Review Summary: VERY FUN ALBUM
whatever people say about structure and respecting the intended order of things, sometimes it's better to play fast and loose, and let the surplus of goodness you have to hand wrangle its own way out of whatever chaos you impose on it: Tempalay's latest record
((ika)) is a candyfloss mushroom cloud of psych pop indulgence destined to get hardboiled album snobs furrowing their brows in consternation as they try to aggregate the too-many-fucking-creative-decisions at play here while the rest of us wave hands and holler, cheerily acknowledging that
aha, no!, this record does not 'need' to be 71 minutes long, and you do not 'need' to listen to it in its entirety or in its intended sequence or even at all (shut up and go there), And Yet there are too many nuggets of individual brilliance here for any of this format navel-buggery to be worth the friction — vibrate in awe as "APPARE!!" (#3) bounces back and forth between one of the most dialled-in masterclasses of a chorus you will hear from anyone this year and verses so haphazard they might as well be pop crash mats, grin like an imp as "Booorn!!" (#14) hip-hops its way through a funhouse goof that palms off its opening question (
so where do babies come from?) as an all-age punchline, bask in delight as the band squirrels a fix of pentatonic strings as serene as "今世紀最大の夢" (#17) into the final run as though they could have played the entire record as a zen reverie, and then shit your pants in giddy celebration of the fact that they did not! that they did
everything, and most of it to excellence! and somehow navigated to perfection aesthetically: these arrangements are intricate enough to suggest polish (read: each track is
full of alternative sources of fun) and while the mix does navigate each layer coherently, the production flexes its rough edges proudly, not quite to the point of lo-fi but with enough haphazard charm that it wears its maximalism to similar effect — one recalls the promise shown on Millennium Parade's 2021 glossy debut and finds similar thrills seen off with welcome increments of sandpaper and chutzpah, all of which bodes well for the dopamine that flares up when sometimes a man named Ryoto Ohara hollers the catchiest ecstatic hooks of the year in a voice high as the Hindenburg, or when sometimes a lady named AAAMYYY croons in tones airy as the same, or when manytimes both hit it at once and one nods one's head and considers their pairing tastefully gauged (the harmonies on this thing!); conversely, the points where this record eschews tastefulness entirely are at least entertaining, hence the track you thought you were listening to will occasionally cut off into abrupt bursts of distortion and endearingly incongruous screaming, something I myself won't pretend to be above doing on occasion — dig it, and remember that
