#team tragic

[i-aim-to-overanalyze]

Listen, at some point in the series,  I NEED a fight where Raven, Qrow and Tai have to team up against an enemy. I don’t care how or why, but maaaybe there’s a Team STRQ flashback prior to the team-up where it shows their younger selves with Summer in a fight, and then it flash-forwards to present day, where there’s a Summer-sized hole in their fight, but they’re making do and kicking ass with using combos they haven’t done since their Beacon Days. I NEED THIS RT.

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. なんだこれくしょん

It’s late May and we haven’t finished April reviews, so it was only natural our project manager Patty threw out the question the other day: is Team Tragic Talks dead? Even though I haven’t given it the time it deserves, I’m not ready to let it go! So here I am, writing a really cursory review of Kyary Pamyu Pamy’s なんだこれくしょん. I’ll do the noob thing and review song by song as I listen.

なんだこれくしょん - This actually starts kind of interesting, with tribalesque beats that quickly degenerate into Kyary’s trademark cute circus sound. For an intro, it’ll do.

にんじゃりばんばん - There’s some chiptune here mixed with Arab-inspired sounds in the intro, before a more or less typical house beat kicks in to hold Kyary’s usual sing-song delivery and repetitive lyrics. It’s not unpleasant and it shows that Nakata can pull a few more sonic tricks here and there. But I’m halfway through the song and I feel like I’ve already heard everything it had to offer.

キミに100パーセント - This starts all peppy and cute, and I expect it to stay like this. Somehow it reminds me of SAWA’s most girly tracks. It’s kind of a toe-tapping good time, kind of idolesque but kind of cute. Even at 3:21 it feels a little long, and I get the feeling already that most of these tracks have no business being 4-5 minutes long.

Super Scooter Happy - Speaking of, this one’s almost 6 minutes long. It kind of harkens back to capsules Shibuya-ripoff days with its breezy, easy-listening vibe. Oh, it actually is a capsule cover? I’m really tempted to skip ahead and see if something different happens in the next five minutes or if Nakata will just take this track’s single idea and drag it on longer than any other track on the album. (Five minutes later) Nope, I don’t think so. I actually got distracted and don’t remember if anything different happened.

インベーダーインベーダー - I can already tell I hate this and don’t want to write about it. It’s like… cute-dubstep or something? I don’t know, I’m not into this one.

み - More tribal beats. It’s kind of like a soccer stadium celebration, which isn’t bad. Little vuvuzela flourishes and everything, and a repetitive chorus straight from the [REDACTED] school of lyric writing*. Actually all the lyrics are repetitive. I mean it’s OK, it’s a fun song but you know, it sounds like something you drop a minute of in the middle of your DJ set just to be super weird and cute. But probably one of my favorite beats in the album.

*Redacted because I don’t want her zillions of fans descending on this blog lol… but she slay, all day.

ファッションモンスター - Maybe doing a track-by-track review was a mistake. Anyway, this is… rock? Oh no wait it’s more club beats… Hmm this is kind of all over the place, which at least keeps it interesting. I kind of like the more pared down parts that sound like indy rock house. That’s pretty novel for Kyary, I think?

さいごのアイスクリーム - This organ intro is completely out of the left field. I wonder what kind of weird track this’ll be! Oh wait. It’s more house beats. Will the organ come back? Only one way to find out. So far it’s not a bad track though, pretty bouncy and she sounds like SAWA again, which can only be a compliment considering how childish she sounds half the time. She needs to back off singing about ice cream, though, or Tommy will cut her. OK the organ never came back.

のりことのりお - OMG another super annoying repetitive song. Slow your roll. Although the dissonance is kind of amusing, like she’s drunk. Actually I guess this is a prime example of “let’s make something that is objectively horribly sung, because it’s the musical equivalent of seeing a helpless newborn fawn try to walk.” I can dig it. Again, this is the kind of song you put in your mix CDs… err playlists just to be like “look at this whacky Japanese shit!” Yeah, I can dig it.

