JAPANESE GUM - Hey Folks! Nevermind, We Are All Falling Down

The label "the new Port-Royal" seemed ready-made for them, all but preordained by their shared Genoese roots and their passage through the small but extremely discerning Marsiglia Records, which released their EP "Talking, Silenty", just as "Kraken" marked the first recorded testimony of their better-known fellow townsmen.

The point needs clarifying right away: Japanese Gum, the duo of Paolo Tortora and Davide Cedolin, with this debut album firmly sidestep the prepackaged tag one might superficially attach to them.

Admittedly, the musical frame of reference is not so distant, nor is the original artistic matrix of Japanese Gum, whose earlier works immediately pointed toward an electronic sound that fused a distant indie-rock lineage with a pronounced melodic sensibility and rhythms that were insistent yet supple. These were the main ingredients of the self-produced or freely shared online EPs with which the duo began to make a name for itself beyond the boundaries of Italy's independent electronic underground.

Proof of this is the release by Japanese label Friend Of Mine of "Hey Folks! Nevermind, We Are All Falling Down", an album that, besides marking the band's official debut, documents its shift toward styles and musical references that go beyond electronic rhythms and landscapes, venturing into expressive territory ranging from para-ambient elaborations to not-so-veiled nods to other important Italian independent experiences.

From the opening "No Help For the Wicked (The Month Of The Dictators)" onward, the album sounds far more played than one might expect: alongside the electronic pulse and fairly enveloping atmospheres, guitars are often present and audible, aiming to amplify the propulsive elements of constantly shifting compositions, from abrasive electric incursions to predominantly dreamy passages running on rails of liquid electronics, rippled by swirling gusts with distant shoegaze echoes. All of it is carefully blended to bend it toward the idea of music championed by Japanese Gum, a vision that places the spotlight on the most immediate and emotional components, almost bypassing the instrumental and stylistic vehicle of expression. In keeping with this conceptual approach, delicate electronic textures with a liquid consistency follow one another ("Big Whale", "%"), alongside more nervous saturations of sound, achieved through explicitly "rock" electric weavings ("Cluster Of Bees") but always paired and filtered by pulsations that are sometimes very piercing.

Throughout all this, the Genoese duo never decisively veers toward the IDM that might appear to be some inevitable landing point, instead showing that it never loses sight of the care for melody, which flows both into impetuous synth-gaze gusts and into expansive, dreamy songs that, on "Ghost – Mistake" and "Converge", can be likened to the more electronic side of Giardini di Mirò.

With its mutating succession of guitars and multifaceted electronic shades, "Hey Folks! Nevermind, We Are All Falling Down" is a fresh work, through which the passion of its authors for music shines, although not yet all the personality needed for them to outline a truly autonomous artistic identity, well beyond any possible a priori reference.

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04/09/2009