For those who missed the vastly underrated and tragically little-noticed debut of this New York shoegaze group, here's your chance to make amends for past mistakes. For those of us fortunate enough to have been fans a few years, shelve the cliched adages you were prepared to trudge out about how much of a shame sophomore slumps are. There's no slump here.
It's important to immediately debunk some gossip about these guys: they are not just My Bloody Valentine redux. First, Yuki is a better vocalist than Kevin and Belinda, and consequently there is no need to bury the vocal track in the ways the latter was known for. Admittedly, though, noise-pop is really not about singing, it's about Spectorian layered sound. Yet in this respect too, instead of simply establishing a texture and then inhabiting it in the textbook fashion, A.S. pulls and plies at it. Like MBV, A.S. is a quilt of guitars and keyboards, sure, but here the quilt is in turns tortured and torn, then washed clean again, purged anew.
Asobi Seksu have also been pegged as hopeless romantics, depressed in their bedrooms because their true love doesn't know they exist, or whatever. But Citrus isn't naive melodramatic artifice, it's the work of truly contemplative artists, meant to and successful at bringing back your most haunting and romantic memories: where you've traveled to, whom you met, and what else you've wasted your glorious life doing. Even if half the lyrics weren't in Japanese, this would still be the anime of indie -- full of epic, life-altering encounters and conflicts, set against a landscape that is paradoxically so alien, yet could hardly feel more like one's own heart.
In fact, if there's any criticism at all to be had here, it's that the music's intensity might burn out some listeners too soon, blow its load too early. By the time the masterful 'Strings' is done you already feel like you've climbed a mountain and swam across an ocean -- and we're only done with four cuts. Maybe the best approach is to absorb this album in small doses, track by track, because every measure is just so densely packed.
I'm reminded of the warnings early American blues aficionados give to neophytes who aim to consume entire multidisc Yazoo compilations in an evening: remember that the blues were originally absorbed two tracks at a time, the A- and B-sides of a 78-rpm. The forms of human expression therein were so distilled, so moving, that it might be unhealthy to listen in greater quantities. The same could be said about Citrus, and I mean that in the best way. |