ふりそでーしょん - OMG AGAIN! Just repeat every other word, Kyary. We don’t mind. Getting more early capsule vibes and you know, in a way this sounds more like an actual song than a lot of other endless loops that make it on Kyary/Nakata albums.

くらくら - I’m just hoping for this to be over and am tuning out this track. More kind of toylike/children’s music from Kyary. GUYS WHERE ARE THE BORING BALLADS? I can’t believe it but this bitch’s got me yearning for them. At least this track was around the right length.

おとななこども - OK finally we’re here. Ugh OK I guess this is what passes for a Kyary ballad. It’s definitely a little more low key. That piano is straight out of a 90s house anthem. This track somewhat serves PERFUME, doesn’t it? Anyway I guess this is the sugary comedown from the rest of the album and even though I just said I wanted a ballad … it feels a little forced. Why not just end crazy? The whole album was crazy so why try to show “range” here?

Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll hold on to this album but it was at least interesting and for sure Nakata drops some better tricks here than on capsule albums. He really needs to work on tying his intros to the rest of the song, because he excels at the former and falls flat at 90% of the latter.

So! Finally, April is done for me! Team Tragic Talks lives!

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. SUPREME SHOW

Give a man a few notes and he’ll make one hit song. Teach him to use an arpeggiator and he’ll… produce SUPREME SHOW? Ami Suzuki’s SUPREME SHOW encapsulates (see what I did there?) mid-period Yasutaka Nakata pretty perfectly: catchy intros that give every song a distinct musical identity but don’t necessarily do great as full-length songs. Sometimes this works out really well, as it did with “FREE FREE” which became an instant classic. Sometimes, well, it doesn’t work quite as well and we have SUPREME SHOW.

The good – Two of my favorite moments in the album actually have the worst intros. “TEN” starts with a tacky, semi-Latin synth above the typical 4/4 beat but it picks up when Ami starts chanting nonsense and a little 80s synth bubbles in the space between her “lyrics.” “SUCCESS! SETBACK! CHALLENGE! EXPERIENCE.” It’s hilarious how Nakata makes her recite words so random it makes it seem like neither of them know what’s going on. And yet I kind of love this song.

Meanwhile “ONE” starts with a fade in and to be honest, the first minute or so always tempts me to skip the track. Pretty soon it picks up to a stomping neo-disco beat that gives way to a pretty dancey bridge. The bridge is so good it makes the chorus actually make sense. (Nakata kind of did this too in MEG’s “MAGIC,” in which the chorus sounds really bad at the start but a lot better when it’s set up after the first bridge. Actually I’m not convinced “ONE” isn’t just a gussied up cover of “MAGIC.”)

Probably my favorite song is “A token of love,” which starts with a cool skipping-record effect before going into full-blown Moroder gallop (or, more likely, Confessions emulation). No matter. Actually making the intro sound like a skipping vinyl gives the usual repetitiveness of a Nakata song a little more depth, like this whole thing is alluding to the heyday of disco. It’s funny that the looping sample gives “A token of love” that disco-soul feeling that completely evaded my least favorite song on the album (see below).

The bad – Most of the album passes by you like an especially thumping bit of ambient noise, but “SUPER MUSIC MAKER (SA’08S/A Mix)” is pretty egregious. It not only eviscerates the fun-packed original, it turns it into some sort of disco-soul mess that doesn’t even go with what the rest of the album is trying to do.

The tragic – “can’t stop the DISCO” and “climb up to the top” began life on the same EP as the “SUPER MUSIC MAKER” remix (basically they plopped an EP in the middle of the album), which taken together really raise your blood tragic levels. The little synth flutter at the beginning of “can’t stop the DISCO” sounds like you’re watching TV and the screen starts shimmering as we go to flashback, and it’s so fabulous when it comes back for the outro. Meanwhile “climb up to the top” starts with a quasi-tribal drumbeat supporting Ami’s best orgasmic pants and sighs that soon enough makes way for some Hi-NRG synths and more Ami shouting nonsense.

