Title: Flamingo

Artist: Renard

Album: The High Moral Fibre Album

Genre: Electronic (Not very specific, but I’ll get into that.)

Released: ???

Rating: 46%

Renard has a nasty habit of trying to wipe all of his best music off of the face of the Earth, so you won’t be able to find this anywhere on his website, but here’s a youtube link:

Breakdown of Rating:

Mojo: 12/30

The mojo is definitely lacking. It wouldn’t really be if the track didn’t have elements of breakcore. When you’re working with hardcore sounds, your expected mojo is definitely set a lot higher. This doesn’t mean it’s not forgivable, but there’s just no replacing mojo.

Style: 17/20

Style is definitely an important part of why I chose to review this track. It was sequenced in reference to the “diminished” scale. I’ll get into what that is exactly later, but the important thing now is how the diminished sound affects the style. The scale on its own can be described partially with the word “creepy”, or “eerie”. But combined with the fast tempo and strong drums, it gives it kind of the sound of an 80’s halloween movie soundtrack. Only less bad.

The Fact that Sinisterrrrrrr was remixed like five fucking times but this song isn’t even on Renard’s Bandcamp page: -12/10

Come on Renard. That was ALL of your mojo points. Down the drain. Get it together.

Performance Skill: 1/15

I should probably fix my rating system so that this doesn’t happen, but I gave a point for pressing the “Export to WAV” button in OpenMPT. Renard will live.

Writing: 21/25

It was pretty cool that this was in a diminished key. Basically an eerie sound that has a bit more of a chromatic sound than the standard set of modes or whatever the fuck. Like, it alternates directly between half steps and whole steps. It has an extra note per octave, too, but there are some accidentals in there, so that’s even crazier. I admire that, but I’m still mad about Sinisterrrrrrrr.

Production: 7/10

Of course a Renard song is going to have awesome production, but I’m pretty sure this was before he really had this figured out completely. You can tell because that’s kind of the driving force behind all of his usual mojo. Not that mojo would have mattered in this track anyway.