Review Summary: Peeling back layers.
Since forming in 2003, LITE have enjoyed a steady career as one of Japan’s leading math rock exports. Unlike the spacious, nostalgia-stained guitar noodling propagated and repeated ad nauseum by the emo vein of their genre’s peers, their arrangements have always fancied a more cluttered, futuristic, and uneasy spin on their roots, foregrounding shifting rhythms and dense interplay. From the erratic, pulse-evasive bangers lining
Filmlets and
Phantasia to the nocturnal, neon-lit, keyboard-based tunes birthed from
For All The Innocence and
Installation, LITE haven’t wavered from their knack for weaving skittish, colorful, three-dimensional musical tapestries—the end results just bear different hues and tones. That consistency belies their ability to shapeshift, however: the group’s latest offerings,
Cubic and
Multiple, were less unified statements than they were grab bags of their past and present guiding philosophies, somewhat awkwardly placing high-energy six-string rippers alongside funky dance beats, amorphous abstractions, and shots in the dark of a jazz lounge. The dimmer the lighting, the less chance they had of consistently hitting the dartboard.
STRATA, a scant, 32-minute LP completing the “preview” released in EP form last fall, is similarly scattered in quality and mission, but it also represents the most committed change in direction the band has indulged in nearly a decade. The synths are fuzzier and more omnipresent. Once-restless time signatures are now kept relatively straight. Most notably, the majority of the album’s nine tracks contain not just vocalizations, but actual lyrics—a trait normally reserved for one-off experiments of LITE yore. This new addition is presented in diverse form, too; sometimes the lines arrive in English, elsewhere in Japanese, and at any given measure they could be rapped, muttered in narration, or conventionally sung. LITE have long been fluent in mood pieces, but the bars dispersed throughout cuts like “Deep Inside” and “Thread” propel each song to neater lengths than their initial ideas would suggest. The weirdest track here, “Dark Ballet,” is a noir-indebted nu-jazz piece with...
bongos (?!?!), gaining essential character from its gruff, spoken-word monologue and tying together the disparate elements that make up its unwieldy recipe. If
STRATA has any fundamental strength, it’s that it contorts LITE’s clunky, club-inspired jams into salvageable (sometimes even thrilling) vignettes, not by backpedaling the zaniness, but by adding padding between the abrasive layers.
Not that it always
needs to, as the band’s DNA is still evident despite the largely verbal, quantized skew: the guitar and bass lines continue to ricochet with countermelodic urgency, Akinori Yamamoto’s drumming still abides by calculated, zesty syncopation, and the group’s cooldowns offer compelling textures of ambience to wade through. Even excluding the vocal tracks, the instrumentals “Breakout,” “Crushing,” and “Lower Mantle” hit anticipated sweet spots, surging forth with tasty licks and fluid atmosphere. Sample any track here and it’s unmistakably something LITE have smeared their prints all over—but for the first time in a while, it’s greater than the sum of those parts, too. The packaging may be meager, and a cut or two here may stray into corny territory, but
STRATA fittingly reveals what makes this band tick...and contains more than meets the eye.
