Review Summary: i will not mention Takashi Kashikura's drumming. no sir
I’ve seen comments before about how the drumming in a toe song is the main instrument, or that it adopts the role traditionally taken up by lead guitarists. The dynamic of toe the band is also outlined as guitars being “duelling”, the rhythm section “loose” and “dynamic”, yet “locked into a groove” at the same time. For over twenty years now, toe have maintained an especially obvious and distinct songwriting ethos. This is said with love; their consistency of style helps them elude categorisation, but it also makes them immediately identifiable in a lineup.
In my world, this often leads to a strange phenomenon in which toe songs – despite their charming tendency to move quickly and with laser precision – are most vividly and meaningfully described as scarcely as possible. I can tell you that TODO Y NADA
sorta makes me think of a dance with elegant footwork and that LONELINESS WILL SHINE
retains the vital, life-affirming energy of Goodbye (that’s a For Long Tomorrow song by the way)
...but it's bittersweet. That’s about all I can offer you that means anything. To say something like:
these cascading chord progressions feel polyrhythmic against the syncopated lead melody is a) excessive, b) waffle and c) failing to adequately convey the alchemy at play. It does not come within a solar system of capturing the ephemeral feeling you get when everything in these songs comes together.
At the end of the day if you’re here you know who toe is and what makes them so good. It’s like – I don’t know – watching someone like Lewis Hamilton drive a really fast car well; you know technically how he’s doing what he’s doing, but it’s still unfathomable that he’s able to do it
like that.
I guess what I *can* do is reassure fans of toe (and perhaps convince a couple of naysayers, fencesitters and dilletantes) that, indeed, don’t fret, it’s okay: the old boys in toe have still got it. It’s all there: Mino Takaaki and Yamazaki Hirokazu are still locked in with each other on the guitars. Their riffs ping-pong and dovetail and move together just as much as ever. There is a relieving retention of creativity and freshness in the rhythms of their arpeggios, and the way their riffs are sequenced to fit the grooves on these songs is super compelling. Especially if you’re high and it’s 12am. Yamane Satoshi’s basslines are solid, and here he is perhaps even more playful than usual. The way he darts around the fretboard in CLOSE TO YOU intercepts that melancholic, yearning feel with an invigorating layer of mischief.
Speaking of CLOSE TO YOU – a song that advocates for toe’s right to be playful after twenty years – it’s the kind of music so good it humanizes its authors. The chopped and screwed vocal hook sequence here just resonates with the idea that this is one of those records that is, pardon me,
crafted. The hook is one that evokes those tiny and precise movements I can’t help but think about when I hold toe in my mind's eye. You imagine them in the studio, moving a single note a semitone below or above to test its feel, its weight, its timbre. You imagine them quantizing, unquantizing, dragging the wavelength on a high pass filter – until the tone and the rhythm and the flow is perfect. So yes it is important not to be flippant with language – if toe is still this committed to such freakish level of detail in their compositions, I do so wish to be respectful in my address.
But there I go, ruining the magic. None of it really matters and this is just me getting excited. The idea is that, in listening to NOW I SEE THE LIGHT, you will take my and everyone else’s word with a grain of salt. You will realise that actually the reason you like this record is because of a feeling that is inarticulable and entirely unique to you. And that, in a way, is a revelation that reaches far beyond your relationship to the music you listen to.
