Many artists have tried to blend traditional Japanese music with a modern, Western sound, which inevitably comes out sounding like “normal jazz fusion but someone has a koto”. Japanese Girl is the only album I’ve heard ever figure it out, let alone so confidently. There was only one way it could work out: an artist with enough vision and talent and personality to command the swirling mix of influences and players.

This album is not only musically between two worlds, but physically as well, with the first half recorded in L.A. with Little Feat(!) as the backing band and the second in Japan with pros like Morio Agata, Tin Pan Alley, and Moonriders. They’re called the “American side” and “Japanese side” in the liner notes, but, testament to Akiko’s guiding force, you’d never know (when Lowell George is playing a shakuhachi, things are blurred a bit). There’s the swaggering funk of Little Feat, sighing slide guitars, Kabuki theater kakegoe-shouting, meltingly sweet melodies and dramatic, cinematic builds, all stitched together by Akiko’s bold, brassy singing, pounding jazz piano chops, and frankly, a really damn good set of songs.

And she was 21! Her first album out the gate! Goddamn! A perfect album and one of the best debut albums of all time. The fact that it’s all those things and not even my #1 Akiko album just shows the kind of artist we’re dealing with.

Astoundingly confident and complete sound, this is the work of an artist who has been at the game for several years, only this is her debut album. A perfect setting of the Akiko Yano template that would be utilised for the rest of her career. The Japanese instrumentation is so deftly woven in to the the fabric of the songs it’s almost like there is no distinction between East and West. There might be albums of her that I like more, but as a debut it’s nearly perfect and encapsulates everything I love about her music.

I realize I need to preface my opinion here. This is a good album. It has the best album cover of all time and it does very well on recommendation algorithms, meaning it’s a lot of people’s first Akiko album and they have a special attachment for that reason. But approaching this in release order, the ambition of Japanese Girl sounds swapped out for a pleasant but disappointingly normal 70s production, and a frankly less memorable batch of songs missing the Akiko “oomph”—something that’s explained by some songs recorded as early as 1973 (at age 18!). Its follow-up would continue the 70s sound and nascent synthpop touches with more ambitious material.

Probably the best album cover you’ll see. This was the first album of hers I’d ever heard, and if you love the “art” side of her art pop, then this is probably its most complete representation until a couple of decades later. On the surface it sounds like a pretty universal 70s pop album, but there is a typical Yano level of obfuscation to everything, the rhythms all feel slightly wonky, there is a huge range of instruments peppered in to the tracks, her vocals feel a bit more strained than usual (by design, not a judgement of her ability). It’s still an extremely fun listen but the whole thing does feel a bit unfocussed. The last two tracks feature what feel like a genuine and sincere attempt at beauty, with some of my favourite piano work of hers and some truly beautiful string arrangements that sound like they belong to a movie soundtrack.

In argument against Akiko’s later sound being a mere byproduct of Yellow Magic Orchestra backing, here we see Akiko’s parallel interest in synth production on her first self-produced album, even working with the same synth programmer (Hideki Matsutake) before YMO grabbed him for their debut months later. However, the album’s bold dramatic songwriting and moody, murky stretches create a concept-album-like flow that evokes Japanese Girl more than any of her later synthpop. That said, this doesn’t reach the highs of her debut or the synthpop perfection of Gohan ga Dekitayo right after. It remains the commendably artsier of two transition albums between masterpieces.

This is an album I can just never quite place. There is a lot to like about it, and its stretch of almost ambient sounding pieces creates a unique atmosphere and mood to this album that she never fully repeats again. It lacks a lot of the bouncy and playful arrangements I have come to associate with her music, and I think this is an overreliance on a set of U.S.-based session musicians or perhaps leaning too heavily on Hideki Matsutake to flesh out the tone of the album. It lacks a lot of the hooks and strong melodic writing of her previous albums, but in the context of this album and its focus on mood and ambience it does work quite well, I think it just comes down to the mood you’re in when listening as to how much you’ll vibe along with this one. The most interesting track for me is the closer, which leans strongly on a proto-YMO sound. It seriously sounds like a demo or something that Matsutake already had in the bank in preparation for the debut YMO album but my understanding is that this predated that by a bit. An oddball album in already extremely oddball discography.

There are two incredible things happening on this album.

