Car and Freezer
(Drag City)
A lot of people claim to combine genres. That tends to mean one genre dressed up with a few trappings of another. Not so with Japan’s Eiko Ishibashi. She not only combines elements of a startling range of styles, she stirs them into an ever-changing stew. You truly never know what’s going to happen next. The album starts with jazzy, piano-centric sounds, but quickly complicates matters, morphing to big, ’70s-style pop, dreamy psychedelia, disco strings, or any number of impossibly weird but effective directions. At one point, steel drum and violin provide a laidback Carribean-Japanese vibe, but that’s quickly overtaken by plucked strings, guitar, and melancholic singing. The album delivers countless transitions like that.
Add to the mix Ishibashi’s bilingual habits—she translated her Japanese lyrics into English, and the U.S. version of the release veers between the two languages—and your ears may give up all hope of an easy listen. Which is not to say the sounds here are overly challenging. They tend toward peppy melodicism driven by Ishibashi’s fuzzy soprano, delivered atop piano textures dressed up with everything from slide guitar to strings. Car and Freezer is probably the most accomplished jazz/pop/country/disco Japanese/English album you’ll hear all year. It’s a work that extends a uniquely welcoming and weird hand.•
