A review of the album. (Score 1)

The album is called Snapshots, by someone named Matthew O'Reilly, someone I haven't heard of before now. The MP3s can be found at this link.

First off, a hint for the original submitter: You don't need full-bitrate MP3s for a preview. 56Kib/s would have done, and would have been a lot faster to download. Further, it would also encourage people to buy the album if they liked it, just to get something they could get a higher bitrate from.

Tracks:

• Drop of a Hat: Okay, so I knew nothing about this album when I started, but I know something from the first moment of this track: There's a banjo.
  
  Now, for the record, the number of albums I have that feature banjo music number approximately zero. I'm not completely sure---there are some suspicious sounds in some of Mannheim Steamroller's stuff that I actually think is a harpsichord, but it's hard to be sure. Thing is, banjo music doesn't do all that much for me.
  
  That said, it's hard not to smile when a banjo starts playing---but it's not necessarily a smile born of fondness.
  
  Fortunately, a piano starts in soon, along with what presumably is the artist's voice rendering a sort of Billy Joel Piano Manesque musician's ballad. Unfortunately (even with the arrival of percussion later on), the artist's voice isn't enough to save this piece. Specifically, his vocal talents are unclear. There are the minor flaws that you expect from a musician early in his or her career, but the bottom line is that this guy needs some training.
  
  I hate to sound like Simon Cowell here, but let's be honest here. The voice is nasal; this comes through even on the long notes when he should be opening up. Any tone that he has is lost in the back of his throat and nose, and never manages to actually get out of the front of his face. This is true throughout the song, occasionally punctuated by loss of pitch and timbre control.
  
  The voice makes the song difficult to listen completely through, and also makes the lyrics difficult to understand in places. But the lyrics I can understand aren't especially strong, and while the tune isn't bad, it's not very catchy. Well, no, that's not entirely true: it's catchy for a few measures, and then it changes its mind. For example, the bit that ends with "Music's horn and I know that I can't stay" [I know that's not right, but that's what it sounds like he's saying] is quite nice, but then it decides to be briefly something else with an awkward meter and mangled melody, and never quite manages to get catchy again.
  
  Then there's the pointless meandering interlude in the middle of the song. Some ideas are merely bad, but others need to be taken out back and beaten soundly for a while. This is one of the latter. This yabble takes up a good 30% of the track before it gets briefly back to the catchy part, and then showcases some of the guy's long notes and bad falsetto.
  
  This is not a great track. It's amateurish. It's the sort of music I used to hear from inflated egos in a small-town high school.
  
  This is not to say that there's not potential here. With some work, he'd be a passable tenor, and might actually sell a few CDs, but this particular CD already has a serious black mark on it. Even if I bought this CD, I'd reburn it without this track. This should not be the first track you have people listen to.
  
  
• Reluctance: Piano and bass guitar start out this piece very nicely. For eight notes. Yet, even in those eight notes, the pianist bungles the rhythm, losing the beat a bit by rushing the piece. Then hope takes a blow to the head by the arrival of another guitar which overwhelms the artist's voice that follows. This is less a fault with the musicians than it is the studio; this track desperately needs a remix.
  
  Beyond that, this just isn't a good piece. The instrumentation is harsh, the percussion actually detracts, and the piece has some significant problems with meter. The artist still has the same nasality and pitch problems, punctuated by some attempts to do a vocal bend or grace note, which merely manages to make it sound like someone slugged him in the stomach---the pitch changes up and down, but not cleanly or clearly. Again, proper lessons would help this a great deal.
  
  In short, this track would have to come off the reburned CD as well.
  
  
• Someone: As the track was downloading, I found myself counting how many tracks I had to listen to still---not a good sign.
  
  This starts off with some strong piano and percussion stuff, with only a few minor flaws, but really, it's quite good, but then oddly hesitates before launching into the vocals---a shame, since it would have been stronger to just head directly into the piece.
  
  The vocals are pretty much drowned out by the instruments in this piece, but it's probably for the best; the nasality and pitch control issues are still obvious. It's okay, though, because reading through the lyrics tends to make me think I'm better off without them.
  
  The bottom line, however, is that this composition simply can't decide what it is. It feels like it was composed in a stream-of-consciousness style, while that stream of consciousness was playing a game of dodge ball. Bits of this song are strong, but most of it is just hard to listen to. I might keep a total of around 30 seconds of this track, extracted from bits and pieces throughout.
  
