Diego Mapa delivers the goods with empathy and care in his remix of The Geeks’ November 2022 single.
There’s no overthinking it: remixes are a thing, always have been. A good-enough single can get a boost from it; a trite one can benefit enormously from it.
I’m not going to overthink it, so instead of taking apart What It All Means, I’d rather—in the case today, at least, of Diego Mapa’s alter-ego reconfiguring of The Geeks’ November 2022 single—hazard a guess as to what they do.
More than singling out the song’s core stems and setting them against a bed of a more danceable backbeat, what Mapa does, I feel, is find a parallel heart. Those of you who follow this page will perhaps recall the band’s self-aware take: “The song’s theme is still very consistent with our body of work; it’s still a sad-happy song with hints of existential dread, which we’ve been known for.”
That dread—or more to the point, the sweet-yet-fatalistic presentation of it—is retained by Eggboy, he just casts it in different clothing.
As a fan of both his original work and his many reimaginings, I think Eggboy goes the extra mile in not going the extra mile, if you catch my drift. In other words, I think he delivers the goods with empathy and care; he values provenance, but he also puts a premium on distilling songs not as ideas but as emotional and spiritual cues.
Mapa zeroes in on the intro hook and the sweetly dejected (dejectedly sweet?) pairing of Jam Lorenzo and Jillian Santiago (Formerly Maryknoll), nothing much else. But again, what he hones in on is more conceptual than auditory.
Through a lackadaisical backdrop of beats, snatches of synth, and textural atmospherics, Mapa isn’t only offering up a parallel-universe take on “The Song of Yesteryear,” he is also saying he gets it, he feels it, he is the same. A song purportedly about “drowning in a sinking ship,” one would imagine, wouldn’t translate well as an electro-pop bop, but it works like a charm here.
I will reprise (and reconfirm) what I wrote in my review of the original track: that “Yesteryear,” while bordering on self-flagellation, doesn’t wallow in plodding, humorless doomsaying. Luckily, that’s still true in the able hands of Eggboy.
Stream the remix today.