Shugo Tokumaru is a freakishly gifted Japanese bedroom-pop artist with an effortless command of hundreds of instruments. Judging from the gentle, whimsical tone of his music, he is also probably one of the sweetest people in the world. The joyful music he creates, however, has extremely limited use-- 15 minutes of his manically giddy pop should be enough for anybody. His fifth full-length album, Port Entropy, grows wearying at less than 40. Whether they are employing flutes, woodblocks, chimes, xylophones, accordion, upright piano, or, more likely, all of them at once, every Tokumaru song expresses the same basic sentiment: in a word, "YAY!!" Port Entropy is charming and pretty and brilliantly assembled, but utterly two-dimensional, and listening to it even one time completely through yields strikingly diminished returns.
Tokumaru's albums usually make room for a sigh or two amid the cartoon clamor. The calmest moments on Port Entropy are the lovely Big Star-reminiscent ballad "Laminate" and the plaintive singing saw and piano of "Linne". Apart from those, Port Entropy is unrelentingly chipper. Tokumaru's ability to layer dozens of tiny musical elements-- to pick just a single example, the flute, chimes, recorder, and bird chattering on "Lahaha"-- is still impressive, and, in small doses, infectious. Tokumaru could probably craft some spectacular indie film scores. Inventive sounds and textures abound: the clanging pots-and-pans percussion on "Tracking Elevator", the John Fahey-style fingerpicking of "Straw". But without any room to breathe, none of these sounds are allowed to settle in and gather meaning. When every song gallops in all directions at once, the result is a curious kind of stasis.
One of a long line of sugar-rush bedroom-pop enthusiasts-- spiritual forefather Cornelius and recent Swedish import Loney, Dear come to mind-- the disconcerting note of insistence beneath Tokumaru's boyishness sours the atmosphere. There is a surely an undergrad psychoanalysis paper waiting to be done on the types of musicians who retreat to create four-track wonderlands behind closed doors, and a trenchant conclusion to be drawn about why their music is so often aggressively winsome. Suffice to say that prolonged exposure to Tokumaru's flights of fancy grows tiresome at first and then, eventually, slightly creepy.