As you can imagine, I can’t get enough of either of those tracks.

So anyway, that’s SUPREME SHOW. It’s pleasant enough, but sometimes I don’t know if Nakata is paying homage to stuff (“Funkytown” in “Mysterious,” “Music Sounds Better with You”/“The Future of the Future” in “LOVE MAIL”), if he hopes we won’t catch him mid-ripoff, or just doesn’t know better. It definitely exposes his weakness as an arranger (since other than the beginning of songs, it was hard for me to put into words anything that happened during most of the tracks), but still has enough toe-tapping moments and isn’t that what we want from Nakata anyway?

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. WAVE RUNNER

As you all know, Team Tragic is an international cabal of cultural savants based in leading style and music capitals like Dallas, San Antonio, and Namerikawa. Though we stay in close contact, we don’t really get to hang out together and plan every intricacy of Team Tragic’s quest for global domination. So strange as it might sound, no, Patrick, Chrissy and I did not at any moment get together in a shady basement to shoot crack; our decision to have a month dedicated to Yasutaka Nakata’s work came organically, without drugs, in a strange moment where our collective poor taste overtook us.

Happens to the best of us.

So anyway, somehow we thought Nakata Month was a good idea, since we do all enjoy the man to varying degrees. I think the thing we can all agree on was that early capsule was utter bullshit, a sad attempt at capitalizing on the Shibuya-kei craze but with superficial production and simplistic arrangements that only made you pine for the true masters of the genre. I thank my lucky stars that even despite Team Tragic’s infinite trashiness, no one nominated that garbage.

But this is about neo-capsule, the electronic due comprised by Nakata and what’s-her-face, his trusted anonymous human vocaloid. (Even the Vocal Forge samples used throughout PLAYER have more personality.) It’s hard to give a general sense of a capsule album since they more or less lack concepts and any one song could’ve come from any album. The exception to this is the album immediately preceding WAVE RUNNER, CAPS LOCK, which to me was an ill-fated experiment in chill out ambient music featuring found sounds and even more loops than usually found on your average capsule album. It bored me half to death, so I welcome WAVE RUNNER’s return to Nakata’s dance roots.

The good – Even though what’s her face probably hates her life and I hope to god that she has some sort of creative outlet in her life where she does more than just nasally, dispassionately read whatever two lines of lyrics Nakata writes for her, she still manages to make the songs she participates in enjoyable. “Another World” is a slow burner that starts almost like a Perfume song or something, only to kick into high gear as what’s her face’s heavily processed voice sways over the beat. There’s not a lot there, and I remain unconvinced that Nakata ever really succeeds at executing his musical ideas for longer than, I don’t know, 30 seconds, but this is some feel good, hands in the air rave anthem. “Dreaming Boy” sees the vocals atop a blaring wall of 80s synthesizers before the song is kind of ruined by this annoying sequencer that takes over for most of the song. Kids these days.

“Feel Again” takes us back to the poppier days of FRUiTS CLIPPER and other “classic” capsule albums for another hands-in-the-air synth house anthem with a little bit of ever-present “whoa oh oh ohs” in the background. Bless Nakata’s heart, from being a poor man’s Yasuharu Konishi to a poorer man’s Calvin Harris/current producer du jour. But “Feel Again” is dancehall ready and single friendly, the rare capsule track you feel compelled to include in a playlist these days.

“Unrequited Love” is an updated disco/house affair, with mellow synths woven underneath a 4/4 beat. Like much of the album though, the middle sections are just like any middle section in like 99% of dance pop these days: machine gun drums, rousing synthesizers… it’s like Ibiza all day every day.

