Review Summary: Likely to be my biggest disappointment of 2026.
As a musician myself, what I’m about to talk about is something I often wrestle with, and I’m sure it’s something many other musicians have thought about at one time or another. Anyone who’s read a review of mine regarding a virtuoso solo artist will know; I’m not looking for 30 minutes of blistering finger gymnastics – I’m looking for a record that showcases those incredible abilities and translates them into great songs. Unfortunately, from experience, you’d be surprised how hard that is to pull off for some of these unbelievable players, getting lost in their own self-indulgence and having the music become ostentatious and shallow. It’s the type of sound where there’s a lot going on but you’re getting no value out of what you’re hearing. For me music with feeling, mood, or lateral thinking will always supersede proficiency, and fundamentally what I mean by that is, when I connect with music it’s because there’s, generally, tangible substance behind what I’m hearing. There could be a song I hear which only plays one note, but if that note is played with unrelenting zeal, or is executed with an unorthodox approach that makes it engaging to listen to, then that’s all that matters.
Personally, it’s about how you arrange and approach those notes, and as a musician and songwriter myself with a limited skillset – in that I couldn’t fathom the kind of stuff Ichika Nito can play – I occasionally ponder over whether I would want that level of talent, and if I did, how would I approach writing music knowing I had an omnipotent well of sounds to draw from. With me being all too aware of my limitations as a player, I compensate by trying to think outside of the box, doing things which might be considered a little unconventional. And in a way, I guess I feel a sense of gratitude for those technical restrictions and the hardships that come with it, because it makes me really dig hard to find stuff that sounds good to me. It’s raw, a little flawed, off-kilter, and ugly at times, but that human element is at the forefront – an element I strive to discover when listening to new music.
So, how do my internal ramblings fall into Ichika Nito’s highly anticipated debut album? Well, this is a guy I’ve been following for a while now and his music has always torn me down the middle. For the most part, Ichika has largely built a career on fast-paced shredders that clock in at just under two minutes, and while a lot of them fall into that cookie-cutter YouTube shredder scene, he has songs like “Orb”, “Awakening” and “i miss you” which display the insane technical prowess he’s known for, but not at the expense of the songs themselves. The aforementioned tracks have a reverie-like quality to them and create a really nourishing mood that makes you want more (when you consider how short the tracks are). So, when Nito announced
The Moon’s Elbow, I was pretty excited to hear a full-length from him in the hope it would deliver on that alluring quality I just mentioned, while avoiding some of the rakes he’s known for stepping on.
Unfortunately,
The Moon’s Elbow is a pretty devastating and derivative disappointment. The album sets off strong enough, with “Where I Begin” serving up a gorgeous serenade of gossamer licks in this soft, dream-esque cloud of sounds that welcome you in, but this is short-lived and immediately throws you into a head-pounding hellscape of soulless electronics and drums, enshrined in the super-pristine, highly processed modern production sound I’ve been heavily critical of in recent years.
The Moon’s Elbow feels extremely dated and apes a lot of the sounds and styles from Polyphia’s flawed-but-decent 2021 record,
Remember That You Will Die. However, when you consider for a moment that that record came out 4 years ago, it really puts into perspective how much this production style has aged for the worse. There are a couple of decent moments on here, like the aforementioned album opener, “The Moon’s Elbow” and “we weren’t, were we?” for capturing that
something Nito has shown us in the past, but the awful production manages to subjugate and ruin the organic essence of even these stripped back numbers. While the rest of the album has a banquet of dated and cliché ideas, and a bunch of terrible vocal guest spots adding further insult to injury. As I opened up with in this review, it’s a bemusing thing to think about
: the kind of skill Ichika Nito holds, and yet the best
The Moon’s Elbow can come up with is a collection of archaic ideas being filtered through a production devoid and stripped of all its humanity. It's a real shame.
