New Figure: Exit Error

The music Nagoya artist Figure makes has always been claustrophobic – the albums and songs he’s trickled onto the Internet over the last few years have been guitar-centered numbers where the vocals get muffled out enough as if to sound like they are being sung from the next room over…through a concrete wall. New collection Exit Error plunges listeners right back into that sonic cloyster – opener “City Walking” glides ahead on the same sort of suffocating guitars, the singing tucked in deep. It isn’t a sad song exactly – the melody is rather sunny – but the whole thing is done up in gray. “The Month You Don’t Know,” though, has a sad bend – it’s a more minor song, and one where the vocals are completely paved over, the whole thing building up to a shoegaze finale that lets some hope in. Listen to the whole thing above.