Home alone and playing machines that were surely exciting, shiny and state of the art when first displayed in the mall in 1965, Kinuko Hiramatsu sings with a sweet, girlish voice in that bathroom way down the hall that so many Japanese pop-electronica songstresses visit to powder their notes. The one that obscures all the words and turns the voice into another pleasant instrument. It´s not about the lyrics.
Sapphire Slows´ is a very special, non-nostalgic retro style. And she doesn´t consider herself a singer. Or a musician for that matter, but rather a producer. You might think vaporwave, it does feel a bit like the optimistic early sixties dusted with the hedonistic early eighties, but Allegoria is not trying to recreate a bygone era. Rather, it is reconstructing J-Pop through an idiosyncratic personal prism. Her arsenal of vintage and contemporary equipment is a yellow magic orchestra, her melodies are catchy and she´s got plenty of them, but she often eschews the verse-chorus-refrain model for something much more undermining, going in concentric circles on ´Corekill´ and ´Fade Out´ (which by the way doesn´t) and creating an aerosol atmosphere behind her fickle marimba on ´Break Control.´
Her journey into near weightlessness lands her at ´Can I Get Out of This Silence,´ which to these ears sounds like an intimate, but necessary break-up song. Despite the whoosh sounds, ´Meteor´ is inaptly named – it is definitely defying the earth´s gravitational pull and moving onward, outward, upward. As does the closing, title track – such fresh air, freedom and fleeciness.
Allegoria is her only long-player so far; a self-titled compilation on Japanese label Big Love gathers previous singles and extendeds.
Stephen Fruitman
