The Lamer's Ballad (the_lamers_ballad.xm)

Posted by TMA Placeholder Account on Thu 31st Jan 2002, rated 8 / 10.

This song starts off sounding like its going to be a really nice song. There skipping used in the first few seconds reminded me of an old style record playing. This is a VERY nice touch. A funk guitar (in my opinion, the guitar going through the whole song is the best thing about it. I love that guitar) picks up and then the song goes into full swing. Up until this point Im pretty optimistic about this song. Then the vocals come in. Im impressed the author was able to put vocals into his song and keep it small as it is, however, the singer isnt the most talented, and it detracts from the song. Heck it may not even be the singer, all I know is that it sounds like hes not supposed to be in the song, and thats never a good thing. Every time the song goes into its chorus, half of the words are unable to be recognized, and after listening to a good bit of rap, you get used to people mumbling their words. At 2:40 seconds (minus a few ascending notes, youll know them when you hear them) the song goes into a nice break down section that I like a lot, and then begins to build back up. For the better part of the next minute, everything seems to work right. The singer sounds like he belongs in the song and in my opinion the key that this section is what the whole song should have been in. Of course, the key changes back to the original key, and the song ends with an ending that doesnt hurt the song, but doesnt add anything to it either. My advice to the author would have been to either take the vocals out, or play with them a bit longer to get them to completely gel with the song. What you have right here at times sounds like something youd hear in a swanky night club, and not in a good way. There is so much good going on here; Im thinking that either a deadline or impatience kept this song from reaching its full potential. But yet, I have to give the song this compliment, it sticks in your head a lot more than you think it would. I cant count the number of times Ive been in formation and this song has popped into my head, so apparently the author has done SOMETHING right. That alone raised the overall score by a half-point. This song is very well constructed. I cant really find anything wrong with it on the technical side of things. Effects are used very nicely, and the samples are all nice enough. I still dont necessarily like how the distortion is used on voice during the chorus sections, but Ill keep from complaining about that.