First: After two albums starting to explore synthesizers and working with synth programmer Hideki Matsutake, Akiko (at the height of her powers) joins up with Yellow Magic Orchestra (at the height of their powers) to seamlessly bring all of her performance and songwriting craft into the world of synthpop, a perfect synchronization of style and talent, and a perfect embodiment of the sound that would dominate Japanese pop for the next decade—arriving fully formed in 1980.

Second: This is a double album that is actually good enough to justify all of its 74 minutes. This just does not happen often. Revisiting this album after a while, I find myself going “This song’s on this album? And this one? And this one?” The album is relentlessly good, whether Akiko’s in pop mode (the opener), giving dramatic belters (“Coloured Water”), exploring moody textures (“Dogs Awaiting”), or giving a mischievous take on YMO’s “Tong Poo” that rivals the original.

But ignore context, ignore Japan, ignore the 80s, this is simply one of the best pop albums ever made.

It would be far too reductive to simply look at this as “Akiko Yano with YMO” (although a good way to sell it to folks who aren’t familiar with her music) because it really is just so much more than that. This might be heresy to some, but I also believe that it’s better than anything YMO put out as a group too. The leap from To Ki Me Ki to this is truly extraordinary, while To Ki Me Ki wallowed too much in experimentation, this is just a big thick slab of pure synthpop goodness. Like all the best albums further along in an artist’s career, she manages to bring together all the best qualities of the music that came before it, and even more important than that, catchy hooks, and lots of them. I’m also not one to place a huge importance on track sequencing, but it’s important to remark upon here, as it manages to ebb and flow perfectly, dipping when it needs to and then building back up again just as your interest feels like it’s starting to dwindle. It's a masterpiece in pacing what is actually a pretty lengthy album at 75 minutes, but it never ever feels like it overstays its welcome.

Akiko’s never seemed like a rebellious artist trying to strong-arm her label into letting her make some three-hour prog rock opera, or needing to work out some “one for you, one for me” type arrangement, which is why it’s surprising that here, on her possibly best-known and best-liked album (Akiko’s favorite, even), almost half the album is the most wild stuff in her whole discography. (If following the common Kate Bush comparisons, this is absolutely her The Dreaming.)

The album originated with the hit single “Harusaki Kobeni” (track 8) for a cosmetics commercial, but the album she made to hold it has tracks like “Vet”, like a punky new wave band attacking a synthpop song, the inquisitive mechanical groove of “Ashkhenazy Who?”, the slightly-hostile wandering ramble of “Iranaimon” (track 5) evoking sneaking up on someone singing in a shower, and a nearly ten-minute stop-and-go saga based on a collection of child-written poems.

However, I’m not surprised that this experimentation could get overshadowed when it shares a record with the best synthpop songs ever made. The experimental edge isn’t siloed away from the pop, the creativity in textures and arrangement push the already high standard set by Gohan ga Dekitayo the year before—just see the infectious “Rose Garden” with its weird modulated alien vocals set over an electronic groove that’s simply unreal good for 1981. It’s rare to see an artist’s most indulgent, out-there work gain widest appeal, and I’m happy to see it happen.

If the slightly terrifying album artwork didn’t clue you in, this is the album you go to when you want all the quirks dialled up to 11. This is a kind of bonkers blend of synthpop, jazz and new wave experiments, it can be a difficult one to recommend right off the bat for any new listeners who are not yet fully on board with Akiko Yano-ness but for those who are (or are ready to throw themselves in to the deep end) will be rewarded with a quite extraordinary journey through a wild variety of moods, tones and feelings, songs that are both beautiful and challenging to listen to, songs that will be stuck in your heard hours later, and songs that work as great mood pieces to give context to the rest of the album. A 9-minute piano and voice track? Or how about a track that rivals the greatest of the YMO masterpieces? This has it all, a glorious mess of music that encompasses so much about what I love about Akiko Yano’s artistry.

Akiko has always attracted session talent to her albums, but adding all of (U.K. band) Japan in addition to YMO as your album’s backing band is still something else. It pays off, and it certainly sounds like a dozen of the 80s’ best art pop crafters in one studio. While previous album Tadaima had peaks and valleys of experimentation, this album spreads its high-energy weirdo creativity evenly across its runtime. If pressed to say why it isn’t in my top 3, it has fewer individual knockout tracks—this has always been more of a less divisible, full-album vibe in my memory, not the bounty of earworms like my top 3. It’s fierce competition!

