The Syndicate

TOP 10

Aladyyn
BLOODYRAIN10001
Kane
Made
MyNameIsNothing
Newcomb
Psycho666Soldier
schadd
tane
Tangrowth
Zarathustra

11th place: vanity. Melt Yourself Down - Release! I let pretty much anything slide here if it was tethered to jazz or had appropriate-feeling motion. I didn't get terribly much of what I specifically asked for, but I'm kind of glad it shook out that way? This is certainly not the sort of sound I wa...

12th place: marmot & KnightsofCydonia Diablo Swing Orchestra - Voodoo Mon Amour It felt a bit inevitable that this song was coming, but random.org actually chose to reveal both subs to me back to back as something like the fourth and fifth tunes I clicked play on. You spared me a lot of confusi...

13th place: LordQuas Sonny Stitt & The Oscar Peterson Trio - Au Privave These guys are rolling on a higher level and their skills are pretty clear. There would be a lot of this classic sort of jazz in my life if I didn't spend the overwhelming majority of my listening time on metal and vgm. I l...

14th place: nutella Youngblood Brass Band - Brooklyn I had a long-ish write-up to this that I ended up scrapping because I think I was just irritable when I made it. A brief excerpt: Lets see what weird things we can do starts to go down the rabbit hole at 5:00, and it's like, it's cool that you ca...

15th place: Ace Marvel OmmoKpop - Mr. 애매모호 I found myself in a weird place on this one where I had mostly negative things to say about it but put it back on over and over again anyway. I've grown so accustomed to godly production in kpop. I'm not sure what went wrong, but yikes the accompaniment he...

TOP 15

Ace Marvel
Aladyyn
BLOODYRAIN10001
Kane
KnightsofCydonia
LordQuas
Made
marmot
MyNameIsNothing
Newcomb
nutella
Psycho666Soldier
schadd
tane
Tangrowth
vanity.
Zarathustra

16th place: shubaka17 Blu-Swing - Sunset This accomplishes a lot with a little. Aside from her voice and a moment at 2:28 where the brass takes over with some guitar and noise effects, no one component really changes much throughout the song. But they're all quite tasteful and come and go before th...

17th place: Owner Odd Chap - The Walking Moustache Alright let us swing, friends. I got plenty of repetitive, beat-driven subs, and their fates range the reveal. An unanticipated consequence of this category in particular was that my ears are really digging for details. There's so much jazz in the ...

18th place: gbsfranca No Buses - Pretty Old Man A song this repetitive should not be this fun. I guess the music video helped with that, but I really like how the sounds in this come together. The bass and drums both feel pronounced but mellow. The vocals have a neat slight distortion going on. I l...

19th place: Relm Hiro Takahashi - 太陽がまた輝くとき The video is pretty hilarious. This guy is a living bobblehead doll, and they made him pretend to play piano and guitar in sections that include neither. The music is pretty in a very standard way. It feels like a cookie-cutter pop song, albeit in an era ...

20th place: Ampharos Snarky Puppy - Tarova This is a lot less interesting than the last two Snarky Puppy subs I got. Classic dialtone keys and funk aren't sounds I get into naturally. This is the soundscape to an air conditioned used car dealership with some guy adjusting his crotch in the backgrou...

TOP 20

Ace Marvel
Aladyyn
Ampharos
BLOODYRAIN10001
gbsfranca
Kane
KnightsofCydonia
LordQuas
Made
marmot
MyNameIsNothing
Newcomb
nutella
Owner of a Lonely Heart
Psycho666Soldier
Relm
schadd
shubaka17
tane
Tangrowth
vanity.
Zarathustra

21st place: Frog Deorro - Bootie in Your Face Let us commence the almost half way shit post parade. https://media1.tenor.com/images/5b2eb1c112de959b4e1cee30e5e27f06/tenor.gif https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lpqfye1xRw1qatk7fo1_500.gif https://media1.tenor.com/images/bd6678db765543c5f29f8ad88bf05...

22nd place: Logic Akitaka Tohyama - Heat Haze Shadow 2 I hope I grabbed the right link, because this is extremely viable for cat 6. Toyama seems to have very little composer credit for a guy who's been in the business since the 90s, and if a fraction of his material sounds like this, I don't know h...

23rd place: BoKnows Kanye West - Flashing Lights So this is what early Kanye sounds like. I don't think he explicitly mentions his penis once. The main hook of this is captivating, so much so that I've found myself putting it on loop and making excuses to not work on my Walrus so I can keep it goin...

