Despite being tagged as "shoegaze," Asobi Seksu can sound positively airborne. Yuki Chikudate's diction renders her lyrics opaque while still gushing emotion, and with the whorl of James Hanna's heavily processed guitar, they conjure an almost synesthetic merger of sound and color. Unfortunately, the band found itself grounded after 2006 breakthrough Citrus, relying on hermetic, lacquered production and reworked acoustic versions of their back catalog to wring beauty out of their latest offerings, Hush and Rewolf. On Fluorescence, they're still fumbling with how to reconcile their studio-rat present with the rock band peaks of their past.
If the cover art and title strike you as some kind of prefab 4AD starter kit, it's for good reason. While Hush took its name as some sort of mission statement, Fluorescence attempts to conjure a specific slice of the 90s where the cushy textures of post-MBV shoegaze were cut across with a forthright, feminized vocal presence and production slick and stylized enough for alternative radio. From the first seconds of "Coming Up", Fluorescence announces itself as more vigorous than its predecessors and ready to recapture their prior rush, despite sawtoothed keyboards and traded vocal hooks that are relative experiments for Asobi Seksu.
Elsewhere, the squint-inducing brightness sheds too much exposure on Chikudate's chirpy vocals-- still an acquired taste to those who don't gravitate toward J-pop. On "Counterglow", one of the tracks that rely more on subliminal drone than pulverizing sonics, Hanna's flattened moan is more effective. Clear standout "Perfectly Crystal" is a richer rendering of the kind of climactic moments that, on Citrus, were occasionally subjected to brittle recording. In terms of sequencing, Fluorescence plays out something like the inverse of Hush-- an uninspired valley in the record's middle spoils whatever momentum the bookends achieve. "Perfectly Crystal" feels particularly marooned, surrounded on one end by "In My Head" and "Deep Weird Sleep"-- near-interludes that ride out wobbly, traipsing organ riffs to no real payoff-- and on the other by "Leave the Drummer Out There" and "My Baby", attempts at multifaceted suites that meander aimlessly.
Housing only a couple of keepers, Fluorescence might initially feel like another letdown after the end-to-end excellence of Citrus, but that overlooks the challenges Asobi Seksu are up against. Whether you think of them as shoegaze, dream-pop, or some variation thereof, these aren't genres for which a whole lot of definitive albums exist-- if they do, they're unimpeachable totems like Loveless. With their grasp of tactile sensuality and major hooks, perhaps Asobi Seksu are best-suited as a reliable singles act; as long as they're at the level of "Coming Up" or "Perfectly Crystal", there's no shame in that.