This feels like Japanese Girl transplanted into the YMO synthpop sound, and how you receive that will vary. Personally I much prefer the more organic production of Japanese Girl, but this certainly still has its charm. Much like Josh’s assessment, I agree that it manages to take the weirdness of Tadaima and dilute it enough through the runtime that it manages to keep its art-y tone nice and even while delivering some fun hooks. My only complaint is it just never manages to reach the same highs as either Tadaima or Gohan ga Dekitayo, and by this point, the art-synthpop sound has already been done for two albums in a row. This really needed that extra songwriting spark to cover those widening cracks in the formula.

Though mellowing from the zaniness of the previous two albums, this is still in same thread of genius songwriting and synthpop production started with Gohan ga Dekitayo (an album the dramatic climax of “Greenfields” would feel at home in). Includes a cover of “Owari no Kisetsu” from Haroumi Hosono’s Hosono House and even a swaggering funky cover of Randy Newman’s “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear” about a starving child street performer. Great taste, Akiko.

Definitely what I’d consider to be the most “mature” of her synthpop albums before the style shift on Tōge no Wagaya, Oh Hisse, Oh Hisse really tones down the more playful aspects of the albums that have come before it, even though there is a song about eating ramen on it. Unfortunately, I think this approach hinders my enjoyment of the album, and thought I’m not opposed to a more introspective tone from Akiko, it needs to be juxtaposed with her typically quirky and upbeat songs to strike the right balance. Something to note are tracks “Greenfields”, an 80s power ballad with some nice organic horn arrangements and big booming electric guitars that cap off the album quite well, and “Assembly”, a more ambient piece that follows, bringing you back to earth. It’s a unique one-two punch that I wish she would utilise more often.

This is a cop-out ranking more than a “worst”, or maybe a categorization dilemma. Originally a box set of four 7″ releases, these are entirely covers of old French and German art songs (translated into English) with classical pianist Yuji Takahashi. The performances are good, but this is clearly for a niche audience I’m not part of, and it’s not really what I go to Akiko for.

Much like Josh’s assessment, there isn’t a whole lot to discuss here. It certainly doesn’t feel like a full-fledged entry in the discography and is more of an exercise or indulgence for one part of her musical interests. It’s pleasureable to listen to, but even if you’ve exhausted her several other solo piano albums, you probably won’t find a whole lot of fun in it considering the material that is being covered.

Though still co-produced with Sakamoto and featuring regulars like Yukihiro Takahashi and Kenji Omura, moving to a new label and recording in New York with American session pros signaled a stylistic break, immediately announced in its opening song’s anxious tension, chugging electric guitar, and big 80s drums. Synthpop isn’t gone (see “David” and her lovely cover of “Umi to Shōnen” from Taeko Onuki’s Mignonne), but the sound is her heaviest yet, marked by angular new wave and prog fusion spiciness, as well as jazz breaks hinting at future albums like Welcome Back.

This is the definite start of a new era for Akiko. The sound on this mostly sheds its synthpop predecessors to embrace a more traditional rock sound and some dry mechanical production. It’s an interesting mix for sure and, to my ear, is quite successful. While the standout single “David” plays it safe by sticking to her tried and true synthpop pipeline, tracks like the jazz fusion freakout of “Soko no Iron ni Tsugu” feel like they could have been straight out of a Zappa record. It’s a compelling listen that takes a real focus on her artistry and development rather than delivering a set of catchy, hook-y pop tunes, and it’s all the more rewarding for it.

While the early-80s YMO-backed synthpop sound has stayed fresh, the late 80s pop sound is burdened with a “cheese” factor. I happen to love it, but I can see why Akiko doing new jack swing or covering “Kaze wo Atsumete” with gated drum machine and keyboard strings could scare one off. This is a slighter album, but in a way that lets it hide as a surprise charmer for when you’re exploring past her big ones. Fun cover choices (including two Happy End songs and a jazz piano take on a German folk song), creative playful production (like the atmospheric final two tracks and a surprise banjo), her usual songwriting strength, and overall upbeat mood make for a very likable album.

