Zach Saginaw, who makes music under his middle name, Shigeto, has shown a nice range of influence within the past few years. On projects like Lineage and Full Circle, the Michigan producer demonstrated the ability to gravitate from the kind of gentle pastoral sound associated to early Four Tet, to the more stripped-down, driving sound of a producer like Actress, and back again, to the glitchy psychedelia of a Matthewdavid. Shigeto’s newest album, No Better Time Than Now combines these separate facets into a single sound, though it’s often easy to identify the dominant mode with which Saginaw is working.
Typically, the more well-blended Shigeto’s influences, the better the result. The standout "Detroit Part 1" is the best example: it's an intricately plotted track on which shifts in tone and texture build a small world within a manner of minutes. The album’s title track, also, uses well-chosen details to advance a narrative, granting it a sense of purpose which climaxes beautifully with a series of well chosen instrumental flourishes. These tracks take lessons from hip-hop and bass music, creating structures which allow Saginaw’s lighter touches to flourish.
Those light touches are often exquisite: beauty is something of a Shigeto specialty. Several of the tracks here, though somewhat formless, are simply too pretty to ignore. “Miss You” uses a warm, full synth to imbue a diffuse track with some soul. And the shuffling “Safe in Here,” opts for sublety, with tonal ornamentation in its back half making up for a lack of direction at its outset.
“Safe in Here,” points at the largest problem on Better Time-- and it’s a problem common to Matthewdavid-style beat music. Tracks too often lose their way, and the listener’s attention along with it. The worst of the tracks here seem almost arbitrary, with randomly chosen loops that don’t fit in with the more in-depth miniatures that the record has to offer. “Ritual Howl", as if to spite its own name, is a barely-there chime loop which doesn’t make much of an impression. Ditto “Soul Searching", which sounds, for the entirety of its running time, as if it’s actually searching for that essential, memorable moment of levity. The lack of structure is confusing, given that Saginaw came up as a drummer, and obviously understands the importance of percussion in buttressing the melodies above.
Though Shigeto has absorbed a host of positive qualities from his fellow beatmakers, he seems caught, between a more purposeful, narrative form of music (like that of Four Tet, and the calmer compositions of Flying Lotus) and the abstruse, diffuse form that’s endorsed by the Leaving Records camp. As the best tracks on No Better Time Than Now show, Saginaw has more than enough talent to pull off the former with aplomb-- a style of music-making that will force him to focus and propel his sound forward. Someone who’s shown the ability to shape such intricate moments of beauty should be able to make music that consistently provides something more than just a passive experience.
