Japan’s Shugo Tokumaru has always been a maximalist working on a miniature scale; he constructed his early albums using over 100 different instruments. His recent TOSS single “Lita-Ruta” is composed with a similar logic. Its makeup includes xylophone, ukulele, sax skronk, handclaps, drumsticks tapping on a desk, harmonies evoking the Beach Boys, a possibly broken jack-in-the-box, and a spiraling harpsichord melody recalling Mark Mothersbaugh’s arrangements for the Rushmore soundtrack. If it all sounds a little overwhelming, that is very likely the point.
For TOSS, Tokumaru switched up his usual one-man chamber-pop formation. He’s made recordings of other musicians, cut them up, manipulated them, and sequenced the results throughout his compositions. Aside from his own playing, Tokumaru’s primary materials on TOSS are drum tracks contributed by Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. In using these snippets, Tokumaru has infused many of TOSS’ songs with a bit of Deerhoof’s rhythmic DNA, which is immediately apparent in the restless, twitchy energy of songs like “Lita-Ruta.”
TOSS boasts plenty of songs like this, where Tokumaru barrels toward joyous cacophony at full tilt. “Lift” opens like a child-sized spaceship taking off, before introducing pitched-up, Dan Deacon-like chipmunk vocals. “Vektor” is a classic Tokumaru anthem, in that it finds his fingers flying up and down the fretboard with various percussive sounds in hot pursuit. “Bricolage Music” lives up to its name, assembling a beat from droplets of water and the clatter of silverware. The opening of “Taxi” sounds like Tom chasing Jerry across a xylophone, while the curiously-titled “Cheese Eye” pushes the cartoon metaphor further, laying out the soundtrack for an entire imagined “Looney Tunes” episode.
It would be exhausting to maintain this frantic pace for 11 straight tracks. Instead, Tokumaru fills the album’s midsection with placid ballads like “Route” and “Hikageno.” Like all Tokumaru songs, they are meticulously arranged and recorded, but they are also a bit sluggish. More successful are pared-down tracks like “Dody,” which veers toward Fahey-like American primitive guitar technique, and “Migiri,” a moment of somber beauty.
Despite the nuance behind all of these songs, it’s hard to call most of them catchy or even memorable. The fidgety songwriting is part of the problem; many melodies only get a few moments of airtime before being supplanted. The sonic world of TOSS also lacks any kind of meaningful tension. Its cover art—a cartoon of a humanoid figure holding a hammer, tears streaming out of its smashed glass face—hints at a more complex idea, a guro-kawaii intermingling of the cute and the grotesque. That’s the sort of line Deerhoof used to skirt so well, writing a whole record about a bloody “Milk Man” who kidnaps children and hides them in the clouds. Earlier Tokumaru albums like Night Piece and L.S.T. employed bent tones and dissonance to similar effect, complicating his almost oppressive cheerfulness.
TOSS, however, like all of his recent work, mostly sticks to just two gears: jubilant and hushed. There’s a long line of Japanese pop artists working in a variety of mediums—Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu—who blur the divide between art and commercial product by surfacing the undercurrents of sadness and fear in cartoons. Shugo Tokumaru, a fellow traveller, increasingly seems content to trawl the surface.
