Review Summary: The unlikely Mezzanine of glitch pop.
As far as "is that really a thing?" genre tags go, glitch pop is as nebulous as they come. It’s an easy epithet to throw at music that incorporates electronic and pop influences in aid of a little aesthetic fission, so its frequent usage makes sense to this end. However, if you can point to any substantial nucleus at the heart of the phrase in terms of scene or essential style, describing what artists
make rather than a technique that they
do, you can help yourself to a slice of my next lasagna.
The main reason for this is that glitch pop has never been a collective movement or, strictly speaking, a genre at all, but rather a trend between artists with little in common who played with similar sounds for diverse reasons. This trend peaked and
almost crystallised in the early ‘00s when it sat in between indietronica and downtempo-prone art pop, while both were enjoying coinciding heydays. A true genre has some form of dialogue with itself and concentrates around a ‘scene’; glitch pop never did this, but at least its practitioners were taking notes from a consistent set of influences over this period. There’s very little in common between, say, Piana’s ambient pop and Khonnor’s maudlin lofi, but it’s quite easy to imagine the two of them hanging out at a múm show - and even then, the geography required for this hypothetical is revealing of glitch pop’s disparate nature. I’m not sure of the word for a group of artists working contemporaneously and independently from Iceland, America and Japan (not to mention Britain, Germany, Canada, France, etc.), but it certainly isn’t a ‘scene.’ In any case, it’s probably best both for the purposes of this review and also general usage to confine ‘glitch pop’ to this general sound from this time and its direct descendants, and to read all other applications (FKA Twigs, Clarence Clarity, Satanicpornocultshop etc.) as well-intended misspellings of “glitch
y pop.”
With the scope of the term narrowed as such, another issue quickly emerges: none of the classic works under the umbrella of ‘classic’ glitch pop fully encapsulate the style, insofar as a style can be construed by joining the dots between its separate works to begin with. Take múm’s
Finally We Are No One - it’s a great example of the relaxing glitch textures that crop up in several later works, but it’s too much in the indietronica ballpark to feel like a summative work. The reverse is true for Junior Boys, whose pop stylings are a little too retro to be considered more than an innovative appropriation. Sweet Trip’s iconic
Velocity : Design : Comfort epitomises a number of textures and tendencies common to glitch pop, but it’s such a melting pot of genres that it feels disingenuous to say it offers a full summary of any one in particular; it’s no exemplifies glitch pop album than does IDM or shoegaze. Tujiko Noriko’s experimental pop landmarks
Hard ni Sasete and
From Tokyo to Naiagara come a little closer, but, tellingly, these feel like the singular works of an artist unto herself and not a reflection of a wider movement. This also applies to the strongest contender for glitch pop’s Statement Album, Björk’s
Vespertine; it’s easy to see how its beats, tones and loops reflected and influenced the incorporation of subtle glitches into forward-thinking pop, but it’s hard to see it as representative of anything beyond Björk’s delicate, idiosyncratic focus.
All things considered, this might as well be taken as proof that it’s impossible for a pseudo-genre to have a defining album to begin with. However, as with all things, there’s an exception that proves the rule. I’m not sure what’s stranger: that Macaroom’s
Homephone TE is the perfect fit for archetypical glitch pop album, or that it was released in 2014, a square decade out of the style’s heyday. Comprised of vocalist Emaru and keyboardist/composer Asahi, Macaroom lay down virtually every trick or tendency that comes to mind with the faintest of utterance of the term. It’s a little inaccurate to say that
Homephone TE could have come out in 2002-2004; its production and sampling smack of updated digital techniques and there’s an oddly contemporary quality to its downbeat atmosphere. I’m unsure which influences Macaroom have explicitly cited as such, but it’s likely safe to assume that they owe enough to vintage glitch pop for this kind of anachronism to be unhelpful. In spite of this, the album barely feels removed from that period; it plays out like the long-awaited transcription of a narrative that had previously existed within the oral tradition; what was once the loose sketch of a would-be genre takes concrete form here.
This is evident from a number of the album’s characteristics, fleshed out extensively throughout its runtime. It’s there in its
Vespertine-esque beats so delicate they border on ASMR (“Yume”); it’s in its versatile footing between downtempo (“Sinwave”) and ambient (“Kingdom”) territory, a gentle indication of glitch’s hybrid disposition; it’s all over Macaroom’s knack for folding the frivolous sensibilities of light pop into a denser electronic palette (“Kodomo”) and vice versa (“Sakana”); it’s the guiding principle behind their incorporation of samples and loops to subtly disorienting effect throughout the album, and in how Emaru, while vastly different in her delivery, is as skilful as Tujiko Noriko or Björk in holding together otherwise disparate tracks with her enigmatic yet loosely personable tones (“Kekulé Dreams The Great Serpent Holding Its Own Tail In Its Mouth”). It’s all over the way this music is as assured in its influences as it is actively innovative and forward thinking, case-in-point the low-key banger “Kaijyuu”, partly a perky nod to the classic acoustic/electronic balance pinned down by Four Tet-esque indietronica in the ‘00s, and partly an anticipation of what forward-thinking Japanese art pop groups along the lines of Maison Book Girl or perhaps 3776 would toy with in the later ‘10s. All this comes together in the feeling of a stylistically comprehensive and individually outstanding work that makes me think of how albums like
Mezzanine,
Violator, or even
In Rainbows have been taken as mid/late-stage classics for trip-hop, synth-pop and alternative rock, respectively; all three feel like compact summations of extant sounds, so inspired without necessarily being original that it’s easy to view them as essential. Given the blurred scope and dubious credibility of glitch pop as a genre, it’s quite appropriate that its equivalent to these albums has a much smaller platform, yet Macaroom encapsulate its various connotations all the same, totally owning its craft and aesthetics without making either seem exclusive to their style.
