NaGUST:

人 EP

Though I was completely unaware of it, NaGUST has actually had an EP out called 人 (rén; “people”) for the past few months. Despite this, I thought I’d weigh in my thoughts anyway, in light of another brand new EP, Technobabble, being released just a few days ago. And seeing that it’s basically become a tradition to review every one of NaGUST’s major releases anyway, it wouldn’t feel exactly right to just leave this one out.

NaGUST, even during her MoonSpeak days, has always made instrumentals that are very calm, collected, atmospheric, and almost dreamlike—the sort of music you’d maybe hear in a spa, where, though the ambience is designed to relax you, there’s also an unnerving gloominess to it that sort of makes you want to vacate the premises.

Much of the issues I’ve had in the past with her songs is that they tend to drag on past a certain point where things get dull and repetitive, but on this EP, she’s trimmed down each song to a perfectly digestible length—occasionally going below even the two-minute mark, giving us a more reasonably-lengthed piece of artistry that one might expect from an EP.

The songs themselves, however, I can’t say did very much for me this time around. We have five very low-key tracks, all with their own unique varieties of sounds and instrumentation, which is nice. “Agnate” in particular reminds me a lot of Lorde’s super-hit “Royals”, with these very sharp snaps of the finger punctuating this muffled, aquatic beat. “Masquerade”, as well, is probably the most unique track here (in terms of instrumentation), dominated by a disquieting set of eerie synth chords.

The songs fall apart for me, however, in the sense that they are just a little bit too simplistic. NaGUST has shown herself to be quite fond of minimalism and simplicity, and she’s certainly pulled it off in the past to some extent (and to her credit, there’s at least one song on this EP where I think she really pulled it off—more on that later), but other than the occasional drum loop to sort of give these songs a spine, the beats are often much too basic to keep me invested.

“Amaranthine” is a perfect example of this—it’s a song that gets worse the more I listen to it, to the point where I just skip it, because the next song—and the final song on the EP—happens to be so much better. “花見” (something to do with “looking at cherry blossoms”—she told me what it meant before, but I can’t remember for the life of me) is the highlight of the EP. We have this low, distant synth backing that sounds great. It feels like you’re in the eye of a hurricane—pristine and peaceful, yet foreboding and ominous. Despite the short three minutes that this track lasts, this is exactly the type of track I wouldn’t mind carrying on for perhaps even two more extra minutes.

If there’s another thing that works about this EP, it’s that the sounds, though some clear experimentation is present, NaGUST remains very consistent, bringing us an EP with songs that all mesh together very well, actually. I may have expressed this in the past, but I truly believe NaGUST has found her niche—even though it may not be the most exciting or bombastic one. However, I wasn’t feeling this EP as much as I was with The Features. The songs are meager at best (“Agnate”) to outright boring at worst (“Leisure”), and the quality of the best track tends to overshadow everything else here.

5/10