MoonSpeak:
Manifestation
Lunar Journey is the track that welcomes us into Manifestation. An excellent choice; it has a very strong sort of "beginning" or "opening" feel to it. Extremely soothing, it's played on synthesized strings, and light percussion is sprinkled about, becoming more prevalent as it goes along. It's going well for my ears at the two minute mark, which is where I'd suspect a song such as this to end -- and then I look... the song is actually over five minutes long...
Nearly three and a half minutes in now, and the main beat hasn't changed much. Oh, okay, the strings have departed. The percussion, too. That's great, because, to me, this song's ending was long overdue, and what I just heard sounds distinctly like an outro. Oh, we're gonna introduce another new riff, though? At this point in the song? Uh... Alright. Kinda... Overstaying your welcome a bit, but you know. And it's funny, the title of the song is actually Lunar Journey, and then it has the word "Edit" in brackets. The song was actually even LONGER, it would seem. Yikes... I'm liking the sound so far, however. It's not bad at all. It just sort of drags on, and I really can't stand when that happens. It didn't need to be three minutes long, let alone five. A song as simply structured as this ought to serve as an "intro", and upon first listening to this record, I thought that this was the direction it was going for. However, intros are rarely, if ever, more than two minutes long. That, combined with the fact that it's a bit past my tolerance-zone for song length... Well, at least it's the only song on the album that beats the five minute mark.
And let me just reiteretate something about that seemingly arbitrary rule: A song can be over five minutes long all it wants, but it's important to have very distinct, yet interconnected, parts to it. For example, the song And All That Could Have Been (Nine Inch Nails) is my favorite song of all time. It's over six minutes, but every portion of the song is NEEDED in order to produce the emotional effect the song has when the final chorus is sung. It uses a number of techniques that makes the song sound like it's only three minutes long. A song like this, while not a bore to listen to, DOES last for too long, and even when it finally does change, it's like, "Wow, really?" And it just doesn't really work for me. What the song did do right, however, was set a good tone for what the rest of the album ought to be like.
Meteora Phantasm has a unique style... One of the things I love about MoonSpeak's music is that it's challenging for me to come up with words to describe just what it is I'm hearing. What I can say is that every note is very sharp and acute and rapidly executed, like, if this was played on a piano, you would just sort of jab at the keys, machine-gun style with your fingers instead of lightly pressing them. Oh wow, I just heard someone coughing. That's kinda weird. And I guess that serves as a sort of breakdown, because I'm hearing layered synth chords now. Not particularly wowed, it's rather standard stuff... You know, it's faster, louder, more aggressive, yada yada... Oh, it ended. What's with the twenty seconds of complete silence here? I don't think that was intentional.
This next song has a lot of weird-ass diacritical shit in the title, and this font can't process it properly, but it looks kinda like "Rauor poka nott". I'm just gonna translate that, because I don't even know what language that's in... Okay, so it's Icelandic (...for... some reason?...), and it means "Red foggy night". Uh, alright. You know, this is a nitpick, but I'm not really feeling the whole "let's title songs with foreign words" thing. It's kinda hokey for my taste.
Alright, what about the song itself, though... Alright, wow. Rough, pounding, urgent. I hear low drones beneath this pulsing beat that threatens something unknown. I'm liking this. I like how vituperative it is towards my eardrums. This is sort of like the theme of fighting off a swarm of zombies on, you guessed it, a "red foggy night". Space zombies. Yeah. Or something else, like, your heart is hemorrhaging and is about to explode or some shit, and you're writhing out on the street, screaming bloody murder for help, only for it to never come. Of MoonSpeak's songs I have heard so far, this one produces the most vibrant of images. The dark direction the record has went is appealing, but since this doesn't seem to be a concept album, I don't think it's going to last. I bet the next song is gonna be much more upbeat.
I was wrong. Wrong-ish. Moon est Boom starts spilling its sludge all over the floor in my mind, drowning it with its raspy, chugga-chugga choo-choo of a continuity. A descending chord. Seems to be a problem in the sludge factory. Ah, no, we're still on. The steadfast percussion is pretty sick here. This is such a video game-ass track. With a title like Moon est Boom, I guess I'm supposed to picture the moon blowing up, but I prefer the images I've made; it sounds like an overflowing sewage pump in some kind of uber-industrial area. So far, this is my favorite.
Baking Under the Midnight Sun... These titles are silly. There's a lot of warbling and ARRGHHGAHR going on in this track. The pseudo-guitars or whatever that noise the main riff is supposed to be is groovy as fuck. I could hear this in a club somewhere. The garbled, wordless screaming strangely adds a layer of depth in the song. Nothing much else to say about it, though.