The bad – I don’t know that there’s anything egregious here or anything, but I’m not all that wild about “Dancing Planet,” which relies a little bit too much on finding annoying synthesized sounds that it sounds way longer than it’s not-even-five-minutes running time.

The tragic – The chill-out moment of the album, “Depth(vocal dub mix),” is kind of tragic, no? Like Nakata is trying to be, well, deep and brooding, but it sounds a little half baked. I still kind of like it and its place in the album. Its sparseness stands out against the rest of the tracks.

All in all, WAVE RUNNER is a decent album. Nothing really makes me want to press the “skip” button but all in all I don’t find individual songs (save a few exceptions) as distinctive as some of the tracks on WORLD OF FANTASY and STEREO WORXXX (which I will trashily admit are probably my favorite capsule albums).

So yeah, Nakata is no TK and capsule is no globe, not by far. But at least he’s shown himself adept at adopting the current trends and give them a little bit of his spin, and somehow not create horrible albums while at it.

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. CONTINUE

It hasn’t even been three years since CONTINUE came out and yet it feels like MEG’s definitive swan song. She’s already pulled the “I’m retiring from music and moving to Europe” thing before, but I think she was hardly in France a few months before LA JAPONAISE dropped and all was well with the world. But the absence since CONTINUE feels longer; what’s more, having access to her carefully curated Instagram feed, it does look like MEG herself has moved on. Modeling, designing, coffee, her black cat – they’re everywhere in her feed but never do you see any indication that she’s writing, or even yearns to write, new music. It’s hard for me to digest that one of my favorite artists would just bow out of the music game and live a more mundane life, but it could be worse. At least she’s not working a counter at a department store like I heard some idols did after she retired.

Anyway, after her years with Nakata, MEG returned to the eclectic approach of her first few albums, with mixed results. Her newfound freedom left her a bit like a kid in a candy store, indiscriminately dipping her hand into this or that musical jar without much concern for the album’s cohesiveness. WEAR I AM was a mess. CONTINUE is a bit more unified, somehow consistently drawing on an8-bit soundtrack aesthetic without going into full-blown chiptune. Sure, there are some clunkers but a handful of songs stand among her finest.

The good – The marketing for this album was genius, boasting a browser game and two tie-in singles, “KISS OR BITE” and “SAVE.” These two songs are two of the best on the album. “KISS OR BITE” (performed by “MEG ZOMBIES”) was featured heavily on the site in chiptune format, and it’s great to hear it in a more realized arrangement. It’s a bit hard to describe – a mishmash of rock guitars with eerie synthesizers and occasional horror movie samples. It started being my favorite of the two singles, but in the end, I became fonder of “SAVE,” a madcap pop song with a bizarre rockabilly guitar layered atop frantic breakbeats and assorted 8-bit sounds. The fast-paced chorus sounds like the type of song that you’d want to see someone play on Ultimate on DDR and the entire song has a desperate urgency that’s very appealing.

The other standout is of course “BATTLE OF PARADOX,” one of the clearest examples of the whole “8-bit soundtracks with real(ish)-instrument arrangements” thing. Sure, the dubstep breakdown is pretty dated by now but there’s enough drama to MEG’s vocals and a sense of narrative to the music to make this an instant classic. I can totally a PV of this (Patty, you asked) featuring MEG in a side-scrolling shooter, climaxing in a bullet-hell scene where her ship goes down in flames after putting up a brave fight. But I guess she already did the shooter concept in “SECRET ADVENTURE”’s bizarre PV.

The bad – I’m surprised that Patty compared “宇宙のMON DIEU” to every annoying Queen song there is (read: all of them), because I didn’t know that he had Queen as a musical reference. I thought only us olds were unfortunate enough to do with them. Anyway, this is a total misstep.

The tragic – “くるみ割り” is probably the messiest of the hot messes on CONTINUE. It starts sort of like a pizzicato strings-driven “Nutcracker” ripoff, before morphing, without reason, into a sort of Broadway can-can number for a few bars… and then going back to bargain bin Tchaikovsky. Someone needed to rein MEG in but at the same time, I kind of applaud her for trying things.

