It’s tweetime! I’ll boil a tweepot.
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[6.50]
Ryo Miyauchi: “Swimming” drops the digital bubblegum of Bonito Generation for dusty pop music extracted from Broadcast’s DNA. Though she’s trying to evoke innocent curiosity than a spectral haunt, Sarah Midori Perry reminds me of Trish Keenan at least with the airy flatness of her voice. Had it been filtered through the sticky synths brightening the last album, Perry’s travelogue here perhaps would’ve sounded cartoonish and hokey like the album’s aphorisms, which landed like a Message of the Day as delivered by the adult cast of a morning children’s show. The switch-up in aesthetic, then, lets the childlike wonder that has always been present in KKB’s music to be taken more at face value.
[7]
Katie Gill: It’s interesting how even though the sound has made a drastic change from KKB’s previous, chipper, electropop & video game sound, you can see a direct line from there to here when you look at the lyrics. KKB has always been amazing at taking one scenario or one scene and pulling and twisting an entire mood out from that scene. “Swimming” is deep and dream-like, a beautiful trance of a song that does an amazing job calling forth and creating this gorgeous image.
[7]
Ian Mathers: It’s twee, right? I don’t know why the nice keyboards would be confusing me. It’s definitely twee. I don’t think my personal pendulum has swung all the way back to twee this year, not yet at least, but this is fine in that mode.
[6]
Vikram Joseph: It’s a strange thing indeed that Kero Kero Bonito’s bouncy, quasi-throwaway alt-pop nuggets on Bonito Generation frequently acheived a kind of emotional transcendence that the more considered, layered songs on their second album Time ‘n’ Place never come close to. On the former, listening to Sarah Bonito’s scattershot, jokey, gently subversive observations on waking up, tramoplining, Instagram and finding her people in London felt like conversations with close friends; the lurid synths and drum-machines were almost savant-like in capturing the strange, chaotic rhythms of the city. There was an intimacy and effervescence there that felt lost in the transition to a more conventional sound; the melancholy dream-pop haze of “Swimming” is actually quite pleasant in and of itself, but it’s more like a conversation with decent acquaintances — it passes smoothly, without any awkward silences, but leaves no lasting memories.
[5]
Iain Mew: This is perfectly nice drifting dream pop, and their ear for vintage-sounding electronics works just as well when turning them to light touch sparkle as when using them for full-on melodic assault. Perhaps it isn’t fair to hold the fact that this isn’t the latter against it so much, but I can’t help it.
[6]
Will Rivitz: This is the saccharine-pop equivalent of that tweet about all your records automatically transforming into copies of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or White Blood Cells once you turn 37. Might work for some people, but I’ve still got a few years left in my twenties.
[5]
Iris Xie: A curious blend of The Beach Boys, Fishmans, Tame Impala, and No Vacation, and each of their approaches to a dreamy beachy sound, mixed with sweet vocals. “Swimming” sparkles like those crystal wind chimes that cast little rainbows over the couch when the summer sun starts falling a little low. The little interruptions at the end helps break up the illusion of the serenity cast from the atmosphere, and wakes you up to get ready for the next event in your life.
[7]
Will Adams: Kero Kero Bonito excel in projecting sincerity without being saccharine — an even bigger feat given they’re working in the two genres most susceptible to being derided as “twee”: Tinker Toy synthpop and dreamy lo-fi. On “Swimming,” they sound brighter than ever. Sarah Midori Perry sings “I can feel the detritus lifting” like a sigh of relief, and I believe her. A later line in the chorus, “the current battles way down below me,” offers a more practical counterpoint — there’s always something lurking beneath — but nonetheless bids you to forget all that for the moment and bask in the sun’s rays.
[8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I grew up ten minutes from the Pacific Ocean so any song that uses the sea as a metaphor for growing up makes sense almost inherently to me. Fortunately, “Swimming” would work even if I grew up in Iowa — the rich bed of textures that Sarah Bonito’s vocals sprawl out upon make the sea all the clearer.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: The poignant undertones about experiencing everything for the first time in a strange and arbitrary world are still there, and they’re front and center now; it’s the expressions of guileless, synth-based whimsy that have been pushed to the back, though thankfully not eliminated. The moment that most resembles the old Kero Kero Bonito is when Sarah Perry drags the word “detritus” out of nowhere and savors every precisely clipped syllable, a move both playful and literary in the classic indie pop sense. But “Swimming” would have us know that there is no “old” or “new” Kero Kero Bonito: “I get the feeling/I always have been.” If the unhurried pace reminds you more of wading than of swimming, that’s by design.
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