  Also, the ending is stinky. Sorry, but it is. The last thirty seconds of the track is completely dispensible.
  
  
• Breakthrough: Thankfully, this is an instrumental track, giving me a break from the voice. (I'm going to have to listen to some Marcella Detroit after this to clear my head.)
  
  Unfortunately, ditching the voice isn't much of an improvement with this piece. The first 25 seconds is---well, pounded out on a piano. Then the drums come in with a sort of hesitant syncopation, and then the pounding begins again. Thirty seconds later, a violin (I think---it's pretty badly played) joins the dirge at another of those syncopated moments. A minute into the piece, the dirge picks up speed, and then becomes this rather sad little dance mix, which would be perfect if one of your legs was shorter than the other, you stomped a lot, and you were clinically depressed.
  
  Over two minutes in, and it becomes a sort of dirge-like slow dance for people who like to stomp a lot. Think of Vulcan dancing in Baron Munchausen, only without the emotional range.
  
  In short, this is not a good piece, even without the vocals.
  
  
• Serien: Thankfully, this starts off pretty quietly, and actually pretty nice. The intro goes on for thirty seconds, and really isn't bad.
  
  Unfortunately, the artist's voice intrudes after that, with all the same problems already mentioned. Again, please, please, please, I beg of you, please introduce this guy to a voice teacher before he cuts another album.
  
  Aside from that, the piano work is an improvement over previous tracks for at least the first half of the song, but it's not a strong piece, and there's very little catchiness about it.
  
  This is the strongest piece on the album so far, but it's still the sort of thing I'd expect more of a high-school student than a musician.
  
  
• Full Circle: Another instrumental, fortunately. Not a bad one, at least for the first minute.
  
  Actually, I'm most of the way through the piece now, and I think it's the strongest one on the album now. (So far, anyway.) It's a little too repetitive for long passages, and unfortunately about 35 seconds before the piece ends, it loses its momentum, and not in a good way.
  
  Still, not bad. The only thing I have to suggest for the artist is that an instrumental piece should have a specific mood in mind for each movement. It manages to maintain that principle for the first two movements, but transitioning into that last movement is just awkward, and doesn't end the piece on a strong note.
  
  
• Looking Away: Starts off okay, but once the artist begins singing, the meter turns to crap, the voice begins to irritate, and the piece becomes difficult to listen to. This is especially true at the faster portion in the middle of the piece, where the artist is completely incomprehensible, the piano is just pounding away, and some of the rhythmic choices made are just downright clumsy.
  
  In all, a very weak piece that I probably would never listen to again.
  
  
• Freedom: Another instrumental, thank $DIETY. Unfortunately, I can't really tell when the introduction ends. This is mostly what I'd expect out of someone noodling around on the piano, but there doesn't seem to be a well-defined intent to this piece; there's no particular mood it evokes, much less a sense of the title concept.

There's no way I can balance out the bottom line here (that I would never buy this album), but I'll just say that there is some potential here. Again, the guy needs some real vocal training, not just some people telling him he has a great voice. He also needs to work with a composer for a while and learn to write a good song rather than write snippets of what could be good songs and then jamming them together with bad transitions. Some poetry classes would also help---his meter leaves a lot to be desired. And developing some subtlety on the piano would be useful as well.

The fault isn't all his. The mix definitely fell short, and did the album a disservice.

In all, a valiant freshman attempt by both studio and artist that falls somewhat short of freshman level. Provided the artist doesn't get discouraged, and is willing to put in the work, I might be willing to listen to more MP3s, but I wouldn't buy this album with the intention of playing it unless I needed to be convinced that life wasn't worth living. And that, I'm afraid, is the crux of the problem. The availability of the MP3s allowed me to consider buying the music, but they also convinced me to give it a wide berth. If the music had been good, I probably would have bought the album based on what I heard.

Anyway, that's probably one reason why nobody's pre-ordered the CD. The only way an indie artist can make a living doing music is to be good---and I'm sorry to say, the quality isn't there yet.

Music is a hard life. It takes a lot of hard work to get good at it, and then it takes a lot of hard work to stand out from the crowd. In the meantime, you can't afford to get discouraged, but you can't afford to delude yourself, either. The artist needs to embrace reality a little bit here and recognize that more work needs to take place before those sales and gigs will start rolling in.

Best of luck to you both.