If nothing else, you have to appreciate the intricacies of Shinichi Osawa. His music flashes around like old Nintendo music. Despite a long, eclectic career, Osawa is producing music with as much youthful vigor as any of his younger contemporaries. Osawa, a Japanese native, mans the electronics while a few guests provide English vocals to back his club bangers.
Osawa clearly has a sense of the pop angle, but he dives harder into electro-pop than perhaps the genre feels comfortable taking under its umbrella. Osawa walks a fine line between pop and acid house. It’s a conscious blend; Osawa isn’t just strapping you in for a crazy light show where your eyes rapidly shift like you’re going insane. But he also isn’t making his electronics accessible for anybody to grasp; he does wish to challenge you. As a result, the blend feels genuine, though Osawa clearly makes concessions in order to round himself out. The guest vocal songs are diluted so that the music can accommodate a pop structure. The majority of the songs, however, find Osawa going it alone, and for those songs, he revs up the intensity of his trance inducing jams. “Pianoctro” breaks the mold and goes for all-out house music. That song is a rage-fest. Yeah, it’s fun, but goddamn is it intense. It’s one of those songs that would be playing in a movie where the character is walking through a rave and the camera gets all blurry and he starts freaking out. Intentionally or not, Osawa is a ruthless bastard, given how “Technodluv” follows “Pianoctro” and totally reinforces the “wait, am I dying?” feeling. Up to this point, Osawa has steeped his music in house, but kept his pop sense intact, while also throwing in a couple of electro-pop dilutions. But these two songs make you feel like ten million people are crashing into you. But see? We begin to notice the difference. Yeah, “Sylkill” is an over-caffeinated electronic song, but it sought out melody; you can just tell, because we’ve heard primarily pop music our whole lives. We know what a hook is supposed to sound like. Whether it’s something hard like Alice in Chains or something soft like Death Cab For Cutie, those bands tried to find avenues into your head. But with Osawa, it’s less about the aesthetics of the hook, and all about ‘the experience.’
Osawa throws us a bone back from the pop realm and hits a home run with “Button!!,” a sweetly, string soaked electro-pop soundscape. It’s a beautiful song. Unfortunately, the first misstep soon follows with “Singapore Swing,” which fails to find either a hook or the mind-warping prowess of the house tracks. And in that, we get a wrap on everything Osawa provides for us over the course of SO2. We see good, great, average, and poor. We see electro-pop, trance, house, and also the ambitious blends of all of them. One thing should be clear, however: Osawa is massively talented. I think to that awful Radiohead song “Anyone Can Play Guitar” and think that’s probably the case, given the right amount of time and effort. But how many people could pull off these ridiculously complex digi-worlds where you feel every moment as much as you hear it? If I graded albums on talent, this would be in the 90s. But there’s only one song that’s truly great (“Button!!”), a handful of good songs, and then some average songs that don’t really make much of an impact. Ultimately, I have to judge the quality of the stuff coming out of my speakers, so let it stand that SO2 comes out as a complex, fun, scary, and ambitious album that doesn’t quite hit all its targets but finds more than enough to make it worthwhile.
Track List:
1. Love Will Guide You
2. Sylkill
3. Zingaro
4. Heart Goes Boom
5. Pianoctro
6. Technodluv
7. Button!!
8. Singapore Swing
9. Bbg Bbb
10. Morphy
11. Paris
12. London
13. Thank You for the Love
14. Addicted to the Bassline
