Review of the new album from YUKARI FRESH

In the latest “CD REVIEW” for the Japan Times, Ian Martin wrote, “Emerging from the dark days of the 1990s’ “lost generation,” the Shibuya-kei movement in Japanese music was a breath of fresh air, bringing together with impeccable style a variety of musical genres encompassing jazz, retro-futurist lounge pop, 1960s French pop and dance music. Its commercial heyday was short-lived, but its influence abroad managed to make Tokyo the hippest city in the world.”

“As a bona fide 1990s vintage Shibuya-kei artist, Yukari Fresh shows that the genre isn’t dead, with opening track “Summer Cape Kid” fusing the rhythms of the 1960s to the production techniques of the electronic era. Throughout the minialbum “grrrl, summer cape kid, etc.,” the values that made Shibuya-kei so cool still prevail. There is a firm grounding in alt-rock and lo-fi aesthetics, but those sounds are cheekily subverted by deliberately over-produced, electronically enhanced vocals and squelchy retro synths, as you can hear on the track “Interstellar Kiss and Ride.”

More