Review Summary: Chill out : the Shadow appears in dreams : the lamp appears under the lampshade
What is Lamp?
Band innit, not to be confused with “lamp” (照明) or Lamb, also a band. Lamp and Lamb are both good bands, of an approximately equal standard of above-average goodness. However, there are differences: Lamb are a trip-hop/DnB band from Manchester, while Lamp are (probably) a Shibuya-kei band from Tokyo. Remember this.
Why are Lamp probably a Shibuya-kei band?
Who cares. They’re frequently associated with that scene on the grounds of being a Japanese group playing comfort music in genres that did not originate in Japan (read: bossa nova and jazz). This sits a little loosely with me because most of their work came well after Shibuya-kei’s peak, and their sound largely avoids the plasticity and pastiche that run together as one of its few common threads, but I digress: they
are from Tokyo (stop remembering this) and their music is extremely fucking comfortable. So there.
What genre is this, again?
It’s Shibuya-kei comfort music from ShibuyaJapan_Tokyo (sorry), for people who treat their lounges as bedrooms and their bedrooms as lounges; it’s a wet dream for woozy baristas, bookish romantics, or Japanophile sophisticates who prefer their levels of (sic.) tonal musicality high, and it will take you far if you study to it or rip it off for a homemade RPG. Thanks for asking.
Yume (2014)
Yume (“Dream”) is one of Lamp’s later albums, an oddly tangential fact given that their writing style and knack for colourful melodies sits in the same ballpark as their work ten years previous. Maybe you’ll read a certain maturity into the way they carry a relaxed tone here, but that’s the kind of take I’d clemently term an
informed choice. The only capital-D development is that the band tend away from their usual bossa nova inclinations and double down on integrating lounge jazz into their sound, equal parts sweet and savoury as per forever. If you want the full list, we
could call it chamber-jazz prog pop or similar, but this is somewhat unfair considering it’s an effortlessly accessible sound and therefore warrants a combination of words that will potentially make people want to listen to it [*unplugs keyboard*].
Let’s start that again:
Yume has pretty much everything you could ask for in a blissed out jazz-pop mood record; depending on which season you’re listening in, it feels like a slow sunset over a quiet town, or a comfortable room with moderately tasteful decor but exquisite mood lighting, and this is very quaint. It has enough depth to reward keen listeners, but caters first and foremost to the casual chilltimes demographic; it is a good album and it will improve your day in the same way that it will improve most anyone’s day. Make of that what you will.
The ~catch is that
Yume is very unemphatic with its points of flair, to the effect that its elements of continuity come off as borderline homogenous. There’s a fair bit going on here, particularly in the harmony dept., but each song folds into the next so smoothly that you’ll hardly notice. “A-Toshi no Aki”’s skittery pop sweetness and the penultimate track “Shizuka ni Asa wa”’s morose refrain, for instance, should sit as potential counterpoints at separate ends of the album, but even pacing and highly saturated arrangements gloss over these kinds of distinctions, rendering them almost suspiciously parallel occurrences on a uniform tracklist. Give this album a few cursive listens without straining your concentration (why would you), it will likely be an instant hit as romantic background music but maybe a little too close for comf- consequence to easy listening material.
That’s not to say there are no perks for those who seek them out: Lamp have a knack for anchoring their most resilient hooks in subtle rhythmic twists, as per the alternation between compound and equally weighted beats in the chorus vocal of closer “Sachiko”, similarly infectious delivery in that of “Zanzou no Sketch”, and the exquisite winding guitar jam that rounds off the late highlight “Futari no Ita Fuukei.” This kind of shrewd phrasing goes a long way to anchoring the rest of the tracklist, which is otherwise so saturated in 7th chords and saccharine melodic accents that it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. Let those sounds blur into the slightly overcooked gorgeous swirl that they are, and follow them grooves.
There are other positives - how nice. These include singer/multiinstrumentalist Kaori Sakakibara’s vocals, which, despite not being Lamp’s traditional strong suit, carry the album’s most wistful moments quite convincingly, and the subtle diversity of styles that adds refreshing levels of shading to a thoroughly saturated frame. “Zanzou no Sketch”’s foray into full-on prog-pop is my favourite of these, but “Shizuka ni Asa wa”’s baroque leanings (Candy Claws fans rejoice!) and “Nagisa a la Mode”’s city pop-esque funk clavs spark particular joy. “Sora wa Grey” sets out a vision for jangle pop in slow motion, and this is cute. The artwork is also very nice.
These are all good things and they improve the album because they are good, but it’s a fool's errand to fish for individual points of strength or, dare I say, subtlety where you have an atmosphere as immediate and charming and unrelenting as the one in question here. It does much more good than harm in its transmutation of a fifty-minute runtime into an unbroken stretch of mellowtime, and it comes off as equally lovely whether you view it through the lens of generic mood music or that of sophisticated (post-)Shibuya-kei jazz-pop. Listen to it immediately and often, and absorb as much of that doey mellowness as you can. Never write about it.
