Eiko Ishibashi – ‘Antigone’ album review: flashes of stirring beauty amid its ambient greyscale
THE SKINNY: One look at Japanese artist Eiko Ishibashi’s cover for the new album Antigone immediately establishes the aural colours to expect before even hitting play. A gargantuan entity of smog looking down upon a lonely urban sprawl enmeshed in overcast skies illustrates the record’s downbeat swirl of jazzy drizzle rain and ambient forlorn, an LP imbued with enveloping power but always wavering into lulls of grey washes which threaten the album’s otherwise experimental command.
Her first album since 2018’s The Dream My Bones Dream featuring her vocals and lyrics, Eiko takes stock of her recent soundtrack work to orchestrate a stirring sense of transportive cinema to each of Antigone’s pieces. Like a one-shot movie, the entire album nebulously sweeps and veers through ever-shifting terrain, yet guided by an unerring sense of narrative, one can’t help but experience Antgone through the eyes of an anonymous commuter’s sodden, ruminative traipse back home—winding and twisting through back alleys and main streets reflecting the spectrum of epiphany and idle thoughts along the way.
The journey in Antigone‘s centre is rock-solid, but the hazy modern-classical arrangements and electronic shades start to mush amid a narrow palette of sounds. Moments of evocative beauty and stirring peaks bob and float amid the aural soup but often never stays in focus long enough to be truly appreciated. Perhaps an authentic illustration of the polluted and ubiquitous fog that clouds many Eastern Asian cityscapes, yet wandering through Antigone‘s murky jazz can leave one hungry for a wider scope of flavours and stylings to marry with the LP’s lack of perimeters.
A unique texture to Antigone that sets Eiko apart from many of her ambient peers is the sonic-thicking agent that creates a pleasing tactility to her shadowy arrangements. Foggy but never thin or watery, each piano drop or soaring string shines with tangible character, and when the elements of pop, subtle funk or even a little post-punk enter the fray, they cut through the one-note haze with bristling energy.
The rippling nebula that coats Antigone is further held together by Eiko’s effortlessly siren vocals and wry lyrical attacks on weathered humanity and society’s malaise-stricken trajectory. However, as a cohesive experience one’s left with the feeling that all the ingredients are there for a masterful piece of work if only there were more musical elements and creative alchemy to play with.
For fans of: just missing the bus and chasing it down the street in the rain.
A concluding comment from The Japan Meteorological Agency: “It’s gunna be chucking it down”.
Antigone track by track:
Release: March 28th | Label: Drag City
‘October’: Majestic start, expertly illustrating how well Eiko can shape her introspective mood pieces. Melancholy but never draining, the haunted radio intermission crackling in the background adds an extra spectral dimension. [4/5]
‘Coma’: Sprightly pop jaunt crackles on ‘Coma’, breezy but with a skip in its step. A temporary sun breaks though the clouds. [3.5/5]
‘Trial’: Fascinating collages of brass and jagged, swaggering bass which flashes a moment of serene menace. Careful, this one bites. [4.5/5]
‘Nothing As’: A gentle piece of austere meditation with a touch of sentimentality. [3.5/5]
‘Mona Lisa’: Shallow immersions into a sarcastic potshot at the modern world. Treading water here. [3/5]
‘Continuous Continguous’: Some pleasing blips of hight-pitched accordion atop cascading piano carry the otherwise staid number an extra distance. [3/5]
‘The Model’: Antigone‘s grand centrepiece. A mystical harnessing of electrical synths and thunderous drums evokes a thrilling air of drama. [4.5/5]
‘Antigone’: A pleasing finale with lush orchestral touches. Still inhabiting the record’s nagging greyscale but ending on a note of rousing contemplation. [3.5/5]
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