If it wasn’t for the final third of this album, I’d call this Akiko’s attempt at a synth funk record. The sonic palette and the funky bouncy bass reminds me a lot of the latter era of the 80s when known funk bands were trying to adapt to the times and started incorporating a lot of synth elements, for instance late 80s albums from Fatback Band and Ohio Players and Lakeside. But of course, as is her M.O., there is a very distinct streak of Akiko Yano that permeates throughout. The little touches of banjo like on “Kaze wo Atsumete”, the jazzy piano, the soaring electric guitar on “Yagate Hitori”, the unusual cover choices, they all betray the fact that this still is, most assuredly, an Akiko Yano album. It’s a really fun album that, with a few little tweaks, could have had a couple of singles that I could envision being played on dance floors in the U.S.

After a short hiatus, Akiko is welcomed back with a new jazz sound, an inclination she’s shown in her piano playing and albums like Tōge no Wagaya, but never this fully. The opening track is a wonder, with Akiko’s crooning and piano over rustling drums building into a sublime unmistakably-Pat Metheny flurry. The backing band is incredible, including jazz legends Charlie Haden, Peter Erskine, and Anthony Jackson alongside Metheny. (Akiko’s piano is so good, I can imagine a world she regularly joined them.) This album is no “Akiko does vocal jazz” exercise, however, this is Akiko in her full songwriting element (still including some electronic arrangements too), joined and elevated by the best in the N.Y. jazz scene.

This is where Akiko fully embraces her jazz piano upbringing and it’s fantastic. If you loved the jazzy tracks from Tōge no Wagaya, then you’re in luck because the opener “It’s for You” picks up where that left off for one of the best tracks she’s ever done for a fusion-esque display of guitar and piano work. While the rest of the album remains in the world of jazz, the mood and tempo is markedly more subdued for the rest of the runtime but is the perfect bridge between the more contemplative tone of her solo piano albums and a more rounded and full featured approach to her playing and songwriting. People might remember her for her synth focused work but this is the proof that she had some real chops underpinning that work and it’s on full display here.

Like how Akiko’s early 80s albums make a stylistic unit, Love Life kicks off a new sound that continues through her 90s pop albums. Even with the different influences here—synthpop, piano ballads, bossa nova, jazz (Pat Metheny joining again), big 90s drums, even a reggae thing happening on “The Letter”—the album is tied together with a cohesive, slick, slightly dancy production. With no discredit to the new songs, I particularly love the medley of jazz standards “Sayonara (Japanese Farewell Song)” and “Cherokee” to a synthpop beat.

This is my wildcard album for her. Depending on any number of extraneous factors this could rate much higher or lower on any other day. It’s a real “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to the songs, like she was figuring out where to take her career next. There are just so many styles attempted the album feels quite unfocussed and disjointed, even if the individual songs are actually quite good. The final third of the album is probably the stand out for me, from “Iiko Iiko” to the title track, she removes a lot of the excesses of the late 80s production to turn out a run of moodier, more jazz influenced tracks, synth freak-out ending solo on “Ai wa Takusan” excluded (but really cool in the context of the song still). The album also benefits from not being hit with the 90s sounding production that hard unlike the other albums she released after this.

While hardly a misfire, my least favorite of Akiko’s otherwise strong 90s output. No major production or stylistic changes are to blame, just a weaker set of songs not breaking out of the fine-to-pretty-good range. This continues Akiko’s self-production after separating with Ryuichi Sakamoto (who had been producing or co-producing all her main 80s studio albums), but I think next year’s Elephant Hotel is a better display of her production chops.

Listening to these albums in the 90s I found myself comparing it the late 80s/Tin Machine era of Bowie’s career, an artist who is still clearly enthused and keenly aware of what their contemporaries are doing, but just unable to bend those trends to their whims in a successful way (although I think Akiko’s attempts were more successful, and that’s coming from someone who likes Never Let Me Down). All the pieces are here, but she just doesn’t have the spark that gave earlier albums a real sense of excitement and intrigue. This is still a fine album that tends to lean towards the jazzier side like Welcome Back but the dated 90s production tends to overtake, like the electric guitar finale on “Down by the Lake”. It’s at its best when it goes for the quieter pieces, a trend I’ve noticed with these 90s albums, like on closer “Love Is”, and with the almost classical sounding arrangements on “Living with You”.

Though also self-produced and recorded in N.Y., Elephant Hotel makes a much stronger impression than the previous year’s Love Is Here. The originals shine (like the infectiously chill vibes of “Me and My Sea Otter”), but the album also works in a large selection of covers, from an Okinawn folk song, a Hermeto Pascoal song, to Taeko Onuki’s “Shikisai Toshi”, the lyrics of which she rewrites to become a charmingly sweet ode to her dad. The way this album threads together its variety of styles into one consistent lush, moody atmosphere shows off Akiko’s production talent and helps make this an easy favorite of mine in Akiko’s already great 90s.

