I'm with Chimpa. The timing of the opening string attacks seemed slightly behind, but the main issue is that the articulations sounded pretty fake. Cool transition to the metal at :28, though the strings might as well have been removed because they were mixed so softly compared to the guitars & drums during that transition. When the strings come back as accents at :57, they again sound practically inaudible like they might as well not be there. I liked the string writing from 1:11-1:31, which was audible. The machine gun drums from 1:32-2:00 completely drowned out the xylo/chromatic percussion; again, the ideas are good, but what's the point of layering stuff if one part can't be heard anyway?
I love the expansiveness, creativity, and energy of the arrangement and performance overall, and that aspect was an easy pass. I'm not even a strong NO because the case can easily be made that, on balance, the production is OK.
For me, I think this was almost at the line, but there should be some adjustments to get the bowed strings sounding more humanized and, more importantly, re-balancing this so that some of your supporting instrumentation isn't completely squashed out by the face-melting guitar & drum work.
Chimpa pointed out over-compression was hurting this, and her "NO (more like a conditional on non-squashed render)" is basically where I'm at as well. It's a close call. If we got a tweaked version that toned down the compression a bit, that might be all we need to flip some NOs to YESs. Good luck with the rest of the vote though, Meirone, this is awesome, and I definitely want to see this posted in some form.
NO (refine/resubmit)