Leaving aside stylistic dissection and genre appraisal,
Homephone TE’s unified mood and attention to subtle details is nothing short of extraordinary. With the slight exception of the vocal modulations of midway oddball “Sjeme”, the album holds together a fragile, cryptic tone with robust arrangements and production that give it a firm foundation at any given point. Each track feels so confidently grounded that its various layers of samples and sparse accompaniment lines weave in and out with nuance and intrigue rather the gimmickry and distraction that similar techniques could easily elicit in more misplaced compositions. The most intricate realisation of this is “Yume”, a gauzy weave of textures brittle as tissue paper, so finely balanced that the track feels as though it could disintegrate at any given moment. However, the two most important tracks are “Chess” and “Tsuiraku.” “Chess” is the best one-song digest of this album’s sound, an ominous blend of digital and acoustic tones that shifts between layers with an ongoing sense of momentum. It combines a focused sense of development with an enigmatic direction, a trait common to a lot of excellent electronic (see my review for Plaid’s
Not For Threes). This direction comes to fruition in a climactic bridge, which slices Emaru’s voice into a rhythmic hook and plays all the mix’s different tones off against one another in a manner that feels calculated, cohesive, ruthlessly succinct, and full of well-placed fission. This is the only point on the album where glitch elements are utilised so directly rather than teased around the edge of the arrangement or confined to the rhythm section, and it feels like an entirely natural realisation of these elements; anyone entirely unfamiliar with glitch pop, indietronica, or any of the albums cited in the opening paragraphs could give “Chess” a once-over and come out of its final minute with a pretty clear understanding of the kind of musical vocabulary at play here, not to mention a glimpse of its alure in execution.
As an inspired counterpoint to practically every other song here, “Tsuiraku” is by far
Homephone TE’s most immediately gripping moment. Most of the album consists of slow growers that camouflage their most infectious melodies in off-kilter phrasings (“Kaijyuu”, “Sakana”) and prioritise gradually developing atmospheres over hooks in general (“Sinwave”, “Kodomo”); “Tsuiraku” opts for a more direct approach that reconfigures the album’s palette into a tense mishmash of pop melodies and abstract, near-apocalyptic lyricism. Emaru’s delivery is unrelentingly paced for the first couple of minutes, yet the degree to which she clings to her breathy style of delivery is a gripping pointer for the listener to read between the lines and focus on the track’s repressed urgency. If “Chess” is the track that best shows off Macaroom’s toolkit, “Tsuiraku” sees them briefly leaving glitch and subtlety by the wayside and opting for a cathartic knockout. The album’s overall mood is tangible yet hard to gauge, claustrophobic and comforting in equal measure, yet underpinned by a hint of something bleaker. “Tsuiraku” fleshes out this out as a breathtaking dystopian panorama and could not be more aptly named; the title translates as a fall or [plane] crash, a scenario captured with startlingly evocative force by Emaru’s performance and the disaster-in-slow-motion tone of the arrangement. Even in translation, the lyrics are abstract to the point of nonsense, yet Emaru’s image of the future of mankind crashing to earth in a falling train carriage doesn’t feel in the least misplaced. Leaving the words and the language barrier aside, this song’s stomach-clenching feeling of protracted descent is almost disturbingly riveting; it resonates through the rest of the album, clarifying its darker undercurrent and affording an extra weight to repeat listens.
The value of a gateway song is hard to understate, given that immediacy is far from the focus for these tracks. For all its tonal eclecticism, palatable vocal stylings and wealth of substantial ideas,
Homephone TE is not a flashy or instantly gratifying listen. Its boldest ideas tend to be packaged as subtle details and its most striking moments are pulled off with a depth that is rarely fully evident from superficial listens. Anyone approaching it from the camp of contemporary glitch[y] pop, expecting a novelty art pop knockout will likely be severely disappointed to begin with; likewise anyone expecting a cerebral electronic mood piece will find themselves at odds with Emaru’s vocal style, reminiscent of Etsuko Yakushimaru or a range of similar vocalists on the artsy side of Japanese indie pop. However, those unparticular about either of these points will find a wealth of great qualities here that are all the more satisfying for the time it takes to unpack them. With their enjoyable yet comparatively superficial follow-up
Swimming Classroom, the duo seem to have moved away from this sound, a shame in many senses but hardly a surprise; what more could they do in this vein?
Homephone TE is glitch pop’s hidden classic, the final form a half-forgotten, decade old trend never knew it needed. Under different circumstances it would be a core text for a hypothetical scene; as it is, it’s a belated act of closure for a genre that never established itself as such and a self-contained treasure.