Alright, the next song is called--WOAH VOCALS. Yeah, really. Debut lyrical piece to MoonSpeak's library. But uh... Whoever this guy is, I'm not digging him... At all. His voice doesn't mesh well with the music, and sometimes it goes completely out of rhythm! And it's just EXTREMELY out of place. This guy came from nowhere, so he's completely unwelcome. He just barges into your house and starts pissing on your walls. Ehhhh... Okay, he's gone. Good. Uh... Rather at a loss for words on how to describe the remainder of this track, because my ears are not shot... Oh Christ he's back. Shit. Uh, okay... It's over.
I hope that never happens again. That was gross. And it's not even really him; it's ALL in the execution... It's the sixth damn track. We're halfway in, and we're just going to introduce vocals? And not do it well? Bad idea. You know how you have to slowly ease yourself into a hot tub in order to have your body accommodate to the new environment, lest you get burned? This record did not just do that. It dive bombed into that shit. And the effect is just as pleasant as that sounds.
I'm gonna use this next song as brain bleach. Kinder der Nacht. I can actually translate this one myself -- "Children of the Night". Standard beat, I guess. Either the last song just raped me of my ability to analyze things, or this is just the most nondescript song ever. Maybe I'll write two reviews of this -- this being the during-review, and then I'll write a post-review. These ARE my first impressions, of course.
Solar Journey. Hey, that sounds familiar! Wait a second. This is the exact same song as Lunar Journey. Like, literally. So far, there's absolutely nothing different. Oh, wow. Except this one IS three minutes long, only! So, what the fuck!? This is getting confusing. We have two identical songs here, and I get what she was going for. Lunar Journey, Solar Journey. Haha, clever. But I don't quite understand the point of it. I think what she was kinda going for was this: The two songs represent the "parts" of the album. So, I'm now in "part 2". But here's something that bothers me about that: The album has an odd number of tracks. Ideally, if my hypothesis was correct, the song would have an even number of tracks, and these to songs, Lunar Journey and Solar Journey, would be tracks one and tracks six, respectively. Coincidentally, Crushed in Orbit (the loathsome track from earlier) is exactly where I'd want Solar Journey to be. It's also just sort of bewildering to me that, since the songs are virtually identical, why the hell not have them be the same length? Why include two virtually identical songs at all? I'm not liking this as much as I was with the first half...
The next track is Adversa de Luna Atrita. Yep, still my favorite MoonSpeak song in general. Already covered it, though. It's identical to its single release. Ptolmey's Traveller is the next track. Sharp strands of noise are sprayed unrelentingly at me. Really, I'm losing patience in this album, so if nothing spectacular happens anymore, I'm not gonna be too impressed. I mean, yeah, this is okay so far, but do am I looking for "okay" at this juncture? Not really. The final track is called Mayor of the Moon, and I can only hope it's also the mayor of this record, in terms of quality... And, not really. It's another shapeless, formless, nondescript series of notes. At least it's appropriately lengthed for its simplicity, but given MoonSpeak's nature, you have to ask yourself: Why ISN'T this song seven minutes long?
Overall, I'm not expecting perfection; that would be ridiculous. What I expected was a reasonably organized and sensible music-listening experience. What I got was a sea of adequacy and straight-up mediocrity. The scarce gems that exist (AdLA, and the Solar/Lunar songs, which were apparently so good according to their creator, that they needed to be added twice) were not nearly enough for me. Not enough for me to be comfortable with the idea of telling people that I spent an hour or so of my life listening to this album. And you might point out the unorganized nature of this review -- in fact, I thought about it, and I thought about scrapping this, in favor of a more proper evaluation. And while I'm still gonna make a revised edition, I'm going to keep this, and when you read it, perhaps one can achieve the feeling I got when I listened to this album for the first time. I will just say that Crushed in Orbit nearly killed the entire thing for me; it was that bad. The only thing that's saving this album from getting anything above a 2/5 is the vast number of "uh, that was okay, I guess" songs. I understand wanting a change of pace, or wanting to experiment a little bit, trust me -- I'm just saying, it didn't work. The embarrassing vocal performance was enough to make me cringe. And I'm still a little confused about the Lunar/Solar Journey thing. Even if the dichotomy was intentinal, the binary is very cliche, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm mostly disappointed, but again, I'll give it another listen later and give a more professional review then. But right now, I'm kinda bitter after listening to that, and I don't even feel like dignifying this review with a proofreading session. I'll slap it on the site, just as half the songs were on this record.
GEMS:
- Solar Journey
- Moon est Boom
- Adversa de Luna Atrita
GERMS:
- Crushed in Orbit
3/5
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