24th place: soah Troldhaugen - Lefty's Wild Ride One of the first things I noticed when I pulled these guys up was that their follow-up to Obzkure Anekdotez for Maniakal Massez, Idio+syncrasies, got absurdly low reviews. Like, the sort of panning you don't see unless it's really that bad. And I lis...

25th place: Marcher Jovian Electone Lab - Takarajima ~ T-Square (Jabberloop cover) This is more viable for the category than the smoother Jabberloop original. It still bears the limitations of a synthetic recording. There's no room for expression in the trumpet or sax when all you can do is compres...

26th place: Bloobird Royal Pickles - Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho This is cute and I like the old time diy feel of it. They seem like the sort of band that could just set up shop on a street corner and jam away. I mean, it's hard to separate Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho from being bored ...

27th place: Adam Nujabes - Sky is Falling Instrumentally this entire song is a 10 second loop. A couple of the tracks in the mix come and go, but in a category catering to jazz, the lack of variance really stands out. It's not something that bothered me. It just made it hard for this song to compet...

28th place:

Moose

King Glasya - Float On But It's Money Machine

I listened to Good News For People Who Love Bad News a lot when it came out.

Never realized it was Fantanocore gecgecgecgecgecgecgecgecgecgec.

Even the lolcats to this category were great.

7.0

29th place: roro__b Pogo - What I Likes This is cute. I'm probably repeating myself a lot to say it's a creative choice for a category that wasn't going to cater perfectly to the gimmick. From a direct appeal standpoint, I can't get into it quite so much as the more electronically-driven Pogo subs ...

30th place: Visorslash Parov Stelar - All Night The way they play with the vocal samples in this reminds me of all the Pogo subs I've been getting. The pounding keyboard dominating the soundscape for the vast majority of the song from 0:50 on wears on me over numerous plays and starts to really dra...

31st place: birdwithteeth11 Diablo Swing Orchestra - Lady Clandestine Chainbreaker I figured I was going to get DSO subs to this, and I thought hey, great, I can finally hear them in their native environment and appreciate what everyone likes so much about them. That didn't go quite as planned. The...

32nd place: staypositivefriend They Might Be Giants - No One Knows My Plan I wish I liked They Might Be Giants more than I do, but I've struggled with most of what I've heard. I think it's cute that they recorded kids' albums. This song keeps it very simple and tame, and I guess there's something p...

33rd place: Keldeo Atsushi Kitajoh - Axe to Grind You're one of those dirty 128kps subbers, but I found another upload that wasn't awful. This is cool in a basic way. You got closer to the core style I was looking for than most, and while that wasn't a significant requirement here, it's refreshing....

34th place: Zack Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia The synth layers over her voice in the chorus sound incredible, and, coupled with that hard beat and the high pitched keys, make the peaks of this song delicious. Unfortunately, I can't stand the rest of it. I don't like the superficial cool of her rappe...

35th place: ladd Mew - Am I Wry? No I had to play this at 2x speed to begin to wrap my head around why it was subbed here. I don't actually parse rhythm in a mathematical sense at all. I never quite got it conceptually, like, any note can go anywhere so it just matters how it feels, no? This has le...

36th place: Cory Triathalon - Garden 2 This doesn't feel like it's only a minute and a half, but I'm not sure that's a great thing. The vocals are bleak for me in a way that could suit some mood but feels out of place here. I could write it off if there was more to the song, but there's so little t...

37th place: PunchyTheCat Rina Sawayama - XS STFU! at least made me laugh, if for perhaps not the intended reasons. This is just really boring to me. I get very tired very quickly of the repetitive chorus. The distorted sample she periodically plugs in doesn't really flow with the song and feels mor...

5. 9pm at apparently every Tokyo nightclub Time to leave the slums behind and jam for the higher casts. We should probably rent suits for tonight's set, but let's face it, none of us have enough class to make it through the door. If you want to keep your jeans on and go for a hybrid, that's fine, b...

Scoring through 4 39. 14.1 PunchyTheCat 38. 23.1 Moose 37. 25.0 Relm 36. 26.6 Logic 35. 27.1 gbsfranca 34. 27.9 vanity. 31. 28.2 Ace Marvel 31. 28.2 Cory 31. 28.2 ladd 30. 28.4 Frog 28. 28.5 Aladyyn 28. 28.5 BoKnows 27. 28.7 Bloobird 26. 29.2 LordQuas 25. 29.4 Visorslash 24. 29.7 Made 23. 29.8 nute...

