Reviews 167: Okada Takuro
Okada Takuro is a talented multi-instrumentalist moving through the waters of indie, post-rock, AOR, soft jazz, and balearic, with a particular focus on fretted string instruments. I first encountered his music through James Blackshaw and his Summoning Suns album from 2015, where Takuro contributed slide guitar and banjo. In fact, that album also saw James joined by Masumura Kazuhiko on percussion and Taniguchi Yu on piano, both of whom join Takuro on his newest musical adventure, The Beach EP released through only in dreams. And in an interesting twist, James is also here, forgoing his usual six-string sorcery in favor of a soft supporting vocal performance on a pitch-perfect cover of Steve Hiett’s “By the Pool.” In some sense, the whole EP serves as a tribute to Steve’s Down on the Road by the Beach, an album whose balearic power is only matched by its unfortunate rarity. Even the cover photo of The Beach comes from Steve’s early 80s seaside masterpiece, making the albums intentions towards lush AOR, soft jazz, seaside pop, liquid funk, and horizontal balearica very clear. And as the EP progresses, things spread out and grow progressively stranger, moving through the hypnotizing sequential tapestries of “After the Rain” into the crazed bass fx and abstract guitar wanderings of “Mizu no Yukue.”
Okada Takuro - The Beach EP (only in dreams, 2018) “Shore” is carried by LinnDrum snare cracks and hissing cymbals, with brass pads slowly swelling and the Rhodes pianos of Taniguchi Yu alternately falling like tropical gemstones or moving through funky seaside riffs. Wavering surf guitars support Takuro’s reverb shrouded vocals, which are at times double-tracked as they lock into harmonies of coral pink and aquamarine. A yearning chorus with a relaxing balearic sway is heightened by layered piano cascades and harmonizing guitars ascending towards the sun. It’s a dreamworld of sunshine pop and AOR magic and best of all, there are thrilling passages where sliding six strings evoke a bluesy island psychedelia and the bass guitar takes off on jammed out prog adventures while clean guitars like chiming crystals lock into epic riff cycles over atmospheric synth clouds. “By the Pool” starts with lapping waves, their movements joined by droning phaser sweeps. Paradise guitar arpeggios and slide leads sway over LinnDrum cymbals panning ear-to-ear and Yu’s gentle piano chords, with occasional snare rolls and tom fills accenting the patient kick rhythms. The vocals are so smeared out and gorgeous as they closely follow Steve Hiett’s melodies, only here sitting much more up front in the mix, helping push this version to even higher heights of celestial bliss, especially when James Blackshaw joins Takuro for euphoric stretches of harmonized falsetto romance. And all throughout the mix, guitars move like intelligent liquids dancing in the moonlight while slide guitars fall like shooting stars and balmy synthesizers carry the heart to faraway shores of fantasy.
In “After the Rain”, fast moving Berlin school sequences work their way into tranced out minimalist patterns. Starlight morphs through strange prisms and positivity bubbles from deep pools of electronic liquid, as soaring guitar leads are ran backwards and transformed into harmonious arcs of feedback. Multiple layers intertwine like colorful gas clouds swirling while the propulsive hand drums of Masumura Kazuhiko join in, sometimes locking in with the percussive sequences, other times flying off on rolling adventures of tribal fire under crazed reverb and delay fx. There are vibes of early Popol Vuh intermingling with Animal Collective’s “My Girls” and as the song progresses, those reverse tracked fuzz guitars attempt to subsume the mix, but can never quite overtake the sparking tapestries of synthesized light and the propulsive hand drum intensity. Of the four tracks, “Mizu no Yukue” is the strangest, with sustaining acoustic guitars joining hammering bass fx that distort reality. Tones of bowed metal work around alien guitar harmonics, evoking Stephan Basho-Junghans as Kazuhiko returns for another evocative drum performance. Eventually, it sounds like massive swarms of insects moving through the mix, as a pulsating bass fog, rattling cymbal static as if an infinite flow of sand is pouring over gigantic sheets of metal, hand drums worked into ecstatic pulsations that defy logic, and mutating synths like drunken birds all come together, everything moving faster and faster towards hyperspeed oscillations. It’s as if a quilt has been woven out of spectral sonic light, enchanting, but fragile, eventually unwinding into a gentle coda of vaporous acoustic guitar noodling.
(images from my personal copy)
