To be honest, this release came out of nowhere to me. I heard the name once or twice, often near the word “Rachel’s”, and felt I should know what the fuss was about, seeing as I am supposed to be on top of these things. Dutifully I looked up the band's website and within the day I had pre-ordered the album. What we have here are 6 Japanese kids on a piano, viola, bass, guitars, and drums – all worked over with electronics. The members cite influences as varied as Max Richter to Cyndi Lauper, Avro Part to LL Cool J, along with almost everything in between… and it obviously works for them that way because the end result is, for the most part, outstanding.

Mostly due to my expecting to hear something akin to the aforementioned Rachel’s I was a little put out by the first 3 tracks of the album when I did receive it. Anoice have a much more unsettling and jarring sound for these few opening tracks – the title "Aspirin Music" makes it seem likely this is intentional. However, from track 4 onwards the band seems to open up as they break into stunning neo-classical compositions and come into their own. The music is mostly centred on mournful viola pieces with picked guitars and pianos. In fact, the electronics they claim are in there are very hard to detect so readers put off by that shouldn’t be too worried – conversely, don’t expect something like 65DoS. The definite standout tracks are "Liange", which, as a friend of mine put it, is “so Japanese it hurts”, and the Yndi-Halda-minus-the-soaring-gutiars-esque "The Three Days Blow". These two tracks alone are the most breathtaking songs released by anyone this year and should convince anyone of the quality of this release.

Now for one small gripe - every odd-numbered track on the CD is a 2 minute interval called "untitled" and these short pieces are mostly just experiments, whilst by no means terrible, they are really just filler (and of course they will annoy anal Last.fm users because "Anoice – Untitled" will become your top track overall in no time. Trust me). One such intermission is reminiscent of DSCO, which I like, but on the whole these seem like an easy way to pad out a release and hide that there are only 4 ‘real’ songs on the album. I hope any future output by the band focuses more on the heart wrenching melancholia they are so adept at and loses these interruptions.

--Ian Nicholls