After 2009's gorgeous Zero, Hideo Kobayashi is back with a new album, this time on Chicago's LeFreQ under the 'Yellow Diamond' moniker.
With ten years under his belt, the Japanese producer is no rookie to production. He's remixed many big names, released on Defected, Kontor, King Street Sounds and many more labels...and yet, he's somehow managed to maintain a fairly low profile. As with Zero, it's hard to understand why. Yellow Diamond sounds like a cross between Satoshi Tomiie, Little Big Bee and Ryuichi Sakamoto. While it may seem trite to compare this Japanese artist to three others, they all share a melodic sensibility which distances them from their Western compatriots. Though Japanese isn't a completely tonal language like Mandarin, some regions do rely heavily on pitch, which may explain the Japanese command of melody.
The 14-track album doesn't start strongly, opening with U Lift Me Up, a fairly standard deep house track. With passable vocals performed by Roxxy, a wood block in place of the traditional clapper and an energetic hi-hat, it's nonetheless a nice start. Like many of the songs here, this was actually released as an earlier single, back in 2009. The next track is Detective Story, which appears twice on the album. This is the broken beat version, with plenty of jazz bass and rhodes piano. However, the most pleasant aspect of the track is the non-repetitious drumming that winds in and out of the other elements, adding an improvisational, random feel. Though each song on the release is discrete – unmixed - it's clear even this early that Kobayashi respects the idea of flow. The first track's chunky bassline and easy vocals pull listeners in, before the pace is quickly wound back to make way for the more interesting bits that might otherwise lose attention if presented upfront.
The album does get steadily more interesting. Track three, Beach & Sky, keeps the Rhodes thread travelling, but this time adds a stunning Spanish-style guitar which just about transports to the beach. This is followed by melodic interlude which sounds like pieces left over from Little Big Bee's watery Scuba. Again nodding to flow, this brief piece marks a respite before a dive into more obviously synthesized sounds. Show Me the Way leads with a trancey arp, adding a super-fat but leisurely bassline and some sparse, effective piano flourishes. By track seven, Kobayashi's West Coast influences become more apparent, with some soulful vocals leading Move. As if teasing listeners to believe that the album is just another deep house creation, the next track switches it up with a slow, ragged breakbeat and some hi-reverb elements. It doesn't stray too long though, ending with twinkly, carefree tones.
R246 Dancer is perhaps the best track on the release, fusing a large number of layers to form a complex, engaging piece of music. It's characterised by urgent synth stabs, bubbling, filtered pads and bell-like percussion. It's greatest strength, however is bringing a large number of ideas together, and switching rapidly between them in a coherent fashion. Though it doesn't feel improvised like Detective Story, it almost seems too clever for electronic music, a genre with a long history of repetitious machine beats and fairly simple composition.
Now, if Yellow Diamond has any big-room clubbing appeal, it's to be found in the third-last track, the original of Detective Story. It's here that the comparisons to Satoshi Tomiie reside. While the melody and percussion feel the same as the other, more sedate tracks on the release, the bassline is a simplistic, earth-shaking monster. It's the kind of track that conjures insane notions of purchasing an unaffordable subwoofer just to hear it properly. With the thumping bit out of the way, Kobayashi then somehow manages to make things even more melodic with In Your Life, a slow, moving piece sung in Japanese. To finish comes the title track, Yellow Diamond, a gorgeous piano solo which sounds like the work of Ryuichi Sakamoto. It's a fitting end to an incredibly well-rounded album, one which fuses elements of jazz, deep house, progressive and classical music with fierce creativity and divine talent. |
