Ten years ago, Fujiya & Miyagi seemed fresh and cool. Stitching together lush synths and rigid, springy beat programs with thin golden wires of electric guitar, they made electro-pop feel metropolitan, dislocated and somewhat detached from human affairs—qualities embodied in David Best's aloof vocals and the smoothly machined forms they nestled into. Their music descended from 1970s German experimentalism at a time when krautrock hadn't yet become a common influence in indie music.
If Fujiya & Miyagi started out ahead of a trend curve, they sounded increasingly commonplace over the intervening years, and at this point they’re the ones rushing to catch up. On new album Artificial Sweeteners, they inject their mannered krautrock with an energizing dose of techno, a shift ostensibly executed to propel them into contemporary relevance. The shift is immediately noticeable on opening track "Flaws", where a melting haze of kosmische ambiance and a rounded, lockstep bass that could have come from any of their albums accelerates towards a thrumming dance arpeggio that could only have come from this one. It's a neat, good-humored way for the band to spoof its own trajectory.
Throughout the record, Fujiya & Miyagi prove adept at fitting together sequences at higher BPMs, twiddling knobs, triggering gates, and tailoring filters to make the music dynamically slingshot around tight corners. But none of that saves the record from feeling rather stale—even anonymous—in a musical climate that's currently awash in such stuff. The productions can be deft and exciting, with a wide variety of timbres smartly meshed to distinguish the otherwise cookie-cutter tracks.
But the vocal performances are flat and tiresome, offering a wan surface for emotional connection—which is problematic now that the music has leaned away from sculptural forms and toward a more kinetic, direct, and engaging style. Best seemingly aims for louche in his delivery but stops short at toneless and, at times, downright silly, with faux-dramatic whispers as the rare source of variation in his gray mutterings. The band excels when the singer gets out of its way, as on "Rayleigh Scattering", a tensely scudding mini-odyssey that lofts and dips on powerful bass currents, where the lead synth melody is more eloquent than the cipher-like lyrics that resemble Matthew Dear doing Dr. Seuss.
The slit-eyed vocals, dance beats, and funk guitars of Artificial Sweeteners bear a strong resemblance to !!!, another band that started off fresh but then got stale as the culture it was once at the vanguard of caught up with and, eventually, lapped it. Similarly, Fujiya & Miyagi have skill as producers but, at this point, they don't have much to say. Artificial Sweeteners certainly isn't a terrible album, and it does the trick if you're just looking for a quick pick-me-up, but it leaves a bland aftertaste.
