Review Summary: Floating classroom
The best dream pop lives and breathes comfort so naturally and with such indifference to material constraints that it’s prohibitively absurd to deconstruct its form; the worst lands as a vapid attempt at user-friendly gratification with little or nothing to show beneath its wafer-thin aesthetics. It’s a fine line, as prone to over-polished banalities as to otherwise ineffable magic. Now, Macaroom’s spread of ideas has never confined itself to dream pop - their style has interpolated anything from folktronica to ambient- and glitch- pop - but they plunged full-tilt into that genre’s bliss and alleviation on 2018’s
Swimming Classroom, a record that played like candyfloss compared to the fascinating weave of glitches and subtleties they spun on their earlier output. That album was still full of intricacies, but these drove its hooks rather than its accompaniment, paths to immediacy rather than hints of depth that begged to be uncovered over however many repeats.
Their long-awaited follow-up
Inter Ice Age 4 takes this a step further, offering by far their sparsest arrangements to date. Everything on this record is in plain sight from the get go, but the goalposts have shifted yet again: in place of saccharine flourishes, we are now faced with songs so blissed-out we hardly have a chance to catch up with them, each development skittering and dissipating through the arrangement like ripples over a calm lake. Where Macaroom once drew on each listener’s patience to mine their work for subtle details over repeated listens, here they simply point us to absorb it in realtime with as much attention as we can spare.
Inter Ice Age 4 is hardly a challenging record from minute to minute, but it is situational; it demands a reflective listening attitude that may throw anyone expecting more of
Swimming Classroom’s gratification. Its sparseness makes for an impressive aesthetic unity (perhaps the group’s most seamless to date), but it occasionally wears thin enough to expose patches of drabness: “kisya" attempts to duplicate “hong kong”’s incremental layering of glitches over a placid piano accompaniment but lacks the melodic strength to see this off, while “ushiro” is a frankly unforgivable cut that packages the group’s tweest qualities into a one-dimensional nursery car crash and marks their lowest low by a considerable margin.
Far stronger are the tracks that support themselves with a firm rhythmic foundation, as on “mugen”’s coy saunter or “yakan-hikou”’s impeccable pop daydream, or - better still - those that use the album’s tranquil palette as a platform for wider experimentation. These come as late highlights “mother” and “nemurini”, both originally heard on 2019’s
Official Bootleg (a) EP, return with slicker arrangements and a newfound sense of spaciousness. The former is overall as impressive as ever, though it misses the cinematic majesty of its original opening arrangement, while the latter’s newly added ambient string accompaniment finally raise it up as the ambitious career highlight it seemed destined as from the start. More than anything else since the group’s 2014 masterpiece
Homephone TE, it opens up otherwise inannexable pockets of liminal space and roams them like a seasoned sleepwalker. Vocalist Emaru breaks new ground with her elfin stylings on both, supported by heavily modulated contributions from producer Asahi: the two play with Japanese phonetics like little else I’ve heard, slurring and eliding commonplace sounds with a keen rhythmic focus, establishing a style open to any number of triangulations between art pop, rap and spoken word. “nemurini” makes for a fascinating finale, equal parts epic and understated, and it’s the part that best encapsulates the childlike wonder that, right from the start, has always given Macaroom’s dream-adjacent spaceouts such a tangible edge in a world of empty fantasies.
Inter Ice Age 4’s listless moments may raise a few eyebrows, but for anyone with an ear for this group’s uniquely blithe articulation of delicate oddballs, this is as cogent an episode as any in their watertight discography.
