The American importation of modern Japanese music used to insinuate a strange sort of neo-orientalism-- one that, rather than exploiting the foreign and exotic "other," reveled in their exotic and foreign reflection of us. The mix of familiarity and strangeness in Japanese imitations of American forms produced an equally hazy mix of sincerity and novelty in enjoyment. But through experimentation with an ever-growing number of Western underground genres, the Japanese have moved in their own, enviable direction. Lo-fi experimental rock is popular with the kids overseas (hence The Microphones' recent "Live in Japan"), but there are only a handful of reciprocal acts that have made it over here so far. Osaka-based duo Nagisa Ni Te are one, immersed in 60s/70s American psych-folk and a lo-fi connection to the natural world via imperfect multitracking and distracted guitar strumming. Despite being billed as Japanese avant-folk, The Same as a Flower subsists on relatively standard, slow, guitar-based songs.
Fortunately, Nagisa Ni Te avoid sounding derivative, and some unique characteristics set them apart as worthy of attention. The strongest of these is a pervasive aura of childlike innocence and wonder, usually an unconvincing pose when coming from American musicians. Shinju Shibayama and Masako Takeda's direct, unprocessed and imperfect singing strikes at a deep and sincere place. Some of their simple melodies are possessed with the placidity of lullabies, as in "A Light", while others run along the traditional pentatonic scale, such as in "Thread of Souls". Nagisa Ni Te's songs balance a home-recorded sense of creation and experimentation with a propensity to swell into grand orchestral finales. Yet while the mood remains wistful and appealing, the songwriting on The Same as a Flower is not that strong, offering few musical moments that linger beyond the immediate. This forgetablilty works on some level in their favor-- the album as a whole comes across as a wispy piece of lazy late-summer listening. But overall, that lightness is what prevents the record from the transcendence to which it aspires.
Because of the duo's generally unremarkable songwriting, the album's best moments occur when Nagisa Ni Te get creative with arrangement and production. "River" creates a big piece from a small idea, propelling a simple melody into rounds and canons that imitate the flowing, winding object of the song's title. "Wife" layers plucked, detuned guitars over a percolating organ beat, offering an instrumental island before the 12-minute centerpiece "Bramble", which culminates in the album's most dense and distorted moment. The slide guitars and ending strings and harmonies of "After a Son" embody the blooming psychedelia that Nagisa Ni Te hint at elsewhere. And the sparse, acoustic closer "Hope" creates one of the album's most beautiful places, exemplifying the intimate, minimal sound that they're able to realize quite well.
The Same as a Flower didn't make much of an impact the first time around, but it drew me back to repeated listens, and grew grander each time. After the standard melodicism and fairly reserved sound, there remains something undeniably appealing about this male/female duo's unpretentious yet confident delivery. If they can start writing songs that meet the standard of the musical stage they set, then we'll have a take on some classic genres that itself is worthy of imitation.