Of Akiko’s 90s output, I think this one might be my favourite. It’s a relatively melancholic effort that trades away a lot of her typical playfulness and upbeat mood for a more sombre journey that unfortunately, does feel a tad too long. Notably, I’m a big fan of her more playful pop stuff, but what she goes for here actually works quite well. Pieces like “Machi”, an atmospheric piano/synth piece with some quiet slide guitar and the String of Pearls cover, with its slow baroque pop arrangement, typify the mood of the album. It’s quite unlike a lot of the stuff she has done before, or even after, and for that it earns a place higher up in the ranking.

In spite of six years and two studio albums in between them, this sounds like a direct continuation of Love Life, if perhaps dropping some of the jazz influence in favor of expanding on that album’s cohesive dancy pop production. Covers include a Ventures single (opener “Kyoto”), her second Okinawan folk song (“Jin Jin”) after covering one on Elephant Hotel, and even a spare, gentle cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”.

Akiko had decided on which path her career was going to go down after the relatively scattershot approach on Love Is Here and started doubling down a bit more on the dance/electro/D&B elements. The problem is that sound is just not something I have much of an attachment to, so it doesn’t really grab me. There is still evidence of her usual flair with some interesting and unique covers, but, for me, it shines when she lets her jazz voice come through on tracks like “All the Bones Are White” and cover of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. Another highlight is “Brooklyn Bridge”, which sounds like it could have come from the days of Tadaima with a clashing journey of styles and instruments amongst the mechanical synth backdrop.

My memory of this album was originally focused on the hammy big late-90s drums heard on tracks like “Girlfriends Forever”, but after revisiting, the album is much more mellow and not as far from Oui Oui’s sound as I remembered. Although I wish the album went even harder into big dancy maximalism (a wish fulfilled on 2015’s Welcome to Jupiter), this is still one of my favorite of Akiko’s 90s albums. I can imagine someone running scared from the album’s 1999-ness, but they’d be missing out on a strong set of songs and melodies. Includes her theme for My Neighbors the Yamadas (“Quit Being Alone”) and lovely closer that adds lyrics to a Bill Frisell melody.

Unfortunately, this album falls right in a production black hole where the dated sound is very noticeable, but not quite old enough to really have that endearing charm that makes it a little easier to overlook. This really feels like her first foray into the EDM sound that would be properly realised several years later, thus it still sounds amateurish, as if she is still figuring out the nuances of this new style and, I’m assuming, of new equipment and a relatively new workflow. She clearly has experience, so it’s not a complete wash, but it just doesn’t sound like the fully formed songs that she might have envisioned. There are still moments of greatness here. The quiet acoustic guitar driven rock of the title track, the jazzy ambience of “Yuugure”, and the lively brass and woodwinds on “Hitori Botchi wa Yameta” are all highlights you would come to expect of an Akiko Yano album, but the mid-paced tempo of the rest of the tracks cause them to blend in a bit with each other, especially for a longer than usual runtime for one of her albums.

After the very “of its time” production of Go Girl (not a complaint!), Reverb is simply…songs! Most the album has simple songwriter/rock backing that remains modern sounding even if the songwriting isn’t at her most memorable. Taeko Onuki joins in a cover of a classic The Peanuts song (“Una Sera di Tokyo”), and Akiko’s daughter Miu Sakamoto sings backup vocals in two songs. Other covers include songs from The Ventures, Tamio Okuda (who also co-writes a new song here), and a new version of a The Hammonds song (a one-off 1997 side project).

Yano’s move to N.Y.C. sparked a very obvious and abrupt change in style, immediately shedding most of her previous synth heavy pop work and adopting a more moody and withdrawn sound. It also shows that she was very clued in to the music scenes that were happening around her and appropriately drawing from them to fuel her own efforts. This combo of Reverb and Honto no Kimochi showed to me that she was very aware of garage rock revival bands like The Strokes and wasn’t afraid to draw from the well of the youth around it. Reverb is an absolutely fantastic collection of rockier songwriting that manages to utilise a pretty wide array of textures and moods to produce one of my favourite albums of hers that manages to keep one foot in step with the likes of The Strokes and early 00s dance while never falling in to the trap of pastiche, remaining unmistakeably an Akiko Yano album.

