Shugo Tokumaru - Exit Review

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full review

Tracklist:
1. Parachute
2. Green Rain
3. Clocca
4. Future Umbrella
5. Button
6. Sanganichi
7. D.P.O
8. Hidamari
9. La La Radio
10. Wedding

Ranking: #36 for 2008

user rating

3.9
excellent

Chart.

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On 12 Lists

5.0
classic

Lew is EMERITUS (67 Reviews)

2008-09-02 | 32 comments | 4,983 views

Summary: The runaway kid with a key in his fingers rattles it along the fence, the rust comes off again.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in my little part of the house. Years of use are present: the fading and drooping armchairs; the small pencil drawings on the wall; and the pins in various shapes and positions, a face smiling from the knee. What sounds like a backwards bagpipe is playing through the speakers in front of me, a pot banging from the kitchen in the background, and I feel more comfortable than I have for days. While I won’t dwell on the Issues that Plagued 07-08, I can tell you that finding myself in this room wasn’t a rare occurrence, listening to Shugo Tokumaru because maybe, I don’t know, he was so good to just trip out to, maaaaan, or Night Piece was the perfect way to come down off another long, summer day, or Exit got me get ready in the early mornings, even more so on the way to school. Not many albums inspire that kind of attention from me, fewer artists even, and Shugo Tokumaru manages to do just that. That I can’t understand Japanese seems pretty irreverent.

Craig Eley over at Cokemachineglow described Tokumaru this way: “Listening to Shugo is like watching a foreign film with the subtitles off. You can't ‘know’ what's being said (as if you can ‘know’ anything, man, shit), but you can ‘understand’ what's happening. You can feel. And at the end, you can say ‘that was delirious and beautiful and fun.’” More so than anything, this is what makes Exit Tokumaru’s best album to date (his "singles album" as opposed to his subdued, atmospheric debut), each song a different template and story. I’m not to assume the dirty, Nintendo-fronted acoustic bash “D.P.O.” is meant to be profound, but when the song guides its way to the softer, effect-laden “Hidamari,” Tokumaru’s falsetto-prone performance becomes poignant and palpable after the frustrated wails in “D.P.O.”

When Tokumaru switches to English to sing the title's refrain in “Parachute,” his enunciation is a hook in itself; when in “Button” his voices rises into a passionate wail, it barely matters what he’s saying as long as we can feel it. This is such a large appeal to Exit that it’d be easy to overlook the fact that the reason the album works so well against the language barrier is Tokumaru’s abilities as a songwriter. “Parachute” makes this immediately apparent, jumping full-throttle into the layered acoustic song, outlined with kitchen noises and bells, though Tokumaru never indulges the quirks; the clank and slides on the acoustic guitar are always audible. His ability to use any sound at his disposal is indelible, like the cowbell that keeps tempo in the clunky, passionate “Button.”

Even when the tracks become abrasive, almost a little too saccharine as the jangling "Future Umbrella" presents, they still manage to work as beautiful compositions, dense and off-the-wall. When woodwinds blow in spurts through “Clocca,” they are fascinating because of how they read on paper: annoying, irritating, indulgent. In practice, in the universe that Exit exists in, they are just a part of the landscape, more beautiful details to a design that seems to always be expanding.

As I’m writing this, “La La Radio” has begun the transition from innocent folk-rock to sparkling electronica, replete with a jazzy guitar and another transitional acoustic solo, where Tokumaru marks the passage into a full-blown rock song. It ends. The silence is overbearing until a guitar chord thumbs through the fog, and Tokumaru suddenly, quietly, creates a folk instrumental. At this stage of the album, following Tokumaru’s magnum opus, a more fitting conclusion couldn’t be created; though, as “Parachute” begins once again to vibrate through the floor beneath my feet, it serves perfectly as the cooling off period before we indulge, once again, in expertly crafted pop. Exit is a classic, a refreshing and rewarding experience that is sweet and euphoric and brilliant. Exit should make Tokumaru a star.

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