Who knows if MEG will ever record another album. But if CONTINUE has to stand as her final work, I think we will still be able to see her as quitting, if not while ahead, at least while on the upswing.

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. Dithyrambos

You give me MEG month and of course I'm going to pick Dithyrambos. I was introduced to MEG via aquaberry, and continued to listen to her through her Yasutaka Nakata phase before finally catching up with her first two albums.

My mind was pretty blown.

Even though I always enjoyed MEG's Nakata albums, I never really suspected there was more to her than her panty-flashing antics and whiny, nasal vocals from BEAM and STEP. When I finally tracked down her earliest work, I was surprised.

The good - I rate the album overwhelmingly positive, and not just because I picked it. After the short "intro-esquina" (a reprise from room girl), we set out with the thumping "rockstar (yasutaka nakata 128 mix)," which I suppose might be the earliest MEG/Nakata collaboration out there. It sounds pretty atypical of him, a breezy house groove layered with mellow synths, a style that didn't quite come back until parts of MAVERICK, or maybe Nakata's remix of "FREAK." It's a great reworking of the original, a guitar-driven pop-rock number that got lost in the indie pop shuffle.

"dawn" is another surprising MEG moment, an ethereal ballad brought down to earth by a pervasive bass line that MEG just slays with her subdued vocals. It's very haunting! Before we get too cozy, we jump to "stereo 04 (sugiurumn mix)" which is a bit typical of a Sugiurumn remix with the heavy drums at the beginning and all. It might be a tad too long and repetitive since it only samples the chorus, but it's a good time.

"saigo no kotoba" retains the disco-house formula, adding funky guitars and sweeping strings to the 4/4 beat. It's one of those moments that just enliven the party in my head.

To continue the #PattyVsEdu saga, I have to say that my favorite song on this album is "lovelive." Everything about it is weird - the robot voices, the vaguely country-and-western twang in MEG's voice during the … chorus? Verse? It's hard to tell with this song, and the weird structure also contributes to the charm. I just imagine a PV for this where MEG rides a mechanical bull and line dances while wearing a cowboy hat covered in silver glitter. I know, I have a very specific mental PV for this.

The bad - Nothing is bad on this album. Stop asking. If I really need to point to a culprit, then I'll say "carpool" gets a little lost at the end, but that's not bad. Considering most of the songs are pretty thumping dance numbers, it's nice to have a gentle bossa nova to come down to. It's not particularly innovative from a musical standpoint, but it's well-crafted and it showcases MEG's more pleasant vocals.

The tragic - What could be more fitting for this spot than "lovin' you"? I can barely begin to describe it. It's quite sparse, just an electric piano (?) and a few chimes atop a proto-hip hop beat while MEG harmonizes with herself as a strings section creeps up behind her. There's something about her vocals that I really enjoy here. It's like everything she's capable of shows up in this track - girlish, delicate, whiny, shrieking, everything she can do is here. She doesn't have the best vocal range, but she's effective at conveying a warm, heady feeling that must be, well,what lovin' you feels like.

Dithyrambos is a great reminder of what MEG was capable of when she met Nakata. It's easily my favorite album and it makes me think that she was a little diminished when she worked with Mr. Uber Producer. It shows great breadth and range and at the same time, focus, which is something, sadly, she seemed to struggle with in her post-Nakata albums.

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. Tommy’s Halloween Fairytale

Musical alter egos are always a dicey concept, but if there's someone that's done them right, it's the briliant green's Tomoko Kawase. Tommy february6 and Tommy heavenly6 could've been pathetic one-shot projects relegated to the 100 yen bins, but somehow it's been almost 15 years since Tommy february6 dropped and look at her, still releasing music.

