About the review

Title: Acts of Obsession
Listen online: 
 
 download add to playlist
Artist: Ceekayed
Genre: Electronica: Industrial
Reviewed by: Din on October 06, 2007 (All reviews by Din)

Review Feedback: 
Ceekayed gave Din positive feedback for this review.
Din responded: I look forward to hearing your tweaks :)

Agree		 
Disagree

Review

 Agree with this review?  
Have an opinion and want to be known for it? Share your opinion directly with the musican and start earning your Reviewer Reputation by reviewing this song.


1Overall Description
This is an excellent industrial track, utilizing layers of distorted instruments and sound effects for a nice hard and heavy feel. The emotional quality is well conveyed; I can understand the artist's anger behind the piece. I especially like one particular synth that captures the wailing sound of anger and frustration and makes great use of pitch-bends and cross-delay. The breaks are well positioned, allowing for transitions that fit perfectly into the song's genre (although I'm not a stickler for following genre rules, or even knowing them in a lot of cases). My only real complaint is that, with all the stacked distortion the high end of the frequency spectrum is filled with a battling of hiss, ringing, etc. that interferes with things like the brass of the drumset and some of the lead-ish synth lines. So while the masterful use of distortion ends up being one of this song's real strengths, it also manages to be the song's greatest failing.

Overall, it's a solid song; fans of industrial will definitely want to grab this one :)
 
2Creativity Description
I don't know that the artist manages to accomplish anything new, but I also believe artistic license and creativity include being able to capture a unique idea or personal emotion, even while using established methods. As such, this piece works perfectly.

The song intro transitions quite suddenly into the song's main theme. The breaks work well, and I especially like what was going on at 2:05, when the drums drop out briefly for the strings to play with a little more focus. The ending is a little fragmented, where every thing stops, you get a reprise of the introduction, and then another measure of the main theme that quickly fades out. It works, but I would like it better with either something that ties all three pieces together (like maybe some deep pad work way in the background...maybe?), or using just one of those closing parts.
 
3Sound Quality Description
My short experience with distortion has shown me that as soon as you distort an audio signal, you boost the signal across the entire frequency spectrum, especially the high end (and I mean BOOST). I've also found that not all of those frequencies contribute to the sound in a good way, in the same way that anything below 30Hz creates nasty things like subsonic rumble, unintended vibrato or warbling of the entire mix, and (at it's worst) DC offset. I might try using a combination of parametric and graphic equalizers on everything that's run through distortion, and shave off some of those 10kHz+ frequencies to open up the top end for all the rest of the mix.

Also, the song makes limited use of the dynamic range, although this particular style of music is more forgiving of something like that. There's a short intro and then BAM! the song hits peak and remains there for almost it's entirety. I can appreciate it like it is, but some listeners might enjoy a little more variety in the sound levels.
 
Comments

There are no comments yet. Be the first person to comment.