Glorious sunshine, sparkling, clear blue oceans, friends on beaches relaxing and having fun. If The fin. don’t conjure up all those images in your head, you need a psychiatrist, pal. It’s the kind of laidback summer vibe that you’d associate with Family Of The Year or Empire Of The Sun or perhaps any other band that have “Of The” in the middle of their name. Well, maybe not Future Of The Left but you catch my drift, I’m sure. So pile on that suntan lotion – we’re actually HAVING a summer this year after all – and run like a loon to the dunes with a copy of There seducing your earphones.
There’s little point in listing and assessing each track respectively here – they all have that blissed out vibe, although ‘Missing‘, somewhat bizarrely, reminded me a little of ‘All Over The World‘ by Pixies, but please don’t let that comment convince you that they sound even remotely like the Boston legends, as they couldn’t be much further away from them if they tried. Crucially though, they are just as easy to embrace.
That the band evokes such imagery in our heads is even more surprising when you consider that they are neither a West Coast American outfit nor resident of a Tropical island. No sirree, they are a Japanese three piece comprised of Yuto Uchino (vocals and synths), Ryosuke Odagaki (guitar), and Kaoru Nakazawa (drums/bass). As Uchino himself says about the beautiful track ‘Shedding‘: “I wrote the song last winter. My life had changed so much at that point and I felt like a new part of me was getting bigger and bigger. So I had to change something in me, like shed my skin off. But the winter was too cold for me to try and shed it somehow.”
The whole album though will infuse you with a warm glow throughout. I’d really love to be able to tell you more about it, but really there’s not a great deal more to say. As Uchino says: “There’s been so many things I’ve experienced in the 4 years since I started toruing abroad. I’ve been trying to retain everything I had within my music and keep it pure as I possibly could.”
And ‘pure’ is probably just about as accurate as you could get to describe it. Lovely stuff.
There is out now on Hip Land Music Corp.
