, and play fast sixteenth notes. At 1:40 the rhythm from 0:19 will come back in to back up the melody even more. This section will continue to play and repeat itself for about twenty more seconds. At 1:57 the piano is now added to counter the vocal and the percussion/twangy guitar, which plays a light rhythm. The bass for the piano is also muffled out a little bit, so the treble is mainly heard here above everything else. At 2:07 the choir completely drops out, and the piano starts to get a little more flashy. It plays at a medium-high pitch, and there's hardly any bass with it. At 2:10 a buildup is beginning, continuously getting louder and louder. At 2:16 everything drops out, except for a light, percussion-like synth, the stretched note last played by the guitar, and the piano to play the melody. At 2:22 is where the piano really starts to speed up in terms of melody, and 2:26 starts with low piano at the pickup (same notes as the guitar at 0:28). Unlike 0:28, there's no guitar, and the melody previously played by the piano continues. The piano does a great job here in keeping the melody moving and not being too repetitive. At 2:42 the song now becomes a pure piano solo with nothing to stand in its way. However, at 2:51 the guitar comes back in and plays almost the exact same thing back at 0:28 except for the quiet piano continuing its melody. Then, after repeating itself a little bit, the song fades away...

Pros: The various guitars used here in the song were pretty sick. The percussion hits, starting at 0:19, were clean, strong, and powerful. What I like the most about this song though is the piano dominated section from the second half of the track. I know that I speak of my love for piano too much, but for this track I do prefer the piano over the guitars.

Cons: The song, even for its very short length of 3:11, was a little too repetitive. I got sort of sick of the sections that just played over and over again (mainly the section at 0:28). Also, the section where the vocals came in bothered me. They sounded good, but they didn't sound right with the rest of the song. To me they came in at a pretty bad place. The ending could have been better also. It would have sounded better if they did something new for the ending instead of just repeating the section that was playing all the time.

Overall: The song sounds pretty cool, but it's not one of my favorites. It's also very short, although the length is fine considering the few changes in the song altogether. Very western, very clean, and it's pretty cool to listen to.

Rating: 7/10

Note: Probably some are thinking why I placed such a low rating on this song. Well, I'm trying to change some things in terms of my rating system. I've noticed, and other people have noticed, that I rate these songs way too high. I may even fix the ratings on the other songs I've looked at or even create some .5 SotW's for the first reviews I ended up doing since I started writing on this blog. I want to limit the ratings to only whole numbers or a number with a .5. This is no longer "on a scale of 9 to 10..." No, this is on a scale of 1 to 10, which means the lowest rating I can put a song would be 0.5 or maybe a 0 if the song is a complete disgrace to music everywhere. I would only use numbers with other decimals when comparing a song with others reviewed in terms of their ratings. I'll try not to do that too much though. Now, I probably won't rate anything lower than a 5 right now, but hey, at least I'm trying to turn things around. Who knows, as I continue writing these I may change the way I write the entire review. That probably won't happen for a while; I'm just trying to take things one step at a time...

2 comments:

Met said...

I'd be giving this one an eight if I wrote it. I dig the ethnic vocals and my only regret is that the song fades out relatively unfinished. Gotta love the piano with the delay, it sounds awesome. What bothered me most was probably the elements that remained within the piece right before the piano was left alone. I can agree with your comments about its repetitiveness, but I like this track too much to give it a 7 (which I see as average for a site like OCR). In any case, Daniel Baranowsky is well worth checking out.

Met said...

Also, I highly recommended modifying your existing ratings if you're starting to change them now. Just for the sake of consistency. I'll probably be doing a review of my SotWs as well.