Vanishing Twin – ‘Ookii Gekkou’ (2021)
‘Ookii Gekkou’ is like nothing I’ve ever heard before, though the band claims to draw their influences from across time, creating a body of work that’s wobbly, fuzzy, touchable and warm, where dare I suggest that anyone smitten by the band Stereolab will enjoy this bit of jazzed psychedelia to the max.
‘Ookii Gekkou’ is like spending a night bar-hopping without the distress or the hangover, it can be spiritual and mysterious while dancing around those improv, might be here, might be there doorways. Yet ‘Ookii Gekkou’ comes with a tradeoff, where the breezy pop and romantic sensibilities of earlier albums have been tossed out the window in favor of less directional otherworldly sure-footedness. If anything, Vanishing Twin have created a lifestyle album, a minimalist mid-century modern affair that’s ripe for lava lamps and all things 60’s new age without overstaying their welcome.
This is a joyous bold adventure, a timeless romp through visual and spatial delights, tantalizing and artfully danceable. The real trouble in describing an album this futuristic is that there’s no contextual description I can infuse on the whole, as each song rests neatly in a world of its own, songs that have been fleshed out as standalone stories (much as the lyrics of Morphine have been) gathered together and placed within the cover of a book you’ll keep returning to.
*** The Fun Facts: “Ookii gekkou” is Japanese for Big Moonlight, suggesting that ordinary life can only be perceived by the light of the moon. The band’s name is drawn from vanishing twin syndrome, a condition in which one of a set of twins or multiple embryos dies in outer, disappears, or gets resorbed partially or entirely, with an outcome of a spontaneous deduction of a multi-fetus pregnancy to a singleton pregnancy, portraying the image of a vanishing twin.
Jenell Kesler
Vanishing Twin – ‘Ookii Gekkou’ (Fire Records 2021)