1st place: Zarathustra Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Dead Flag Blues This feels like cheating, but I made no mention of it here and honestly didn't even think of it when I was writing the category. I stole a line from the lyrics in my cat 7 description last year, subs from which this one derived. f...

2nd place: Zack Magnolia Electric Co - Almost Was Good Enough I've had a bunch of Songs: Ohia albums sitting on my harddrive for going on 20 years, and I've still yet to dive into him. Oops. I love this like I love the Neil Young sub to cat 1 for a lot of the same stylistic reasons. I can ride thes...

3rd place: staypositivefriend mewithoutYou - August 6th Each time I listened to this, I picked up more bits and pieces of lyrics that made no sense to me collectively but painted something devastating. All the birds fell like frogs from the sky. My heart felt like Guernica scenes. Human foreheads a...

4th place: Tangrowth Stars of the Lid - Taphead This is pure ear candy and I don't care if there's nothing happening in it. I click play and zone into my happy place and then 12 and a half minutes later realize a song just ended. I think the tones are appropriate for a vast empty place, whether tha...

5th place: Made Miles Davis - Blue in Green This works for me here, and it probably shouldn't. I could impose this style of music over an endless array of scenes and find excuses to make it stick. Sure, it's not projecting a harsh environment physically, but the trumpet's swagger sets it apart from...

TOP 5

Made
staypositivefriend
Tangrowth
Zack
Zarathustra

6th place: LordQuas Kowloon Walled City - The Pressure Keeps Me Alive I've always gone into this band with extremely high expectations on account of their name and then passively lost interest, but I've never had to parse them in the context of a walrus before. I've never listened closely. This giv...

7th place: Newcomb Pharmakon - Transmission I have no idea what this name actually means, but conjuring the pharmaceutical industry feels more sinister to me than any amount of standard satan and warfare modes. The noise wall at 0:50 sounds like one of those blaster toys gone berserk, and the bass ...

8th place: MyNameIsNothing Shady Nasty - AA This it took me a very long time to reach a point where I directly enjoyed this, but it trended all the way up from the bottom feeders to top 10. This isn't a category where enjoyment is necessary anyway, and it was hard for me for all the right reasons. ...

9th place: schadd Senyawa - Kabau This is a pretty low key brooding piece that I keep expecting to do more. It feels restless and pensive, ready to break out in a scream or a mad dash for freedom away from that constantly flickering guitar that seems to rise up like flames around the deep droning s...

10th place: nutella MGMT - Lady Dada's Nightmare This was instantly one of my favorite subs to the category. I'm beginning to view this band as the modern heirs of Blur. The song doesn't start out like it's going to be a cat fit, but the drums that roll in at 1:35 convert it to an expansive echoing...

TOP 10

LordQuas
Made
MyNameIsNothing
Newcomb
nutella
schadd
staypositivefriend
Tangrowth
Zack
Zarathustra

11th place: Ampharos mewithoutYou - Lilac Queen This guy's lyrics have been a consistent trip. This one first caught my attention at I was the ISIS flag design . I am again left with no clue what he's actually singing about but an ambiguous feeling steering me in the direction of something bleak an...

12th place: KnightsofCydonia Joe Bonamassa - Black Lung Heartache One of the first things that struck me about this song was how the bit from 0:11 to 0:22 reminded me of Day Sixteen: Loser from Ayreon's The Human Equation. So of course I checked, and of course there was no artist overlap, but in th...

Yes bwt forgot he subbed this and expressed to me how he'd wished he subbed it and I told him someone else did and we were like wow what a coincidence.

13th place: birdwithteeth11 Gorguts - Pleiades' Dust Subbing a 33 minute song featuring one of the sample artists was bold. I've said before that I'm fine with sample artists, and I am, but Colin Marston's a higher risk than most for being in the already too familiar zone. I do own this album, but ...

14th place: BoKnows MF DOOM - Lactose and Lecithin Yeah, two people subbed sample artists to this category and did just fine for it. I've listened to Operation Doomsday a ton, but I've only ever given his other albums two or three spins. Doom's sound is so core to my vision of this category that it...

15th place: Owner Reignwolf - Are You Satisfied? This song would be more satisfying if I hadn't heard it at least 50 times in commercials before. It's a grand testament to the impotence of advertisement that I don't have the slightest clue what it was shilling. Google says Bauer Hockey brand appare...

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