Akira - Japanese Frequencies

AKIRA. Sarah, Joel and Gbenga. Two guys and a girl intent on infecting the world with their singular take on expansive, electronic post-rock pop. It's taken Lagos, The Hague, Brixton, Southgate, Cambridge and London to bring them to this point, along with various guitars, effects pedals, electronic drums and the knowledge of various computer programmes. Oh, and melody.

JAPANESE FREQUENCIES, Akira's debut EP, is a showcase for the band's many sides. Lead track Hard Feelings opens with the sound of your brain freezing and a brooding double-tracked vocal from Joel before opening out into an expansive chorus that would do the Arcade Fire proud, the multiplied voices of Sarah, Joel and Gbenga singing in unison. While the band twist and lurch around it and the electronics teeter on the verge of chaos, the song's melodic centre is never lost. Tickertape introduces Gbenga on lead vocals and here the juxtaposition is between his soulful voice and the full on barrage of electronically mangled instruments, all pinned down with an insistently danceable drum groove lifted straight from the live show.

Akira are what you might call an ambidextrous band. Three vocalists, male and female, who can sing lead; all guitar players who swap various other instruments around; able to seamlessly weave electronics into their music because they form a part of the songwriting process and are created by the band members themselves.

With a lot of material sitting on various computers in their homes, Akira work on the assumption that a recorded version of a song is just that – a version. The band are constantly remixing and refixing their songs with the results often bearing little resemblance to the original material. It is this process that produced God's Warning to the People of England, a one-minute sketch constructed from the melody of Hard Feelings and warm synth washes that sound like sunrise.

End# fittingly closes out this set of songs, a seven-minute instrumental that is at once the closest thing here to Akira's post-rock roots and the furthest, for it is also the only track that does not feature 'live' instruments. It is the soundtrack to a planetary collapse viewed from a platform in space with a loved one. Its video has also been tagged by one YouTube user as the alternate ending to disaster movie Cloverfield. Go figure.

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