In Japan, the dream of the ’90s is alive. Or parts of it are, anyway, with CDs still making up the majority of music sales and a slow shift to a digital market. And there’s former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist Shintaro Sakamoto, whose three solo albums over the past six years have embraced the sort of funky exotica and playful eclecticism—think Beck, or Cornelius, or Stereolab—that sounded futuristic at the turn of the millennium. For 2014’s Let’s Dance Raw, Sakamoto dialed back some of the grooving to make room for chrome bubbles of Hawaiian lap steel guitar. And on the new and equally beautiful Love If Possible, Sakamoto dials back the lap steel slightly, too, making space for even more space.
While marimba sparkles (“Foolish Situation,” “Presence”), Sakamoto duets with robot voices (“Purging the Demons”), and the lap steel glitters on nearly every song, the album's main reference point might be reggae. Though some songs flirt with outright roots grooves (notably “Another Planet”) and organs echo and diminish elsewhere (“Others”), it works mostly as an atmospheric strategy rather than as direct quotation. With longtime producer/collaborator Souichirou Nakamura acting as live echo technician on Yura Yura Teikoku’s tours—and returning as engineer for Love If Possible—Sakamoto is no stranger to the wonders of dub. But Nakamura and Sakamoto keep it restrained on Love If Possible, creating a wide-open sense, implying the untapped worlds waiting to be opened by the right echo technician.
Recording a dozen studio albums between 1992 and 2007, Yura Yura Teikoku played to large audiences in Japan, only touring outside the country (including the United States) for the first time in 2005. Evolving from an indie guitar trio to encompass psych-folk,, garage groovers, electronics, and much more, the wildly inventive Yura Yura could sometimes sound like a Japanese equivalent to Yo La Tengo, with whom they developed a late-career friendship. To longtime fans, Sakamoto’s solo projects might seem comparatively contained. Love If Possible and its predecessors play like careful articulations of a place Sakamoto has found and wants to stay in, with moments that gently recall his past, like the lounge-surf and quiet organ that colors “Feeling Immortal.”
After three albums in this mode, this now feels like a language of Sakamoto’s own, maturity only disguised as irreverence. In the untamed years of the late 20th century, artists like Beck and his shibuya-kei twin Cornelius flirted with kaleidoscopic vocabularies they might discard after a single usage. Retired from the road but still quite active as a musician, Sakamoto’s mission isn’t novelty, but an expressive palette he has carefully made for himself with a ship-in-a-bottle-like focus.