Like Chrissy mentioned, the Tommies' careers have merged through the years, with some mixed results. I find the two personas work best side by side, as complements or companion pieces as with the wonderful FEBRUARY & HEAVENLY double EP, or the SUGAR ME/ICE CREAM HEAVEN albums from 2013. But when they both get stuck in the same track or the same EP, I find them stepping over each other's toes and becoming something of a meandering mess. Sure, it's clever to have "Lollipop Candy♥BAD♥Girl" last 10:31 but the waltzy interludes totally kill the flow.

By now you know where this is going, straight to mixed-review land. And that's fine. I have to give it to Tommy – she's secure enough in her career and her schtick that she can do whatever the fuck she wants and no one's going to stop her. I'm assuming that if someone's still paying her to put out singles and EPs, she must be selling. Good for her. But sometimes she risks getting lost in the concept and her own kookiness and the music itself feels like a bit of an afterthought, or at least not as important as the atmosphere she's trying to create.

There's only really three songs on Tommy's Halloween Fairytale. "LIVING DEAD DINER GIRLS" starts out great with an in-your-face industrial guitar riff that pretty soon gives way to… just another feburary song. I like it, but I would probably like it better if I didn't feel like it's going to turn the corner and become "Ruby Eyes" all of a sudden. Likewise, "LITTLE RED FOREST" brings out the 80s synths full-force but it doesn't take a lot of listens to start wondering if this isn't just "Je t'aime☆Je t'aime" wearing a fake mustache. I've long been a fan of Shunsaku Okuda's songwriting, as he crafts songs that are catchy and have an air of inevitability around them, but he seldom repeats himself as gratingly as he does here.

On the other hand, we have the closer "Frozen Raspberry Snow," which does not sound at all like Tommy's previous Christmas effort, "I ♥ XMAS," the one case where you'd actually want Tommy to repeat herself because "I ♥ XMAS" is an epic Tommy single. But I don't hate it. I think it's a nice, chill closer with a lot of humor to it. What do you know: Tommy, like Americans, gets into Christmas mode as soon as the Halloween decorations come down. Sorry, Thanksgiving.

I want to wrap up this review but I guess I can't do it before I talk about the other two tracks, a short intro and an insufferable head-scratcher, "The Sparkling Candy Man" plus its coda, "Follow the White Rabbit!" I guess I'm just a grouch because I'm not getting into the game that Tommy wants to be playing. Instead I just find these songs weak and irritating. She's done the Mad Hatter's Tea Party to better effect before (although to be honest, "I’M YOUR DEVIL" is much, much better without the spoken parts) so I'm not sure I see the point in rehashing this, unless anything Alice-related is guaranteed to be a sales hit and in fact it's these tracks that are enabling this entire EP and Tommy's continued existence. Which would be pretty sad if true.

Anyway. I love the Tommies (though I definitely favor Tommy heavenly6) but Tommy's Halloween Fairytale is a little meh to me. Maybe there's a lyrical dimension I'm not appreciating because my Japanese is so rudimentary. But even from a purely musical perspective it doesn't feel that great. Sure, it's super polished like we've come to expect from her (well, other than the underappreciated I KILL MY HEART), but it's a bit of a rehash. I hope Tommy and her team are recharging their batteries and strike that perfect balance of familiar and new in their next release.

[teamtragictalks]

Edu vs. CUTE

I've been a fan of Towa Tei since he was the Guy in the Glasses in Deee-Lite back in the 90s, but that doesn’t mean I can't or won't serve some tea. I'll always be the first one to admit that if there's something he's consistent about, it's being inconsistent. Mixed with his moments of pop brilliance come all sorts of head-scratchers, boring tunes, musical ideas stretched thin and the like. But I continue to get his albums, even though I'm expecting about half of each to not be very good.

