This one was a pleasant surprise. I thought I’d never heard of Mokyow before this review and erroneously assumed they were from Moscow. To my chagrin, I soon realized that I had heard of the band, and even owned one of their previous CDs! Turns out this Tokyo band includes half of Anoice, whose Remmings release should be familiar to many readers. Multi-instrumentalist Takahiro Kido is the leader of both Mokyow and Ricco Music. He’s released a number of albums on his own, as well as two by pianist Yuki and a Kido/Yuki/Utaka Fujiwara collaboration, cru. To make it simple, cut Anoice in half, graft on three new members (including Fujiwara), and you’ve got Mokyow.
Tadahiro Kido’s solo work has traversed an arc, starting with the simple, spacious tones of A Short, Happy Life, progressing to the dense, complex interplay of In My Time, then curving back to the confident leanness of Fleursy Music. Whenever more musicians have entered the fray, the tonal palette has grown in lushness and appeal.Remmings stumbled by seeming more a collection of tracks than a coherent work; cru’s re-Silence was a step forward, but still incomplete; Variations for Spiegel succeeds by offering a cohesive vision (with one exception, noted below). Those who have ignored Kido’s work up to this point are advised to have another listen, because Variations is quite unlike all that has come before or after.
The first two tracks offer the greatest rewards. Having first been underwhelmed by Remmings, then lulled into a false sense of security by Fleursy Music, I expected to encounter another album of pretty, unassuming music – pleasant, but not necessarily memorable. “Sunny-Side Flowers” starts off just like that: gentle guitar strumming, joined after a couple minutes by soft swatches of electronic fizzle. Tentative organ tones beckon listeners to a lie down in a bed of lilies. A solo piano steps forward, giving the impression that this is track 2, but as it turns out, the composition is just beginning to develop. The piano grows a bit louder, then the strings begin to enter, then the glockenspiel, and holy crap, here come the drums, and when the violin takes control at 5:05 we realize that something really special is going on here. Three minutes later, as the piano and strings cushion the landing, I am already sold on the album.
“In Different” begins with drums, winding through an 8-beat pattern in tribal fashion. The electric guitar introduces itself while the piano presents a slightly modified counterpart. A second drummer (or the same drummer, with four arms) begins to offer a gentle, rock-styled backbeat on cymbal and snare. At 4:09, the guitar hits a particularly loud note, which fades to complete silence at 4:13. The heart prepares to skip a beat. And suddenly: post-rock! Two minutes of aggressive percussion and layered guitar, bolstered by viola and violin, a la Yndi Halda. Then a drop to drums and organ, followed by another build, a euphoric climax and a wrap-around to the beginning. This is not what I expected, but I like it!
This makes the positioning of the next track particularly unfortunate, because while “In Different” is anything but indifferent and offers a sense of cathartic release, “Re-lease” plods on for nearly eleven minutes without offering a single dramatic build. One could excuse the two and a half minutes of synthesized tones at the beginning, the repetitive piano pattern of the next few minutes, even the barely distinguishable warbling of the female vocalist, if it were all leading up to something – but it isn’t. The preceding two tracks toppled from precious to transcendent at the midway point, but all this track does at that juncture is add drums. I would have preferred a truncated version, or perhaps a complete excision.
“Come Toward Our Line” should have been the album’s third track. The bubbling electronic patterns at the beginning sound like water about to boil, and as they are joined by guitar, first on every eighth note, and then throughout, we get the sense that something exciting is about to happen. Perhaps in apology for the previous track, a taste of the post-rock munitions is provided early, before even three minutes have passed. This track then follows the traditional quiet-loud-quiet format, amassing a collection of Midwestern instrumental choruses as it chugs forward to its pleasing but predictable conclusion. Classic rock fans will notice a slight similarity to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in the closing minutes. Album closer “Small Small Flag” is a quieter piece, well-placed, that highlights organ and soft, intermittent vocals.
The frustration I have with Variations is that the aforementioned centerpiece casts doubt on the entire enterprise. A four-track album or three-track EP would have gotten a slightly higher grade. There’s nothing wrong with releasing a 25 or 34-minute CD if all the tracks are good; it’s more enjoyable to listen to a short recording all the way through than to have to program out a track on every spin. The good news is that Tadahiro Kido seems to have an amazingly short learning curve, and I expect this sort of problem to be ironed out in the future. In the meantime, Variations is worth purchasing for the opening tracks alone.
-Richard Allen