Review Summary: Simultaneously everything you were and weren't expecting.
This review assumes you've also read the review for Funwari-chan's previous album,
with Funwari-chan! It directly follows and references that one, so take ten and read it first if you haven't. Why? Because I've come to the conclusion that
with Funwari-chan!,
Funwari-chan With a cube, and
Funwari Laboratory are really just a single work in three acts.
While I question the motives for breaking the conceptual piece into three separate albums, I can't really find fault with the end product for it:
Funwari-chan With a cube feels simultaneously identical to and completely distinct from the other LPs. I'd characterize this as the difference between the mood and method. Funwari-chan uses the exact same method to create a very different mood, and the result―perhaps because it's ostensibly a different album―feels dissonant in context. Here's a few of the similarities to
with Funwari-chan!: both albums are seven tracks long, both have a single vocal track that appears at about the same point, the last track on each album is a remix...they even have similar names! Second verse, same as the first! It's a conclusion that writes itself.
I say this because as you go through
Funwari-chan With a cube those metatextual cues are sure to hit you with that nagging deja vu and it's important that you don't lose the forest for the trees. It's such passive listening you may not notice the mood is so different, but it bears mention
because the mood is so different.
The album opens with two very tonal pieces to set the mood. When I say "tonal" think of something like the opening to PERTURBATOR's
Dangerous Days: a very richly textured and intensely...not necessarily moody, but certainly
moodful composition that sets the tone for the rest of the album. But there's two of them, and while they're good they don't exactly flow together. In fact, I'd go so far as to call them tonally discordant, a total juxtaposition which I'm forced to conclude is a feature, not a bug.
That idiom is a particularly fitting one because it's very clear that Funwari-chan is in some capacity either some kind of technology, or in some way inextricably linked to it. The iconography's even on the cover of the last two albums. I personally see Funwari-chan as the ghost in the shell, a conscious inhabiting some kind of clockwork monolith. I think it fits, and fits thus: Funwari-chan is some kind of grand self-contained facility, a factory or an arcology or maybe a future self-aware megalopolis, like if the Mirror's Edge city was "smart". The album is a tour Funwari-land in audio form, an attempt to distill a very much visual and kinesthetic experience down to a strictly auditory medium and largely, it works.
The last two paragraphs may have been a touch misleading in giving the impression that after the opening two tracks it opens up from the mood music to something more active and direct, but that's really not the case. With the exception of just two tracks any cut from this album feels like it could be the overture or bridge in some other album. One would usually consider such inconsistency a bad thing, but here it's consistent. In keeping with the "tour" theme I see we get these little vignettes, brief glimpses into other albums in Funwari-land that could have, would have been. Something about it strikes me as mournful, but I can't place what.
And speaking of mournful I want to talk about one of the two aforementioned tracks that does it differently, fluffy cube. Fluffy cube is this album's sole vocal track. It's also something of an enigma and to relate just how so I feel compelled to specifically recount my experience with it. To my review of the previous album,
with Funwari-chan!, someone remarked that happy people can't make good music. Well the peanut gallery is vindicated because I don't think this a happy album, Funwari-chan is not happy. It's easy to type but far from to realize; I must have listened to this album dozens of times before I realized myself. The only reason I realized was because I sat down to write this review, and when I did I heard fluffy cube for the first time.
In deciding to write this review I knew I'd have to actually figure out the moonspeak Funwari-chan is blabbering. The reasons to do so should be obvious, and besides that not knowing just plain didn't sit right with me so here it is. Fluffy cube seems at first blush a cheery and upbeat tune yet's actually a real downer. It's a somber, resigned tune of a vague, omnipresent regret about what is and what will never be. Something like Arcade Fire's The Suburbs as written by Trent Reznor, with a heaping helping of that infuriatingly vague cherry blossom talk to which the Japanese are so prone.
I had the hardest time reconciling fluffy cube to the rest of the seemingly cheery and upbeat album, but I think I figured it out just as I was writing this review. Fluffy cube is a personal indictment at the creators themselves and their inability to create the music they want. Oh sure they can put together a few tracks, but they can't really
explore. What I mean is the tracks on
Funwari-chan with a cube should each be a part of their own separate album―listening to them it's evident―yet they can't. Those other tracks just don't exist. Whether the fault is time or creative block or outrageous fortune the complete body of work hasn't appeared and it likely never will.
With this realization
Funwari-chan with a cube has changed for me. No longer is it a bright, sunny anime tour of the amazing Funwari-land. A tour of Funwari-land is more like Mirror's Edge city if all the people just disappeared. The buildings are there, all the machines still work, it's all right where it belongs. And yet everything's changed. A beautiful, hollow place. It's a funeral dirge for the concrete jungle and the ghost trapped inside. And now I feel hollow.
