Blame the extended hiatus they took after their too-brief heyday if you want, but Cibo Matto are hard to separate from the late 90s notion of cool. The association with Shibuya-kei chic expanded into international-minded polyglot goodwill, the consciously high-concept Michel Gondry music video (the time-bending DePalma-gone-palindrome “Sugar Water”), the collaborations with a then-emergent Sean Lennon, the playful but well-composed hip-hop-adjacent eclecticism—it's hard to imagine Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori becoming minor sensations at any other time, no matter how casually their style nodded to the eras preceding them. They still made individual strides in the ten-plus years following a breakup that left 1999's Stereo**Type A,* their last significant work as a team, and continued to embody a stay-posi NYC boho philosophy that's all but disappeared from the city's current hipster-panic atmosphere. But is a new Cibo Matto album a brand-renewing nostalgia trip, or something deeper than that?
It only takes a brief acknowledgement of the conceptual thrust behind Hotel Valentine to get the feeling that their reunion has a more intent purpose than mere let's-get-the-band-back-together restlessness. There's a story to tell, even if it's a sort of indirect one that might have a lot more meaning than it lets on. It goes like this: there's a hotel with a ghost in it, and... well, the rest of the details are a bit more elusive, and intentionally so. The spirit isn't a threatening one, unless you count the bit in “MFN” when it's clear it doesn't want to be harassed by the only person who can see it (“Don't tell me what to do, I'm a ghost/ Don't throw the fuckin' oyster shells at me”). All the other blanks can only really be filled in by the music itself, which Honda and Hatori have put together in a way that sounds like their old collaborative identities answering for what their cross-cultural peers and successors have done in the intervening years.
If the eye-popping neon palette of GEORGIA's video for “MFN” evoked artists of a Mad Decent bloodline rather than the old Grand Royal-era phase of transcontinental pop-cool, much of the album does the same at subtler frequencies. It's less a direct homage than a parallel, maybe, but the Cibo Matto aesthetic operated on similar enough principles that Hotel Valentine's occasional leanings towards deep-bass microhouse revival (“Empty Pool”) and M.I.A.-goes-!!! dance-punk (“10th Floor Ghost Girl”) seem like foregone (and natural) conclusions. Fortunately, the moments of genre blueprint-crumpling idiosyncrasy—the rickety but sinuous acid-jazz charge of “Emerald Tuesday”; the title track's codeine Tropicalia; the swooning acoustic-guitar soul of closer “Check Out”—are just as engaging, and in ways that sound both unconcerned with trendwatching. They reveal how many possibilities Cibo Matto have always been open to.
But it's the mood of Hotel Valentine that stands out the most. The allusive nature of their lyrics sometimes lets slip the occasional glibly funny detail or observation, like how the ghost notes in “Lobby” that the afterlife's advantages—not having to worry about radiation, guns, or criminalized marijuana—don't entirely cancel out the fact that you still can't really go out and do things. The setting of a hotel as a transitory living space merges the exploratory thrill of travel with the disconnect of not really living where you are. And the paranormal angle to this album is simultaneously odd and mournful, with enjoyable quirks like Hatori's deadpan rapping throughout and some characteristically goofy interjections from Reggie Watts on “Housekeeping” offset by more uncertain perspectives and anxious melodies. There's hints of a more ambivalent, somewhat lost entity in this hotel, floating around with a confused purpose (“Check In”), a displaced sense of awareness (“Déjà Vu”), and an identity crisis that puts its movements and communications in an American/African/Brazilian mishmash but still leaves it without a traceable source (“10th Floor Ghost Girl”).
And not all of that might even belong to the ghost alone. Make of that what you will when it comes to metaphorical statements—this could easily be a concept record about the disorientation and need to find connections that arise with the pop artist's idea of a global influence. But that's up to a lyrical interpretation that requires more clarification from the authors than they've decided to give. If you really do need it laid out, “Empty Pool” is probably the most explicit: “In an empty pool I was swimming alone/ But I felt someone calling me/ The only thing I found was the world that I know/ My heart was floating”. The rest isn't so easily figured out—but when a musical partnership has always been this skilled at synthesizing so many different ideas and sounds, the interpretation should be just as wide open.
