Kazumasa Hashimoto’s music has always been a fertile, well-cultivated region. Puerile melodies are generally planted in it like rare flowers, bathing in the yellow beams of sythesizers, while the scrabble of tiny insects rubbing their limbs together festers below.
Where the pop element of his work was previously mixed and contrasted with the fey persistence of electronics and off-centre cosmic chimes that would wash tirelessly against the tracks central pulse, tinging things with a dash of the emotionally ambiguous, here the proceedings are more or less steadily straightfoward. Most of the basic elements remain, but now they stand in a sort of equilibrium, a unison out of which spring dense combinations of electronically manipulated animal noises, martially propulsive strings, orchestral percussion, and the wriggling, sped up and slowed down vocals of Gutevolk. In short, pop music of a blithe, summery sort.
Its aesthetic, imagery, and vocabulary is never anything but genuine and wholesome – something which seems to come more naturally to certain strands of japanese pop music. “Lonesome Girl” showcases a woozy sense of awe, with melodies in the form of background loops that rotate around an inky glitter of electronics and Gutevolk’s vocodered vocals. That being said, such vocals, which feature prominently throughout, act like an anchor forcing the recordings to hold fast to a prescribed and rather dated content. In fact, though in places Hashimoto commands the instruments such that one’s brain bounches merrily along with the music, the albums manner of unfolding is often not engaging enough and does not open as many doors as it closes.
Max Schaefer
