Heavyish Progish Rock Band

Hi guys. I'd actualy like to see if I can get a few of my peices with my band crituqued. My band is called Iceland, we have some diverse rock related influences. Everything you hear is guitar, drumset and keyboard (me!).
Unfortunatly all I have to offer is these recordings found at

http://www.myspace.com/iceland
and
http://www.purevolume.com/iceland

These are all at least a year old and we have developed a bunch since then. But... I'd still like to see what real musicians think about the song writing.

We have a few songs online, but I really only care for the review of three of them. Feel free to comment on anything though.

The songs I'm interested in you guys looking at are
1491
(purevolume)
Sals Song
(purevolume)
P nut
(myspace)

Some of our earlier songs were not so well put together and some others were butchered in our super quick studio recording.
We are working hard on several new songs, and I'd really like to see if you guys have any usefull thoughts that could be relevant to new material.
Any thoughts?

Hey Varnon,

I don't really know what to say. I don't listen very often to this kind of music, so I don't know what I should be comparing it to. This song 'My name is P Nut', I mean quite clashing between the heavy guitar and the piano melody, I suppose thats the intent. I don't know, the chord progressions still seem quite ordinary. The instrumentation is quite unique though, which is part of your 'edge' I suppose. It does get interesting when it speeds up a little, harmonies start to get played with and melody gets kind of interesting. The hard guitar 'riffs' around 3:15 are cool. The piano part really needs to be made more interesting and you need to have great use of dynamics from soft to loud. Maybe exploit the use of a guitar solo and a piano solo. Also some tempo changes would be well utilized. That's all I have to say Keep making music!

Regards
Pravin

Something I can say at first glance is that the playing/recordings isn't very tight at places. It's very unstable in rhythm, like the keyboards and drums. You need to start working a bit with the metronome. The beat is very important in this kind of rock music so you need to be able to get a steady rhythm so you can get that oomph out of it. Other than that I can't really say I like the music, there are some places that work, but of course that's my own subjective opinion. Something I reacted to is that I feel alot of your riffs has no aim, you're at many times just going up and down a scale, feels like there's not much of a "goal" at places if you get what I mean. I don't know if you're aiming to be real progressive, but if you are I'm afraid most of your stuff feels a bit ordinary.

Hey guys, thanks for your time and commments.

These peices are actualy over a year old now, and some of your comments were things I had allready considered.

Upstart
There really wasn't in intent in any of our earlier music. We didn't intend for things to clash or to have an edge or anything. We just sort of did what we thought sounded good with out thinking about it too much. I'd like to start writing things with intent now, instead of just letting things randomly happen. I had thought about tempo variations, and I think I have some decent ideas.
The total lack of keyboard dymanics was one of those technical things encountered in our rush recording... but I really don't know what to do with dynamic variation anyway. Any ideas?
It had not really occured to me that the chord progression was ordinary, I'll have to think more about that in future works. Thanks.

Erik,
I know, the timing of the recording bugs the crap out of me. The members of the band are from different cities, and we were out of practice when recording. We also didn't have any time to fix anything in studio. Not to say we don't all have our timing deficits, but live recordings we made when we all lived in the same city and could practice were very tight. Unfortunatly, the songs I mentioned aren't the worst recordings we made for this CD.

Can you discribe in any more depth what you mean by a goal?
We didn't aim to be anything in particular, we just played stuff that sounded good. I listed it as progish because we don't have any song structure.
I guess I can see that the song structure may be more interesting than chorus/verse/chorus/verse but the parts that make up the song sound ordinary. I hadn't really looked at it that way before.

I've come a pretty long way since I wrote these songs, and these are actualy the first handfull of songs I wrote... and I may be better than any of the other rock musicans locally, but I'm still a neophyte when it comes to the 'big picture' of music. Any other comments are greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.