Review Summary: With The Shader, agraph finally takes his sound downward.
A little exercise never did anyone any harm. This again proves to be true on Kensuke Ushio’s 3rd outing as Agraph. Hot off his award-winning gig soundtracking the popular sports anime “Ping Pong,” the vitality and emotive qualities of his soundtrack and collaborative work (he's 1/4th of popular synthpop band Lama) have finally made their way into his solo work. The Shader breathes and moves in a way that his prior work didn’t, touching on darker elements while avoiding rote navelgazing.
Until this point, Ushio’s work as agraph had been characterized, for better and for worse, by his near-exclusive use of synthesizers and ambient tones. Because of this his last album, Equal, was a technically brilliant but emotionally hollow affair, more likely to soundtrack a study session than a club night. With relatively mild tempos and a near-absent sense of rhythm or movement, Equal felt like an ambient album in what is perhaps the worst way.
It’s evident from The Shader’s first track that Ushio intends to avoid these pitfalls. Anchored by a foreboding piano and found-sound rhythms, “reference frame” is a master class in tension. At about the four-minute mark, the song bursts open, revealing a newfound love of prominent percussion and bass that agraph has yet to demonstrate. The result is a track that feels epic in the truest sense of the word.
And this sense of scale lasts through the album. The tracks “cos^4,” “radial pattern,” and “div” all take simple ideas and transform them into something foreboding and massive. It’s not a leap to view these tracks like decaying bits of modern architecture, starkly colored and geometric, but with visible signs of decay. And with the references to mathematics and computer design peppered all across album, it’s not hard to see Agraph himself conceptualizing these tracks in such a way. This makes for a tight and almost uniformly dark listen, one that never overplays the weight of its own sonic themes.
I say almost because there are some veritable “pop” tunes on here as well, or at least as close to pop as ambient techno and IDM gets. “Greyscale” and “asymptote” move with a vivaciousness that evades most of the other tracks, adding an additional bit of texture to the album. “Toward the pole”’s strings and piano ostinato give it the feel of a Portishead track, and the tremulous bassline only add the almost jazzy feel of the track.
But while the album does best to avoid repetition and sonic stagnation, there are some points where Ushio’s insistence on creating a mood prevents the songs from truly pushing off. The closing track “inversion/91” builds to a good enough climax, but the build itself lacks a bit of the tension and propulsive energy that makes much longer tracks like “reference frame” and “div” more gratifying. That’s not to say the track is bad; the climax and outro feature a stark string section that pulls the track out of its own atmosphere and gives it the energy to close out the album effectively. “Trace of nothing” has the opposite problem of spending the entire track effectively building tension only to end without any truly satisfying conclusion. The instrumentation is brilliant here but, like many pieces of modern architecture, the glistening exterior and A1 building materials form to make something too radically simple.
However, those gripes do very little to diminish the strength of Ushio’s work here. The Shader, when taken as a whole, is a remarkably well-crafted album from an artist very much in his prime. With this release, Ushio has taken the most effective parts of his past works (a rooting in classical composition, the ability to make gorgeous synthscapes) and merged them with a rawness and an emotion that has yet to be rivaled this year. For a definitive artistic statement, Ushio couldn’t have done much better than The Shader.
