Nobukazu Takemura — Songbook
Now 35, Takemura is almost an old-timer. First into Punk and New wave, by the end of the 80’s he was making some hiphop in Audio Sports, together with great experimentalist Aki Onda. In his solo career, he has been considered as doing experimental, minimal music or even IDM or electronica. What is undeniable is that all his releases have something playful about them, something childish or childlike. He named his label Childisc and has once said “to me, music must be like children humming”.
In February, Takemura released 10th on Thrill Jockey. Since I happen to be a big fan of his Hoshi No Koe and Signs CD's, I bought it. However, the music was quite a letdown. Often boring, somewhat non engaging... It seemed that I had to believe what many people were saying: Takemura’s work was going downhill. Fortunately, Assembler 2 was released two months later and denied this assumption. But what about this CD?
Songbook sees Takemura back in group mode, with drummer, cellist, trumpeter plus him handling programming, as well as guitar, piano, organ and bass. Who says song, says singer. Actually, singers: Hirono Nishiyama (Gutevolk) and Takemura’s regular collaborator Aki Tsuyuko (who often manipulate the videos at his live gigs).
The tracks length range from 00:30 to 09:07, some of them hardly qualify as songs. Let’s first talk of the problems... Songbook has a 79 minutes running time, and that is wayyyyyyyy too long since most of the songs are quite similar. The album is just not varied enough to be captivating for one hour and twenty minutes. Sometimes very formulaic, the songwriting is not of premium quality. This being said, Songbook has its great moments. Takemura is a jazz freak and on some of the tracks, his love for Sun Ra and John Coltrane is obvious. Like many Japanese, he also seems to be fascinated by 60’s french pop music. Mahou no hiroba is exemplary: at the intersection between pop and jazz, we’re not far from the best songs of that era (albeit a tad longer -09:07) with Aki Tsuyuko as the frail sounding chanteuse, an Asian version of Françoise Hardy or France Gall. When understandable (i.e. in French or in English), the lyrics really sound like children poetry.
All of this sound very sweet, but there is a limit to the amount of sweetness one is able to swallow without feeling sick. Songbook happily cross those limits, not to the listeners delight.
Far from Takemura’s more experimental work, we have here a CD which has some great tunes but lacks the quality of albums such as Hoshi no Koe. If you don’t know Nobukazu Takemura, I would advise you not to get Songbook first.