Review Summary: Interstellar hugs
Hinako Omori brings a rare sense of frankness to soundscapes distant as celestial bodies. An emerging ambient maven, she showcases a sensitivity for imminance and intimacy in her blend of warm-hearted art pop, new age mystique, and peripheral gothic suspense – all of these tend towards the abstract, yet are so ostensibly heartful that they dodge the glassy-eyed obliqueness frequently associated with their reverb-heavy soundscapes, ethereal vocals and elaborate synth passages. The upshot certainly benefits from close attention, yet seldom goes so far as to demand patience: even at her most liminal, Omori never fails to suggest a benign touch reaching out through the mist.
On last year's
A Journey…, this was an anchor in the face of various diffuse currents that occasionally bordered on nebulous or dizzying; if that record's charm lay in losing oneself in its expanse, then her latest record
stillness, softness is a more intimate affair that places Omori's ethereal vocals in the same room as us. This extends a new focus and immediacy to her compositions and (*sigh*) vindicates the third parties who spuriously termed
A Journey… ambient 'pop'. By and large, the songs on
stillness, softness are more compact and more individually discernible than their predecessors, though this comes not at all at the cost of an impeccable album flow – this record is every inch a holistic experience, expansive and integral as an end-to-end, though perhaps several shades darker than a returning audience are likely to have anticipated. The centrepiece track "foundation" in particular expresses a great deal through negative space, with Omori's vocals fading in and out over a skeletal beat as eerie synth pads conjure the kind of atmosphere one would usually associate with the myriad dry-ice-and-mascara acts propped up by Sargent House. This track proves the epicentre for a lurking sense of unease that runs through the rest of the album, from the anxious cadence of the overture "both directions ?" to the ambient wasteland of "epilogue…" – for such a superficially relaxing album, there's a lot of subtle tension at play here.
So it is that the depth and contour furnished by these ominous undertones prove a valuable foil against the album's central appeal: this record is straightforwardly, enchantingly
gorgeous. All of it! Whether it's Omori's first attempt at drawing a resplendent chorus out of the conventional songwriting playbook ("cyanotype memories"), the delightful pop-and-crackle that accompanies her choicest analogue synth-twinkles ("stalactites"), or good ol' exquisite arpeggiations ("a structure", "in limbo"), this record is spotlessly beautiful and ranks alongside Tujiko Noriko's
Crépuscule I & II as one of the most cleansing experiences I've had from any album this year. This extends beyond its aesthetics: true to
stillness, softness' narrative as a self-healing odyssey, Omori opens a sheltering emotional space through her introspective lyrics, ultimately transcending the record's darker qualities and rounding off a package too humane to qualify as dissociation music yet comforting enough to share that appeal. The result is something to be proud of, establishing Omori as a welcome presence in the ambient landscape – just how few of today's rainy-day trendies have the pizazz to favour new age whimsy over glum Grouper-isms? – and raising a dozen exciting questions about what might be expected from her next. Get soothed, get stoked.
