Third time’s the [6]…
[Video][Website]
[6.60]
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: A study in musical false ceilings. The verses and first choruses are disarmingly calm, quiet kick pulses and little taps, as if the last half of Frou Frou’s “Shh” was soundtracking a furniture showroom. Then the ceiling comes off in chimes.
[7]
Crystal Leww: By pop standards, this is way too long. That rise takes forever to build into a release — and yet, this is delightful. This pings right when it needs to, and that chorus feels like the proper type of emotional release, more Postal Service than Owl City. The patient approach ends up being the correct one.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The voice rides the electric piano groove for an uncomfortable three minutes until the hi-hats and wash of electric guitars take over. An accretion looking for adequate climax.
[6]
Brad Shoup: Damn that mosquito frequency. I could see this as a gateway to post-rock; the timbres aren’t nearly as important as the patterns and the programming. Still, if it were raining I bet that keyboard — pulsing like some internal process — would slay. Dunno about the second half, for which they stomped on their Jimmy Eat World FX pedal.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: A bit like a lesser “Yoru no Odoriko” with one difference: I’ve heard of a quiet-loud dynamic, but a bored-excited one?
[5]
Will Adams: Knowing what Sakanaction’s M.O. is certainly helps, because that’s how you know there’s something big waiting on the other side of those soft electric piano stabs. The payoff isn’t as grand as in “Music” or “Yoru no Odoriko,” but patience remains the band’s real knack.
[7]
Mallory O’Donnell: Sort of the “Boys of Summer” of low-key post-YMO/Kraftwerk Japanese melancholy. Turns out we could all stand to forget for a while about what any of that even means when reduced to our fundamental components by a last-third-of-the-song shimmer so heart-wrenchingly good.
[6]
Iain Mew: As an attempt to refine the meticulous gorgeousness of a sound to the point where you can forget about songs, this is a pretty successful one. It still doesn’t answer why you would try that.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: You never notice the small details in Tokyo. Everything whizzes by too quickly, everyone around you off to catch some train or get to some meeting. Even nights out seem stuck in perpetual motion — go to the convenience, buy a beer for the walk, get somewhere, drink, head out again. Ichiro Yamaguchi gets it. He’s from Sapporo, hardly the sticks. But it’s also not Tokyo. That’s where you go to live “recklessly,” a word he repeats constantly on “Eureka.” It often sounds playful, his Japanese gliding from word to word save for the bouncy repetitions. But he sounds submerged, like he’s got a lot rumbling around in his head. And he does. He imagines skyscrapers nibbling away at the sky and vines of people filling the street and how he lives in this enclosed place. Other images break through, too, of memories belonging to another life: mom tending to the plants, or a girl’s hair in the early night sky, the little observations that used to be at the center of life in simpler places. Then the existential dread kicks in, and in a moment that would make Yasujiro Ozu proud, his moment of clarity is shrouded in vagueness. What is recognized, though, is that the moon still sets and the days keep going.
[10]