Review Summary: Tomorrow morning comes so early
Oomori Seiko’s debut EP kicks off with an utterly perfect track.
In some ways this is hardly a surprise; Oomori Seiko herself is distinctly special. An outspoken and defiantly complex female voice comfortably at odds with rigorous Japanese norms, she’s showcased a stunning series of reinventions over the last few years, moving from an ugly duckling of the Tokyo indie scene to a pop queen of considerable acclaim and social clout. Her credentials are extensive: her 2013 pop masterpiece
Sennou and her close involvement with the unorthodox idol platform Miss iD are just the tips of two respective icebergs. For those out of patience for the ultra-twee cliches of Oricon kitsch, Seiko is as iconic and inspirational as pop artists come. If anyone were to kick off their debut with a perfect track, why not her?
And yet, for all the accolades of its creator and the idiosyncrasies of her voice, “Kira Kira”, the first song on
PINK, seems strangely noncontingent on these qualities. A lot of Seiko’s work benefits greatly from self-reference and wider familiarity, but more than anything else in her discography, this song feels uncoloured by her legacy and development as an artist, a blank-canvas piano ballad that demands no further context. In this sense it’s perfect as an introduction for an unfamiliar listener, but there’s also something perfectly complete about it, as though the voicing of each note is individually integral to the song as a whole. The whole piece is so balanced, so distinctive and so powerfully voiced that I want to call it one of the better career openings of all time. This is of course a ridiculous claim to make for any song from any artist, even one as notorious for attracting hyperbole as Seiko, but in this case it somehow feels too appropriate to dismiss as glib.
Hyperbolic or not, much of the track’s greatness stems from the tension between its evasive lyricism and its almost comically un-evasive vocal performance. Within the first minute Seiko namedrops her quote-unquote purpose in life with guttural force (“ikigai ga…”), yet she refuses to elaborate on what this might entail, letting the strength of her delivery fill the gap. She lives her own truth, her resolve evident in the near-contempt with which those words find themselves spat down her microphone.
Purpose in life? Read between the lines, Seiko might as well be snarling; the stanza even ends with her questioning her own exclamation (“uso mitai darou…”). Four lines into the song and we’ve already hit an emotional extreme; in a now thoroughly established Seiko-ism, it only takes thirty seconds to hit another. This one comes with the opposite temperament: in the track’s second verse, she shows a more fragile side as she pines after the value of her addressee’s everyday life (“kimi no mainichi ga taisetsusa”).
What’s so precious about everyday life? She won’t say, instead moving on to pronounce the track’s cornerstone line over an ascending sequence of sustained chords dropped with the flat-handed weight of a death sentence: “Karadagoto Love Hotel - uso darage desho?”
Your whole body is a love hotel - isn’t it full of lies?
“Kira Kira” sees Seiko scrabbling for value in the everyday and doing her utmost to conjure herself a guiding purpose, but she leaves us with just two truths: this sordid metaphor and the track’s bookending line
tomorrow morning comes so early. There’s a point here, one which slips through the gap between her decidedly frayed vocals and beautifully sparse arrangement, between the various levels of contradiction in her lyrics, and vaults off those key lines. Once it’s expressed as such, it’s cheap to reduce this
point to a dinky summary.
Oomori Seiko sings about feeling like dirt while craving everyday validation: anyone could express as much - and they do! That’s the stuff of the B-grade blogsphere. What elevates Seiko’s voice from a pedestrian whinge, and what makes “Kira Kira” such a breathtaking song, is the way she shows more than she tells. It’s all very well to wax poetic about the disoriented, almost dreamlike snapshot the song furnishes of disaffection with the various self-contradictory models of selfhood, adulthood and - especially - womanhood; Seiko dissects these in all their attraction and repulsion over the course of
PINK (and any of her albums), and while this is interesting content, it’s no more or less so than your daily sociology column. However, with a little lyrical awareness and familiarity with Oomori Seiko’s style, you’ll find the whole lot of this spilling over the end of her every line, however ambiguously phrased. Those two statement lines resonate with it without losing a jot of nuance: that brutal articulation of “iki
gai ga” erupts with the weight of every other line’s undertone of bitter self-doubt, while
tomorrow morning comes so early is easily terse enough to beg for deconstruction, to which endSeiko provides more than enough to read into it. This knack for expressing so much so clearly with delirious lyricism has a fair amount to do with what makes her such a formidable songwriter, and the fervent personality behind these lines and themes has a
lot to do with what has made her such an inspiration to Japanese young women.
This is what makes Oomori Seiko distinctly special.
