What’s made Paellas’ rise up the ranks over the last year so surprising is how the group’s songs are unrelentingly downcast. This decision to cloud the familiar funk and rock elements that have become trendy in recent years in a fog — a choice they’ve been making since their earliest indie-pop cuts, the group sounding…
Taking us into the working week is this dreamy collaboration between long-running house producer Shinichiro Yokota and England-based (but formerly in Japan) Pleasure Cruiser. It’s a nice escape from the drudgery ahead, or at least that’s how I’m expecting all those electronic chirps and the gauze wrapping around the whole song to feel come the…
The Ordinary Songs series serves as Snail’s House’s state of the union, of sorts. While the most popular “kawaii” producer in Japan at the moment goes off in all sorts of directions, Ordinary Songs is them at their most cuddly, constructing pleasant playroom-ready melodies from an assortment of synths, bells and other toy-chest-ready noises. The…
AM 2:22 lasts just under eight minutes, and that brief time is all you really need to get a good sense of what rapper Gokou Kuyt is all about. More concise than last year’s #teendreamtape, his latest feels like a late night dispatch, short and at times fluttery beats giving enough space for Kuyt’s monotone…
It’s startling how sweet the singing on Haruno’s first full-length album Filia can sound. Last year’s lovely Flower’s Laugh had similarly pretty vocals, but those came courtesy of a real human — this time around, Haruno uses Vocaloid technology for all ten songs here. Yet despite (or, maybe because of) a visible electric hum surrounding…