Review Summary: Keeping you company
You wake up before your family does. You open the blinds and see it rained last night; grey skies and a wet ground. You leave home and walk into town to do some shopping. Everyone looks chipper this morning. On your way to the store, you pass by the pub, a couple rocking in chairs on their front porch, a man running a stand selling cuckoo clocks and candles, a duck pond with a little old lady reading a book, an antique store with old lamps and exquisite furniture in the window, a little boy looking through wooden barrels lined outside the restaurant, and a woman picking sunflowers out of a bed parallel to her house. While you’re up and about, you feel great and must have had a really good sleep last night.
With all the untold stories passing by one at a time, your mood changes to sheer comfort. This is the essence Lullatone has captured with
Soundtracks For Everyday Adventures. Changing their sound a bit from their cutesy lullabies to indie-folk acoustic passages, Shawn Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida head in a new direction with less-subtle, less-sedative music that’s still as gentle as it’s ever been. Throwing in acoustic guitars, woodwind, violins and banjos to their instrumentation, Lullatone bring you to an isolated countryside town where the people are very friendly and there’s a story to hear everywhere you go; each song on
Soundtracks carries its own unique mood that translates into a piece of narrative, told not through words but through the emotions conveyed.
As a result, this isn’t as subtle as something like
Little Songs About Raindrops, but still shows the delicacy of life’s littler moments, even in a small, rustic town that seemingly has nothing. Just as they have before, Lullatone quietly point your attention to the smallest of unnoticeable things, as your mind wanders with their ambient music. More direct imagery and a refreshing organic tone make this a more lively and atmospheric listen, but it’s not without the more passive moments like “An Old Couple Holding Hands” or “A Picture of Your Grandparents When They Were Young “. Life is as simple as ever for Seymour and Tomida, and it’s the little things that matter most when it comes to their work. Such little things are still explored down to wood-grain detail, and you’ll find some truly impressive moments like the trickling rain piano effect on “Listening to Raindrops Knocking on a Window”. But by the time you’re finished with
Soundtracks For Everyday Adventures, you’ll find the greatest moments are the most simple and mundane, the kind that make every day, really, an adventure.
