CAPSULE - Wave Runner

One thing in particular must be credited to Yasutaka Nakata: he's one of the very few in Japan operating within what can broadly be called popular music contexts who still has the courage to look beyond the country's increasingly narrow borders. This resoluteness shows both in how he markets his own output (as well as that of his protégées — just consider the international success of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu), and, more importantly in the long run, in his openness to a sonic universe that is multifaceted and entirely independent of geographic restrictions, one in which he sees great communicative and hybridizing potential rather than a hurdle to be avoided out of fear of the unknown. So if his electro revolution, which took place more than a decade ago now, successfully led the Land of the Rising Sun to open up to a world of expressive possibilities far removed from yet another eurodance-flavored act or some half-heartedly launched urban-pop starlette, the time has come once again to turn the page.

Already the interlude of “Caps Lock” spoke of the Japanese guru's urgent need to move beyond, to return once more to a dimension of exploration that could shake off, if only briefly, the pressure of delivering the next hit for the market. With the new “Wave Runner”, roughly a year and a half after its predecessor, the path attempted this time is different again — undoubtedly less disorienting than the minimalist experiments of the 2013 album, but no less disruptive for Japan's insular scene. The idea, all things considered, wasn't bad: once again give prominence to the heavily distorted (as usual) vocal contribution of his longtime collaborator Toshiko Koshijima, while betting on massive, jagged beats to drop into chaotic, shapeshifting contexts — as maximalist in outcome as they are deeply danceable and fresh in sound. Too bad that between saying and doing lies the small matter of actually making an album: at least this time, things didn't quite go as Nakata expected.

Turning up the volume and raising the stakes, pumping up the muscles of the purely instrumental component, in other words, as much as or more than already imposing records like “Stereo Worxxx” or “More! More! More!”: had that decision been accompanied by choruses worthy of the name, songs capable of channeling all this sonic epic, perhaps the gamble would have paid off, and the new expressive alchemy would have yielded more exciting results. It's not that everything here should be thrown out — after all, experience has long since taught Nakata how to avoid horrifying missteps that leave him too battered. It's true, however, that toning down a few nuances, a few ideas, might have benefited from entirely different treatment and consideration. Playing the brostep card, in this sense, could have opened the door to new stylistic ventures within Yasutaka's electro macrocosm: but used as mere aesthetic “decoration” in tracks (“Dreamin' Boy” and “Depth”, to be precise) that would otherwise do perfectly well without it given their construction, it loses substance and meaning, settling for a mere decorative skrillex moment.

Then, yes, there are also those tracks that, for all their (deliberate) disarray and wealth of detail, know how to hit the mark and even ensnare the listener, when they want to. “Another World”, for instance, with all its micro-melodic segmentations, stands as the latest compelling piece of an electro-house inquiry that has deep roots; “Hero” shows an appetite for the dancefloor crowd that Nakata knows how to tease, with a build that drops an entirely instrumental refrain. Within the album as a whole, often balanced on an underlying flatness that's hard to overlook (“Unrequited Love” and its unconditional adherence to its genre's dance formulas, the banality in how “Feel Again” handles its climax), tracks like these are rare exceptions, scattered flashes of a creativity that wasn't allowed to run off the rails, but was firmly reined in, as it should have been.

With all its flaws, this is still a gutsy defaillance. Let's hope the Capsule ship gets back to full operational speed soon.

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12/05/2015