Akiko’s 90s showed a long interest in interpreting other artists’ songs, seen expressly on the solo piano cover albums and also the growing inclusion of covers on her normal studio albums. It’s notable that here she’s written or co-written all but one song, and uncoincidentally it’s a great album. Maybe it was a spark lit by the two new collaborators whom she really lets take the reins on sound: Quruli’s Shigeru Kishida giving an indie J-rock bite and Rei Harakami (who she’d make two albums with later as “yanokami”) adding a bright 2000s electronic pop (you won’t have to check Discogs to tell which of the two is producing). The artists’ styles all work together to make one of her most underrated albums, and one that follows Reverb’s lead on showing off Akiko’s continued quality in the new decade.

Just going to put this out right now, “NYC” is one of the best tracks Akiko Yano has ever recorded. A punk-y rock track that is unlike anything she has ever done before, or after sadly. While there are other tracks on this album that follow that mould, it manages to pepper in a few more reflective pieces and the bouncy art pop of her earlier career. She strikes a great balance between upbeat and moody, the highlights being the full featured version of “Night Train Home”, which edges out the Acoustic Version earlier on the album as the better of the two, and the EDM sound of “Too Good to Be True” shows off her burgeoning interest in the genre, which she would fully throw herself into on the albums to come. While these tracks are not the hook-driven catchy pop you might expect of her, they are still fantastic pieces of songwriting that show her creativity has not slowed down one iota 25 years into her career.

Akiko was born in 1955, the tail end of the generation inexplicably enamored with meandering blues rock riffing. I never pegged her for a classic rock nut, but what is this: Led Zeppelin cover? The Doors? For doing this kind of thing, she got the right people, producer T-Bone Burnett and guitarist Marc Ribot, both with long careers of high-profile collaborations. Though not a style I get enthused for, the album has a good professional sound and she confidently slips into the genre, her originals sit comfortably along the three covers. My favorite tracks strike a folkier tone—not coincidentally, since Burnett, Ribot, and drummer Jay Bellerose had all just worked on Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand the previous year. It’s the wandering blues-ing filling the middle that makes me ambivalent on this one.

Probably the only time I will ever enjoy The Doors. I have a bit of a fascination for weird underdog albums that come out later in an artists career, (Elvis’ disco stuff, Tom Jones going blues rock) and it seems like a sure hit for artists to do a more grounded blues-y, folksy rock album with an established stable of session musicians and this follows that template pretty closely. It seems the T-Bone Burnett/Marc Ribot/Jay Bellerose combo is a potent one as evidenced by the success of that Alison Krauss/Robert Plant album from 2021 for instance and this largely follows the same tricks with just enough Akiko Yano flair to distinguish itself. While not a super compelling effort (much like a lot of these kinds of albums) it’s still a solid and enjoyable listen, the covers are kind of wonky and that’s why I love them but it does tend to meander.

In 2014 I would’ve been worried. Her last (non-solo-piano) studio album was the classic rock exercise of Akiko, then a six-year wait for this, a full dive back into synthpop with weak songwriting and occasionally embarrassing modern production touches (especially on a couple self-covers that unwisely invite comparison to their original versions). This at least can be pinned on the album’s concept of handing off each track to different producers. Thankfully, one year later, Welcome to Jupiter came out and did everything this album was going for better, relegating this album’s role as a so-so production experiment and just-fine entry in a huge discography.

This really does feel like a test run for Welcome to Jupiter, utilising a similar palette of sounds and instruments as well as ideas, but it just feels incomplete and more like she was too focussed on the production side of things rather than writing a solid set of songs. But then with each track having a different producer, I’m not sure how that really works. Maybe the somewhat large gap between studio albums required some warm up time to get back to her usual form. Whatever the case may be with its production, it still ends up with a collection of quite lacklustre songwriting, with the occasional bright spots like the pared back synthpop of “Yes-Yes-Yes” that has shades of her work with YMO, “Gohan to Okazu” with its glitched out stop start production, and the Marc Ribot guided “Ai no Taikyu Test” all of which are excellent, but there is just too little to go around for the runtime on this one.

