Ok, so ‘Oh Yoko’ take their name from Lennon’s 1971 track. I have to admit that I couldn’t care less. Millions revere Lennon, but I’ve never been a Beatles fan, and while as many revere Yoko Ono as despise her, I’ve never been down with her or her work, or had any specific beef with her either. So where does that leave us with Oh Yoko’s debut album? Well, unbiased for a start, and it has to be said that I find myself on similarly neutral ground after the fact also. And that’s rather the problem.
Simple arrangements constructed using basic synths and primitive drum machines provide dreamy bedroom-electro backdrops to Rie Mitsutake’s delicate vocals on dream-pop tracks like ‘Grand Prix’. She mutters breathlessly against a sparse electrodoodle bubblings of ‘I did this, I did that’, while elsewhere, the twittering, flickering ambience of ‘Treehouse’ brings texture and shade to the album.
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Orchestral stabs and whistles approximating The Clangers swoop in and out of the mix as the duo create an eclectic sound with only limited instrumentation. Soft strings and glitch crackles provide a warmth to the recordings, and samples add extra dimensions, but there are times the diversity falls to a lack of focus, and at times the lighter than air compositions threaten to float away due to their lack of substance. Fluffy, mellifluous and interesting, but not entirely satisfying. Oh, dear.
Oh, Yoko Online
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