Review Summary: Math pop euphoria fleshed out in the most savoury of tones
Maison Book Girl have always been a group more inclined to tease their audience with moments of high-concept artistry than to deliver instant gratification. As an idol group disposed far more towards classiness and complexity than any stereotype common to that label, they’ve had a steady few years developing a highly distinctive brand of off-kilter pop steered by more odd time signatures than your favourite math rock band would feel comfortable touching, more spoken word/field recordings/enigmatic ambience than the edgiest of bedroom projects could stomach, a savoury range of acoustic tones more akin to Steve Reich than traditional J-Pop, and a sophisticated live show closer to an art installation than the personality-holding-a-mic routine that frequently defines idol.
It’s an interesting blend that they’ve harnessed successfully throughout their discography, but they've always seemed to explore further possibilities of their full potential rather than stepping into it completely. They’ve come so tantalisingly close at points that this has been more of a point of intrigue than an active frustration, but there was something so wilfully dense and ambiguous about 2018’s weighty concept-pop megaload
Yume, with its evasive breaks of ambience and field recordings, that I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if they cleared that album’s self-cultivated foggy haze and came out with a record that was pop first and arthouse second.
Yume fleshed out the latter category so thoroughly that it seemed appropriate for Maison Book Girl to make something of a return to their fundaments.
Call me prophetic, but that is exactly what
Umi to Uchuu no Kodomotachi turned out to be. This is easily the most streamlined, palatable release Maison Book Girl have put out to date, somewhat comparable to their vibrant 2017 release
Image but with that album’s busy instrumentation and forthright percussiveness toned down somewhat. Instead, we get an album that raises the game in two key areas: the arrangements give the vocal melodies more space to take the lead and resonate to peak catchiness, and both the overall sequencing and individual songwriting are almost entirely fat-free. It's not like either of these factors dragged Maison Book Girl's past output through the mud, but they did relegate it somewhat to a once-in-a-while listen, obstructing the face-value pop appeal that the bouncy instrumentation and breezy vocals seemed to suggest. These tracks, on the other hand, no longer smack of producer Kenta Sakurai’s galaxy-brained studio antics; for the first time, the group are backed by the kind of fare you could make a decent penny out of busking (if your guitar and/or keyboard chops were up to scratch and you happened to be fluent in unconventional rhythms). “Anshoku no Asa” and “No Wonderland”, for instance, are as close as we’ve heard so far to a conventional strumalong as we’ve heard from these girls so far, and they sound all the more inspired for their immediacy.
Given the album’s newfound scope for relative straightforwardness, it’s impressive how many elements of the group’s complexity are reintegrated here. Their trademark mesh of time signatures is as active here as it always been, but it sounds twice as convincing for the fluidity and (at points) danceability with which it carries the compositions; who'd have thought ‘math pop’ could seem such a natural vehicle to a set of pop hooks like these? Take “Kanashimi no Kodomotachi”’s urgent chorus, in which anyone unsure of how to pronounce that title will find themselves set straight in short order: I’m not sure what’s more impressive, that it’s delivered in an alternating phrasing of 5/4 and 9/8, or that you’d never know this if you didn’t make the active decision to count it out. Whereas
Yume camouflaged its brightest hooks under scrambled rhythms (see: “Kotoeri _”),
Umi to Uchuu no Kodomotachi uses the immediacy of its hooks to mask its complexity. These two attitudes complement each other so well that it feels like a little redundant to deem one superior to the other, but
Umi… definitely reaps full benefit from it.
Umi…’s greatest charm, however, lies in how its relatively tight runtime is packed with individually memorable moments despite a meticulously even distribution of quality across the board. With the slight exception of “Nagai Yoru ga Alete”, which follows on in the same vein as the exemplary “Laundry” but does very little in its five and a half minutes that the other song hasn’t already covered in four, the album is a breezy listen, flying by effortlessly even as each track is afforded just enough space to make its mark. Consider “LandmarK”’s cyclical acoustic guitar slide, “Laundry”’s sensationally fun brass arrangement, or the criminally catchy chorus of “Kujira Koujou”: everything about this album is so delightfully
listenable on a level uncommon to most permutations of whatever gets construed as “art pop.” Even Megumi Koshouji's token spoken word track at the end of the album feels like a walk in the park compared to
Image’s protracted “opening” or
Yume’s best imitations of vocalised sleep paralysis.
Umi… isn’t a highlight album as such, but for the sake of covering all bases the group dropped the ballad “Silhouette”, previously heard on their
Umbla EP this summer, in at the halfway mark. “Silhouette” is easily the most understated track here, a mesmerising piano piece that drops its many harmonic and rhythmic quirks like soft bombshells. It's a stunning listen, coming off as a strong challenger for the finest track in Maison Book Girl’s discography and a late-game contender for the best song of 2019.
Umi to Uchuu no Kodomotachi isn’t exactly a gamechanger for Maison Book Girl, but it does represent a highly satisfying refinement of their style, panning out as their most straightforward,
potentially best album to date without sacrificing any of their idiosyncrasies (apart from, y’know, the ones that led them to follow a breathtaking album highlight with five minutes of rain and bird sounds on
Yume - looking at you, ELUDE!). It’s easily one of better realised and more engaging art pop outings of the year, rounding off Japan’s unexpected power trio of breathtaking 2019 alt-idol releases alongside Dots’
Points and 3776’s
Saijiki. Maison Book Girl’s new output is easily the most palatable of the three, and it sets an excellent precedent for whatever materialises next from this group's corner.