For those understandably sceptical that a sentiment along the lines of “I’m a depressed, angry young woman with a complex and toxic relationship with self-worth and authorship” can be accurately reconfigured by the likes of
tomorrow morning comes so early, there’s some unpacking to be done. Fortunately, Seiko holds nothing back here; the remaining five tracks unpick “Kira Kira”’s vague subtext with such brutal thoroughness that the opener seems like a beautiful, distant dream by the end of the EP. No punches are pulled: whether it’s “Coffee Time”’s pissy ode to early adulthood, “Party Dress”’ wistful rumination over the equivalent benefits of wrist-cutting and banging old men as antidotes to depression, or “PINK”’s hair-raising call-out of those critical of her credentials as a female musician,
PINK is ferocious in how rigorously it runs the gamut of uncertainties and insecurities.
At this point the language barrier had likely become the elephant in the room for many; what’s the use of lyrics if you can’t understand a word of them without spending multiple minutes of your life trawling for good translations (see bottom)? To this end, it’s worth foregrounding that in correspondence with how this release’s penmanship requires a raw edge, the music here is -
eh - pretty fucking ugly. Its genre vocabulary sits in a caustic middle ground between indie folk, lo-fi and folk, very much ‘pink’ in the sense of being red and raw and adamantly short of that colour’s typical cutesy qualities. “Party Dress” continually shifts its footing with palpable anxiety; “Coffee Time” is an acoustic burnout that deserves to be at the top of every hangover playlist; “Sayounara” is a glum dirge that smothers itself in feedback midway. It’s all fairly abrasive stuff, punctuated only by the perky “Ochawan”, but the album’s mid-section pales in comparison to its inevitable “it” moment, a must-mention for anyone familiar with the EP:
“PINK” is one of the most violent acoustic performances you’re likely to hear from any artist, exploding as the final outburst that the EP’s rough edges were reaching for all along. The song starts as a fire-and-brimstone folk punk sermon in which Seiko eviscerates Japanese conceptions of infantilised womanhood, becoming increasingly forceful and disjointed until she all but drops her guitar and spends the best of part of her minute mangling her larynx over a furious monologue of bitter self-parody. Her voice here resents itself for ever entertaining the possibility of presenting itself a musician’s, plunging into a merciless satire of preconceptions of feminine incompetence. The track lays bare all its author’s perceived inadequacies as an adult, a woman and an artist; the only path conventional wisdom holds in store for her is to regurgitate platitudes from the present to her deathbed and keep her misguided creativity under wraps. Needless to say, she screams her lungs out regardless; how else could she put it? Remember how in “Kira Kira” her enunciation of her purpose in life served as a stand-in for the real thing, equal parts a deconstruction of her having a meaning in the first place and a perlocutionary act that placed music in its stead? This approach is turned up to eleven on “PINK”; Seiko tests the limits of her own verbosity, but the force of her speech is as important as its substance. It’s crass, but she pulls it off, and by virtue of its crassness you don’t need to speak a word of Japanese to catch the weight and intention behind these lines.
There will be some people who will not be able to tolerate Seiko’s vocal tone or stylings, others who can’t see the scope of this music beyond a set of razorwire folk songs, and others still who wave at the language barrier and leave it at that. Fair craic. For what it is, these tracks could hardly be better expressed;
PINK is wholly unapologetic over the levels of personality and paintstripper showcased throughout. That artwork is bang on the money and, as far as take-it-or-leave-it affairs go, so is the EP as a whole. It exemplifies the rawest facets of the Oomori Seiko experience sound while teasing her robust songwriting chops and creative potential; it’s easy to see how she would eventually outgrow her indie days to make maximalist pop of equal appeal to idol and arthouse fandoms. The aesthetic of her particular brand of ~pink would get decidedly cuter, but her lyrical scope would remain as cutting as ever and her knack for a raw unplugged number remains a key part of her craft; 2018’s
Kusokawa Party boasted a fantastic throwback to this style in “Tokyo to Kyou”, and acoustic manglings of all shapes and sizes are a prominent part of her live show.
PINK’s rawness isn’t so much an origin story as part of her lifeblood.
The last thing to add, which this EP frames very well, is that although Seiko’s tracks are often depressed, they are never disaffected. One of most inspiring parts of her work lies in how she doesn’t so much invite us to share her downers as much as she exorcises them down the microphone and turns them into something more powerful. Sometimes, as on her later pop mini-opuses “Dogma Magma” and “Shinigami”, this is uplifting and almost overwhelming, and sometimes, as on that hideous masterstroke of a title-track on this EP, it’s unashamedly petulant. It’s easy to see why she’s attracted such fierce admirers while turning so many listeners off, but Oomori Seiko at her best and most vivacious is remarkable in how she turns the relatively obscure specificity of her platform into something utterly compelling and relatable. The experience of being a depressed, self-doubting young woman trying to go it alone in the Japanese entertainment biz is not something I’ll ever be able to fully identify with, but like many great artists, Oomori Seiko’s voice extends far beyond the parameters of her background. She’s brave enough to live out her truth in as skewed, ambiguous and contradictory as she pleases, and talented enough to support this with phenomenal songwriting chops. If any of this sounds in the least inspiring, there are worse places to dip your toes than the start of her career.
You might be surprised.