The best Towa Tei tracks are his vocal tracks, where he shows definite talent at plucking interesting voices from more humdrum environments (or the pages of fashion magazines) and throwing them into his sometimes bizarre, always overproduced soundscapes. If it weren't for Towa Tei, I wouldn't have discovered such mainstays of my music library as Chara, UA, Brazilian crooner Bebel Gilberto and Clammbon's Ikuko Harada. But if Towa Tei had missteps, they usually came in his instrumental tracks, which tend to lack a bit of soul and interest.

It's pretty apparent in 2015's CUTE that Towa Tei continues to lose interest in the traditional pop song, and I feel that the album loses something due to this reduced vocal presence. The first half of the album is a little rough. Songs like "FLUKE" and "NOTV" sound less composed and more generated, as if an algorithm was tasked with creating them instead of a human composer with at least a passing concern with melody and hooks. But maybe even that wouldn't have saved things: the album's ostensible centerpiece, "LUV PANDEMIC," was worked on by none other than Towa Tei, Cornelius, YMO luminaries Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, and Leo Imai, and yet it's an overdone mess that doesn't live up to its many fathers' pedigree. I'm not going to say that it doesn't have a joyous, toe-tapping vibe in its last two thirds (it gets off to a rough start), but it seems more about advertising the people involved in it (including model Yuka Mizuhara's minimal vocal contribution, just to appeal to the kids, I guess?) than about being a decent pop song.

Happily, the album picks up a little bit and what do you know, it starts exactly where Patrick says the album lost him, or thereabouts. "HEAVEN" is a sweet moment of sunshine atop a hip hop-lite beat, treacly vocal samples ("things like… love!"), Indonesian percussion and a wicked funk guitar. I can't help but smile whenever I hear it. "SOUND OF MUSIC with UA" (and Leo Imai, but who's counting?) is the album's real transcendent moment, a showstopper from the moment you hear UA's scatting. She then guides you gentle through the nursery rhyme verses as layers of synthesizers and an 80s electro bass line wash over you and drives the whole motherfucking song home. UA is a vocal goddess and can do no wrong. And the nine-note chime that comes in at 3:02 and totally makes the song is probably the most inspired bit of songwriting in the entire album. Seriously, this song is amazing.

"TRY AGAIN" sees Towa Tei collaborating again with Yoshinori Sunahara, in the latter's busy-music mode. Honestly, Towa Tei's contribution to the piece is a bit hard to tease out. Next we move to "CUL DE SAC with Leo Imai" which if I were doing the habitual format, would be placed under TRAGIC. Musically it's a bit of a companion piece to "SOUND OF MUSIC," albeit a lot more sedate, a lot more spacious. What makes it tragic are the full-English lyrics, which are nonsense. "The future's a garden hose," Leo sings. "The future's a dining table, structured to keep us emotionally stable," and I don't know if he's counting on most of his listeners not bothering to look past "this sounds cool" and into "what the fuck does this mean?" I guess this must be revenge for Westerners' kanji tattoos.

"BARU SEPEDA" is the last hurrah in this collection, the best-realized of the many instrumental tracks on CUTE. It's relaxing and easygoing and still has enough going on musically to keep me interested for its nearly five minutes. The album closes on "CHAISE LONGUE," an exotica track featuring an extensive melodica solo. I guess it's fine. Towa Tei has a habit of closing his albums with some hardcore chill moments, and as far as they go, "CHAISE LONGUE" is pretty tolerable. Not my favorite moment in the album, but far from the worst.

Even though I own a lot of Towa Tei's output, I'm the first to admit that he can be astoundingly mediocre. Or if I want to be more generous about it, I'll have to admit that he and I don't always have the same interests. I love his pop sensibility, which I think gains a lot from his maximalist production style - give me a song with a catchy hook where you can still discover new sounds on your 90th listen. But Towa Tei seems more interested in collage, in technology. Perhaps some of these songs were more fun to make than they are to listen to, and that’s OK. I'm still happy sifting through his output for the flecks of gold and sometimes that's all a fan could ask for.