THE CRUSADE OF EPICS: Results -> A Change Of Seasons wins!

Night Prowler

Night Prowler

Customer Deathcycle Manager
Staff member
Welcome to the Crusade of Epics!

This game will consist of 128 songs nominated by you all.

First stage of the game will feature 64 rounds with one match in each round. Reasoning behind this is that the songs are long and it'll go a lot smoother for everyone with just two songs in each round, so that everyone can listen to each song before voting.

Once the second stage starts, I'll do two matches per round, since everyone will have already heard all the songs at least once.

The 128 songs were divided by myself into a few uneven groups based on bands and genre. There are some matches with prog rock songs going one against the other, some extreme metal songs going against one another, some genre mixed matches, some matches with two songs by one band (Dream Theater, Iced Earth, Opeth, Rush and Symphony X, which had the most songs). This was in order to curb the favoritism for those bands and give a chance to other bands. Also, at least in this first stage, no match features two songs nominated by the same user.

Rules for the nominated songs were:
  • metal/rock genre
  • from 09:00 to 25:00 minutes length
  • no Iron Maiden or any project involving a current or ex-Iron Maiden member
  • no live songs, no covers, no medleys

Spotify playlist with all the songs in the game:
open.spotify.com

The Crusade of Epics

Playlist · Night Prowler · 128 items · 1 likes
open.spotify.com open.spotify.com
 

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Devin Townsend - Earth Day (Nominated by @Night Prowler)
vs.
Judas Priest - Lochness (Nominated by @Saapanael)
 
This is a no brainer. Lochness is like if Spinal Tap wrote an epic, but it’s just boring and not even that funny. It makes Nostradamus look like high art.
 
“Earth Day” has a lot of that booming, airy, pleasantly harmonized sound that I like from Townsend, mixed with the noisy, screamy sound of his that I don’t like as much. No carnival music here, which is a big plus. The lyrics are pretty dumb for the most part (and yes, I understand the irony he’s going for), and there’s some bad phrasing in places. All of that said, I think the songwriting is successful here, and there are large swaths of the track that I like a lot.

Then we have “Lochness”, which has a lot of pointless squawking near the beginning (yes, I understand it’s trying to evoke the sounds of the lake creature in some way) and really plods through its first half with the exception of the pre-chorus and chorus, which are nice. The second half is much stronger until the squawking returns near the end. You can definitely hear elements of the coming Nostradamus sound in this track, mostly in a good way. The lyrics here are also pretty dumb, but at least they’re trying to be more poetic than the Townsend lyrics. I think my biggest issue with the track is that it doesn’t really earn its run time — you could easily cut 4-5 minutes out of this and still have an epic that got its point across effectively and accomplished everything it set out to do.

These are both flawed songs in some ways, and while I find parts of the Townsend track grating, its songwriting is superior to the bloated and sometimes boring Priest track. Sorry, @Saapanael, but @Night Prowler ’s nominee takes this one. Winner: Devin Townsend
 
Earth Day is one of the most compressed-sounding songs I've ever heard. Devin is a cool creative guy but this level of noisiness is hard to listen to.
 
I don't see the problem with Lochness. The first minutes are perfectly acceptable, mid tempo fun with a nice chorus and fitting riff. Good lead part. The quiet part might be a little worse if you squint your eyes, but then it comes back big time with another chorus. It's actually a very normal song, it's just slower and fit with lengthy intros and outros. Good song.

Earth Day, on the other hand, is actually rather weak in my opinion. It's very compressed as Saaap wrote, even for Devin, lyrics don't work for me, chorus isn't that great... Like the post chorus "I'm so far away!". Don't like the "hate, love, hate" part.

Lochness isn't top shelf Priest, but it's very underrated and gets a lot of hate for how normal it is as a song. Earth Day seems to be a fan favourite, but it's just not for me.
 
I really liked the Devin Townsend song for the first few minutes. Which surprised me because I'm not usually keen. However it was starting to drag after five minutes. I find the relentless wall-of-noise approach tiring, and I'm not keen with very produced-sounding vocals fighting to be heard in the background.

While Lochness has a very silly chorus, I vastly prefer the structure to this song, which justifies its length. Guitars sound good and distinct too.
 
LooseCannon said:
Everyone had a chance to submit nominations!
Click to expand...
Exactly. With Dream Theater nominations, it came down to two things:

1. Everyone assumed everyone else will nominate the obvious songs (Learning To Live, Metropolis, Octavarium etc.)
2. They have a shitload of songs that fit the game, and therefore everyone has their own favorites.
 
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