What has long separated Cicada from other slinky outfits creating smooth city-bound music in the 2010s is the little sense of unease they bring to their numbers. Suchmos or Nulbarich are a mix of cool and goofy earnest, but never unnerving, while Lucky Tapes or Never Young Beach tend to just be chill. Cicada, on…
#20 Cicada Formula It’s easy to recreate the past, as no shortage of Japanese bands borrowing from ’80s city pop and ’90s acid jazz have shown in recent years (and, really, globally…this is all Daft Punk’s fault). Cicada’s earliest work slid in nicely to this safe but oftentimes overly familiar space. But Formula decided to…
Remember the city pop revival? That buzzed about thing from the first half of the year? Perhaps the latter half of 2016’s sudden shift to ’90s reflection jarred you out of those smooth sounds, but regardless of how many weeks Fantome sits on top of the Oricon Charts (a lot!), the bands from that boom…
Of course you are going to end up with a drastic reworking when you hand off your song to someone like Parkgolf…he falls into the category of producer whose original music sounds like neon lights held together by various strings twisted into weird shapes. His approach to remixes of artists who don’t fall into the…