After decades of style changes, there was no reason Akiko couldn’t pull off EDM. Tobashite Ikuyo just didn’t do it very well. I admit I laughed when I first heard the 2015-isms of the new “Tong Poo” cover opening the album (the water drop sound…), but then it dawned on me: this is fun. This fulfills the promise of the maximalist dancy tracks of Go Girl—great songwriting working in tandem with an infectious clubby energy, milking its cheesiness for the most fun it can. What’s impressive is not only does this mix of styles work, but it still feels so Akiko. Akiko’s Akiko-ness is just too strong to get smothered by genre.

At first blush, my thought was “I never expected Akiko Yano to go full EDM”, but thinking about it more, it really is the logical endgame from her period of synthpop through the 80s, and you know what? It absolutely works! It might be slightly behind the times with the big 80s influenced synthpop that came up around the late 00s, but it stills feels extremely emblematic of the genre and, like Josh points out, is still unmistakeably an Akiko Yano album. These are the albums I get excited about, when she manages to blend all her quirks and stylistic touches with something that is not usually in her wheelhouse. Even if the experiments themselves don’t always work, it still makes for an interesting and engaging listen.

If Welcome to Jupiter seemed like it was flexing how well Akiko could command a new style—that was nothing. Akiko had done an album of guest duets before (2006’s Hajimete no Yano Akiko), but that was in her comfortable domain of solo piano. Here, collaborators throw every style they can at Akiko who effortlessly makes them all her own. Guests are as varied as shamisen player Hiromitsu Agatsuma (whom Akiko would make a full album with in 2020) and rapper and tabla(!) trio U-Zhaan, 環Roy, and Chinza Dopeness (who make an unexpected delightful pairing with Akiko’s bouncy vocals and piano)—though she’s also joined by some old friends like Tamio Okuda and Taeko Onuki for some traditional-style tracks as well.

While a collaboration album from a wide variety of artists keeps things interesting by throwing a bunch of different styles at you, in execution this makes for quite an uneven album for me. There are a few too many songs that don't really sound like true collaborations and the album ends up coming off too much like a collection of demos that could only be fully realised on a future collaboration with the respective artists.

They have the mood of old friends catching up and playing some music together in the lounge room. Endearing, yes, but not terribly interesting to listen to. Where the album truly shines are with the more oddball collaborators like the pulsing club EDM of the opener with Reed & Caroline, the shamisen and min’yo influenced track with Hiromitsu Agatsuma, and the rap with the U-Zhaan, Tamaki Roy and Chinza Dopeness. Akiko has to really try to bring those influences under her umbrella, and, as a result, the songs sound fresh and invigorating.

It comes as no surprise that they are the artists that ended up with further collaboration (the full album with Agatsuma, and an appearance on the full length from U-Zhaan, Tamaki Roy and Chinza Dopeness). I also have a soft spot for the enka/jazz-tinged track with Kiyoshi Maekawa, and it makes me want to hear her attempt an album of enka covers.

Akiko’s 2010s were filled with stylistic experiments, from working with EDM producers, a genre-hopping album of duets, to a new side-project with a shamisen player. When the singles for this dropped, I thought: oh, nice, a return to form. But then I thought: has Akiko really done an album of straightforward singer-songwriter arrangements before? (Maybe Reverb, almost two decades earlier?)

The music video for “Little Bird, Little Love” released in Sep 2020, a simple COVID lockdown-era video recorded in what I assume is Akiko’s N.Y. home (featuring a dancing Akiko and her cat Titus), and it was a ray of light in a shitty year. The rest of the album fully matched that song and video’s cozy warmth, the arrangements hitting the perfect balance of a live full-band sound (with some welcome Americana touches) while simple enough for Akiko’s songwriting to take forefront. A delightful album and further proof of Akiko’s unshakable ability to drop fantastic albums in any decade.

We’ve seen Yano make numerous forays into other genres without ever devolving in to boring genre exercises, and this feels, to me, like her attempt at a country-fied Akiko Yano album. It has mandolins, smatterings of tasteful slide guitar throughout and “My Beloved Landlord” is a nearly completely acoustic guitar number that echoes the mood of her piano solo albums. It’s a fun twist because it’s not an instrument I would typically associate with Akiko and as someone who is not a particularly huge fan of the solo piano albums it was nice to hear her piano mode recontextualised in to something new, and dare I say it, more interesting. Something I also feel important to remark upon is, I listened to this again back-to-back with Japanese Girl and the throughline from her first to most recent album is so extremely clear and defined that they could almost have been recorded in the same sessions. An extremely solid set of songs for an artist so far in their career.