Review Summary: Tentenko XI: Sleepy Cat Land
Tentenko is an ex-idol freelance artist who runs her own label and has released an extensive range of experimental pop and techno EPs. This review is part of an ongoing series dedicated to exploring her discography. For a point of reference and orientation to her discography as a whole, please see the first instalment in the series, the review for Good Bye, Good Girl.
It’s been an odd patch in the Tentenko-verse: only one in the last five releases we’ve covered has been made up of (mostly) original material in her standard CD-R format. A lot of these collaborations and alternative format albums have been plenty exciting, but its been hard to pin an overarching trajectory between them; our current instalment
Tabekko Land remedies this, laying down a template half hour of solo output that the next few releases in this series will stick quite closely to. It’s also a stylistic benchmark for these following albums: if her last meat and potatoes release
Aka to Kuro saw her rounding off her interest in lofi dub for the time being,
Tabekko Land dives head-first into minimal wave and renders things a whole lot trippier.
As it happens, this album is so spaced out that you’ll have to make an active effort going in blind to engage with just about any of its tracks. The aptly-named opener “Jikuu no Yugami” (Space-time Distortion) is so sparse you’d be forgiven for forgetting it was an opener to anything at all, and while the second track “AWA CRAZY DANCE” ups the ante with a vaguely present beat (!) and set of melodies, it’s less the point at which things kick off and much more the EP’s equivalent of blearily flickering its eyelids, murmuring something along the lines of “Oh…you’re still here? That’s cute…” and immediately dozing off again. The third track “Cassiopeia” would confirm this, and the rest of the album pans out as a near-nauseous reverie somewhere between a moderately potent hangover and a stubborn refusal to get out of bed on a weekday.
This is not the strongest endorsement, and my feelings towards
Tabekko Land’s lighter-than-air haze are still a little mixed, but there’s just enough underpinning these tracks to keep them from seeming completely insubstantial on repeat listens. I actually think this might be Tentenko’s most fleshed out solo effort since
Hibiya Koen - ironic, since if this had come from literally any other artist I would have probably dismissed it as a baseless mess, but its spacey saunter feels somewhat appropriate for Tentenko at this stage, chiming nicely with her lofi sensibilities. It’s a particularly strong fit for her deadpan vocals, seeing her following on from
Aka to Kuro and writing in a way that fits her delivery with increasing refinement. There’s some depth to these compositions, with a lot of Tentenko’s harmonic and tonal vocabulary seemingly to nod sleepily to various touchstones of the late ‘90s UK scene, showing an affinity for Boards of Canada (“Cassiopeia”), cold-shoulder Portishead (“Denshi Chuugoku”) and Plaid (“Suzume”). Who knows how intentional this was, but Tentenko derives an oddly satisfying feeling from transmuting Warp and trip-hop’s aesthetic touchstones into a lofi catnap in this way.
The greatest catnap of them all is without a doubt the late-game gem “Neko no Bed” (A Cat In Bed), Tentenko’s psyched out lullaby to her cat. This is a deep cut and, unlike most of her tracks, does require basic Japanese to get the full benefit, but for my money it’s a secret highlight track of her discography. This was not an opinion I was quick to reach; I initially thought the majority of this song’s appeal was ironic, but on repeat listens I realised the craft behind this one is deceptively solid. That one-bar opening lead could have come straight out of any given GBA title and is repeated for the near-entirety of the track, but it’s such a crass foundation that the song’s hypnotic bent slips in with deceptive tenacity; this track is perhaps the most successfully mesmerising thing here. “AWA CRAZY DANCE” comes close, but there’s something bizarrely intense about Tentenko’s cat platitudes that gives this one the edge.
In any case,
Tabekko Land ends up being a surprisingly focal release for Tentenko, despite its evasive take-it-or-leave-it appeal. It puts the days of
Tentenko no Seimei Daiyakushin and
Aka to Kuro to rest and establishes the style she would later explore more robustly on
Machi and
A E I O U. Irrespective of those releases, this is a strong contender for both the most cutesy and most laconic Tentenko release, an odd combination that lands it a few steps away from immediate gratification but I suppose makes it worthwhile for anyone following casually.
