Suishou No Fune - Bonsai No Ie

This record's press release reads, "Recorded in a Bonsai Shop in Tokyo, summer 2010, 'Bonsai No Ie' is a dream made out of floating guitar textures and vanishing vocal lines." I like this sentence for all sorts of reasons. As it happens I also quite like this record. It's making me feel very relaxed. Little bit sleepy, actually. I shouldn't have woken up so early this morning. Anyway, on here we've got four songs and they're all loooong. Relatively minimal echoey guitars drift about while a soothing reverbed vocal gracefully sings over the top. The vocals are well integrated into the overall sound, I think. They never seem intrusive and they always add something welcome to what's going on, which is so hard to do with stuff this meditative. In fact, it kind of sounds like Woods if they slowed right down and went a bit more dreampop. There's a weird kind of rock out section at the end of the first side where everything goes quieter instead of louder which is a bit of an unsettling effect. Quite an uplifting section nonetheless. The whole album's very much on this whole ethereal slowcore tip to marvellous effect. The spooky, wibbly fingerpicked guitar lines in the closing track especially caught my attention. They're simultaneously soothing and a little unsettling, which kind of sums up the whole listening experience on offer here.