Review Summary: Tentenko XIX: Get out of my box!
Tentenko is an ex-idol freelance artist who runs her own label and has released an extensive range of experimental pop and techno EPs. This review is part of an ongoing series dedicated to exploring her discography. For a point of reference and orientation to her discography as a whole, please see the first instalment in the series, the review for Good Bye, Good Girl.
Welcome back to the Tentenkoverse.
Living In The Box (Coin Locker) is the latest of several surprises she’s pulled on us since her minimal wave live/on-the-spot Greatest Hits album
Tentenko no Otanoshimikai. She’s rolling with these thick and fast at this point, reskinning her sound like a true Hokkaido lady with a weathered fur coat that just won’t cut it this winter. Praise be. While not a total departure from her last release, the enigmatic and somewhat brilliant
Tenkibashira, this strikes a very different chord, playing out as perhaps the brightest, most bubbly thing we’ve heard from Tentenko so far. The opener, for instance, is clean and catchy, with a brighter melodic tone than most of her past material in this vein. It’s bright enough that I’m tempted to brand it a bubblegum version of
A E I O U and be done with it, but there’s a little more going on here and those who misuse the label ‘bubblegum’ are liable to come under fire from unsettlingly intelligent people whose music libraries make Tentenko’s discography look like the most refined, savoury undertaking in the history of music. So, let’s not.
Instead, let’s turn to
Living In The Box’s most notable accomplishment: how it brings Tentenko’s most palatable and noisiest tendencies together.
Tenkibashira had already made progress in applying the Hijokaidan collaboration
Angel Noise’s ethos of simplistic techno plus noisey accentuation to Tentenko’s solo work, but its greyscale fare wasn’t as blithe a fit as this release’s synth pop foundation.
Tenkibashira was largely contingent on this sense of accent, though none the weaker for it, whereas the peripheral layers of glitch and modulation on tracks such as “Dancing Doll” are at once icing on the cake and a much appreciated edge that gives these tracks a more satisfying development. I’m personally more partial to
Tenkibashira’s stoney sense of intrigue than this poppier fare, but “Dancing Doll”, and the opener are both solid tracks that see Tentenko trading off techno, pop and noisiness against one another with increasing deftness. There’s also “Aliens”, a full-on industrial/glitch piece that forces this release’s relatively clean production style into a much more abrasive form. It’s an oddball on this tracklist but brings a healthy What The Hell factor to the sequencing and makes for another strong offering in this style.
On the flip side, this release has enough “Tentenko, no!” moments to give it that pinch of disasterpiece spice that anyone who’s made it this far will likely secretly crave at this point. First and foremost is “THE HOUSE”, one of the most infuriatingly irritating cuts to emerge from this discography since the days of
Tentenko no Seimei Daiyakushin. This track applies the Synth Pop Meets Noise brief of the album’s finer cuts in a mismatched mess of nauseating melodies and diabolically pervasive imitations of domestic appliance sounds - a bullseye for trashpile Tentenko. It’s also a little miffing to see “Hot Pants”, previously the b-side for Tentenko’s debut single
Good Bye, Good Girl. back here. Credit it where it’s due, it fits the general tone here, but if there was one experience the general craziness of “Aliens” did not equip me for, it was to immediately plunge into five minutes of a single synth-bass loop accompanied by intermittent samples of Tentenko giggling. “Loop Echo” continues in this vein with an inoffensive non-progression that is somewhat more interesting in timbre but adds little to the album’s overall development and quickly becomes stagnant. Fortunately, the closer “Coin Locker” raises the bar with the album’s most straightforward outing in synth pop, a strong track that exemplifies Tentenko’s trademark evasiveness as far as conventional pop is concerned, all while dropping a few great vocal hooks and a steady, engaging progression. In the same way that “Hachiware (T.F.)” rounded off
A E I O U by spelling out what that release was all about in terms not as clearly articulated by the rest of the album, this track is perhaps the most confident stylistic takeaway here, though not quite as interesting as the earlier noise-pop outings.
Living In The Box, then, is a mixed bag. Its best moments show Tentenko blending styles she had previously focused on individually, blurring lines with a confidence and clear focus. Its lows range from insufferable nonsense to insipid retreads, but on the whole it represents another vaguely promising step forwards with a few strong takeaways.
