A cool thing about Mei Semones is that she operates in a league of her own. You may find another musician with parallel ambitions, sure, but the likelihood of you finding an album that sounds like Animaru is paper-thin. This is music that ignores genre lines and embraces the margins of conventionality. But Semones’ history with the craft spans more than a decade. In high school in Ann Arbor, she was a jazz guitarist tinkering in neo-soul bands. Before that, she had a concentration in piano, taking lessons with her twin sister. At the Berklee College of Music, she was a professional music major studying business and guitar performance. In her twenties, she graduated from house shows in Boston to balancing a day job at a Japanese preschool in Brooklyn with a touring life.
All of that history trickles into her solo work, songs that are far more lived-in than they are experimental. The patchwork in Mei Semones’ music, especially on Animaru, is like a shelf decorated with souvenirs: bossa nova, jazz, chamber singing, indie-folk, J-pop, and math rock linger surreally in bilingual effervescence. Last March, Semones celebrated signing with Bayonet Records by releasing her second EP, Kabutomushi, and we named her the Best of What’s Next. She was blending genres even then, following classical structures before obliterating them with contemporary, rock-based formulas. Her debut full-length is a miscellany just as odd—fragments of fragments that, when glued into place, form a balmy, impulsive mosaic of dexterity and unpredictability.
Staying on theme, after naming her last EP after a rhinoceros beetle, Animaru is the Japanese pronunciation of the word “animal.” For Semones, it’s an embodiment of instincts, which penetrate much of her music. Listening to “I can do what I want,” the tangents sound improvisational yet revel in purposefully arranged chaos. There is an elasticity present, but you get the sense that Semones and her band—Noah Leong, Claudius Agrippa, Noam Tanzer, and Ransom McCafferty—know their own limits and push them just slightly. The ornamentation in “Rat with Wings,” the creature on Animaru’s cover, is bolstered by punky non-sequiturs; mordents of fire-breathing guitar scales and wincing strings escalate beneath Semones’ singing, a prickly, oft-high-pitched voice flared with monotonic stretches. When the title track sources its distortion, you can tell that, a few chapters of life ago, Semones was an eager student of the Smashing Pumpkins.
It helps when half of the players behind you are a violist and violinist. The stringed portions of Animaru are subversive textures playing coy with Semones’ front-facing guitar melody and singing. In “Zarigani,” it’s as if she and her band find pleasure in the sum of their parts. She finger-picks her six-string, while Leong and Agrippa let their bows collide into each other. Then, deep in the pocket nearby, McCafferty and Tanzer’s rhythms thud and clatter. Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea said Semones’ music “carries a mysterious power.” When her guitar expands during “Donguri” and Leong and Agrippa’s bow pulls thread through her strumming, you start to realize what he meant. “Tora Moyo” and “Dumb Feeling” remind me of Semones’ work with John Roseboro, one of her most cherished collaborators and an artist drawing from a similar well of samba and Brazilian folk music (just listen to their song “Johnny”). “Dumb Feeling” is especially great, as Semones pays tribute to New York by recognizing her smallness within it. “This is a special place / But how many days do I / Really feel / I think I’m special too?” she wonders, as her bandmates’ instruments terrace above her.
Across Animaru, Semones pivots between singing in English and Japanese. She did it on Kabutomushi a year ago, and she did it on Tsukino two years before that, because blending cultures has always been a natural gesture for her. It’s like handwriting that switches from print to cursive mid-word; you can apply that seamlessness to her genre brews, too. Semones’ guitar talents serve her band’s soft-loud-soft dynamic well, and she writes without boundary, purposefully locking each song into the next. It’s why the transition between “Norwegian Shag” and “Rat with Wings” is a perfect exhale, or why “Sasayaku Sakebu” sounds like three or four songs contrasting in a 5-minute burst.
Animaru begins with Semones singing “I don’t need to get my word in.” She then spends the next 35 minutes executing impossibly consistent swells and plunges while sitting just out of frame, flourishing in the company of her band’s kindred strangeness. Perhaps that’s the jazz ensemble musician in her, or maybe it’s the mark of a virtuoso begging to be uncategorizable in an age of criticism far too dependent on box-checking. Few moments on Animaru are conventional and, in a world full of boring trends and rabid overconsumption, we could all benefit from taking a page out of Mei Semones’ playbook.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
