I like the ominous mood at the beginning. The lead guitar at :07 sounds a bit inauthentic, but a bigger problem is how much it’s drowning out the drums and bass here. I’d suggest adding a bit more compression to the drums, and adjusting the volume levels on the bass as you can. The rhythmic content here is really nice - I especially like the drums at :24 - and the organ lines are also really catchy. The transition at :57 was very sudden, and during that section the drums in particular get very lost in the texture. The mallets at 1:13 were another cool sound design choice, but they don’t quite feel well-integrated with the synth patterns that come both before and after them. The stop-start transition at 2:02 is once again pretty jarring, but I thought it was really clever to slow down the pacing of the main riff at 2:02. There’s a lot of dissonance in the texture at around 2:30. I feel like you were going for a final climax there, but the texture was very muddy and the drums needed to be punchier to sell the sense of urgency given the slower tempo.
Overall, the sound design, rhythmic content, atmosphere, and mood of this piece are really good. The two big suggestions I have are 1) to work on your transitions and 2) to tighten up the mix. There are a lot of sudden shifts in the texture during your piece, and the result is that the arrangement is rather choppy. Instead of adding or subtracting instruments without warning, introducing them more gradually, or even doing a cross-fade with the lead instrument before it, could help keep the listener more grounded here. As for the mixing, the piece needs both some more compression across the board, maybe even on the master track, to give the mix some more sharpness and distinction, as well as some stricter equalizing. There are a lot of muddy, lower frequencies that should probably be filtered out of the harmonic instruments here - as a general rule of thumb, 200 Hertz and lower should only ever appear in the bass and drums.
Still, the compositional details and frantic melodies in this piece are totally cool. I hope you’ll continue working on this - lot of potential here. Keep at it, SirSandman0! ^_^
Mixing, mastering, and balance
1/2
Structure, transitions, phrasing, and variety
.75/1.5
Melody, tonality, harmony, and texture
1.5/2
Instrumentation and sound design
.75/1
Emotion, atmosphere, and catchiness
1/1.5
Originality and uniqueness
.75/1
Overall (how do the elements above interact?)
1/1
Composite score
6.75/10