真っ黒 (MAKKURO)

TRICOT has been around for a decade now and one of Japan's best examples of all girl math rock. Coming from Kyoto this adrenalized girl's club that is known for its intricate rhythms and jangly dissonance returns in 2020 with its fourth album 真っ黒 Makkuro which translate into English as black as if you couldn't have already guessed by the cover's darkened void. The band that has been a trio for its first three albums that has consisted of Ikumi "Ikkyu" Nakajima (vocals, guitar), Motoko "Motifour" Kida (guitar, backing vocals) and Hiromi "Hirohiro" Sagane (bass guitar, backing vocals) since the beginning has returned as a quartet with on again / off again drummer Yuusuke Yoshida finally taking a full time position on drums.

真っ黒 Makkuro is the kind of album that puts some serious arithmetic into the math rock process with knotty jangled guitar chords zigging and zagging all over the bass groove and jazzified drumming with TRICOT's signature cutesy Japanese girl vocal style that creates a contrast that can be compared to a beauty and the beast style only no metal involved here. The band has toured extensively since 2015 by leaving Japan and heading to both Europe and North America and carries with it a decade of experience both in the studio and on the road and album number four cranks out 12 tracks and 2 bonus tracks on some additions that fortifies the jittery guitar fueled math knots into J-pop charm all completely sung in the Japanese language.

While TRICOT's rhythmic stylistic approach has been math rock through and through, 真っ黒 Makkuro tames down the band's previous anarchic approach a tad and gears for a somewhat more polished sound as if the gals are making a beeline to the middle as such styles of prog lite are becoming more popular in hipster circles. In particular the production is less punky and more polished with beautiful tones and timbres clashing with dissonant guitar angularities and bass and drum barrages. The cleaner guitar segments are quite jazzy with off-kilter time signatures delivering the expect math rock herky jerkiness that offers a plethora of start / stop chord explosions and asymmetrical flows of eruptive youthful energy. Only Nakajima's sweet schoolgirl vocals keep this in the realms of power pop albeit one that has gone completely wrong.

While i'm not familiar with the band's output this album does check off all the basics of Japanese girl bands while delivering a healthy dose of non-conforming math rock in all its excesses. Scattered deviant counterpoints and harmonic incongruences rule the roost on 真っ黒 Makkuro but its once again the sweet innocence of the vocals that keeps this in some sort of vocal jazz limbo where the band seems to be playing from another dimension. This is decent stuff if you love dissonant outbursts of frenetically choppy progified jangle pop with the exotic flair of being sun in Japanese but neither will this convert any non-believers of the math rock experience into swallowing the koolaid either. For my money this one is a little to homogenous in its 50 minute runs despite some decent hooks that bend like refracted light never to return to the source. The compositions are about as math rock as you can get although the variety between them could've been a bit better. Still not bad at all.

3.5 rounded down