MoonSpeak

Egregore

“Egregore” is a companion EP to “Heredity”, but instead of containing remixes of songs from that record, we have three new ones entirely. I don’t know. Everything on here is quite simple in their structure, however, which is fortunate for me when it comes to describing them.

“Strange Journey” is a jazzy beat with a lot of samples from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, a film I can’t really stand. Either way, it’s quite catchy, but MoonSpeak’s idea of where and when to use samples is very misguided, in that they occur too often. You want to have the character say the line just often enough so that the next time you see the movie itself, that particular line will not stand out awkwardly, ruining the line and its meaning for you. And it’s just weird after awhile. She introduces two or three lines (“I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey,” and “I made you, and I can break you just as easily”), and she tries to sort of splice them together (“And I can break you—on a strange journey”), and it doesn’t sound quite right. Due to the pacing of the piece, just over five minutes is the perfect length, and it doesn’t ever get monotonous, which is great.

“Next Level Bizniss” does, though. You’d think with a wacky title like that, it would be a bit more active, but, no, it sounds like something straight out of “Heredity”, in that it’s a dull, generic beat, looped. The difference is, it isn’t six-to-eight minutes long. Can’t imagine why that would be, given that every other song like it clearly follows that standard. It’s not a bad thing, though, but it begs an explanation. In general, song length is one of those things I think nobody in the music industry actually decides, UNLESS it’s just a generic loop. If it’s a loop, you have to actually make the decision to extend it for periods of time, and sometimes, MoonSpeak will extend a track to grotesque lengths, and other times, it’ll be more appropriate, like this one. It baffles me.

“Dreamers” (surprisingly modest title) is another song, but she’s going experimental again. It starts off with samples from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”, and is actually a remix of stock violin music playing on a record player, or something to that effect. It… doesn’t really work for me. I get what she’s going for, but the execution was faulty. By “remixing”, I mean taking a bit of the violin playing and splicing it around, making it stutter a lot, and trying to make a new song by doing that alone. Oh, and cymbals, because adding a futuristic spin on vintage music is SO retro, brah. And again, the samples are a little overdone. Actually, in general, I think samples are best done only in the beginning and in the very end of your song. If it’s sporadically scattered about, it’ll get obnoxious. An interesting experiment, with the hypothesis of which, stating this was a good idea, proving to be inconclusive and in need of more evidence.

In general, there’s not much of a reason that this EP needs to be at all separate from “Heredity”. Maybe she didn’t want that long of a record, but in her repertoire, this just adds more fluff. It isn’t spectacular, and it isn’t execrable. It’s just there. I feel like too much of her discography has been just like this: Fluffy.

3/5