So many demos

At the behest of our fearless label-honcho, we’ve been assigned to review a few demos she’s been sent.

There are some damn good ones in there.

There are some not so damn good ones in there.

At the risk of being impolitic, I have one suggestion for people making new music: please, please stop trying to sound like VNV Nation. We already have one of them, we really don’t need more. Not that I dislike VNV or anything, but, well…if we’ve already got the one, a backup VNV doesn’t really accomplish much. I’m very happy you own an Access Virus, they’re very nice. But you can use it to do things other than make 00ntzpop.

Thank you.

As a word of advice to anyone else out there, the main weakness in most of the demos I’ve heard overall is in the vocals. It’s not that the vocalist can’t sing or that they have a bad voice – it’s that I can’t hear them over the music. A little compression, maybe a little volume gain…it doesn’t have to be too loud, but if I can barely hear it, it isn’t intelligible and it’s presence distracts from the music, so neither the music nor vocals are well-served. It took me years to figure that one out for myself…

Here endeth my rant.