“It’s sad that memories fade
But I want to keep these ones
Thank you for the lights
I’m grateful that we’ve met”
Lights Leak is the debut full-length album from desksnail, the solo project of Tokyo-based songwriter Taku Sudo, the former frontman of Smokebees, who has been peering at the edges of the folk-pop twilight for many years with a quizzical eye and an open heart. A quiet visitor to his own sonic spaces – he’s built over the years an amazing ability to inhabit moments in time. Melodies dance like half-thoughts from a bleery memory and subtle shifts in tone and production are key. Lights Leak is a wonderful thing and it makes perfect sense that it’s found it’s home at Galaxy Train a label who’ve put out so many wonderful artists over the years – always with a truly independent spirit and sense of hope in a sometime wearying world.
And Lights Leak truly is a beautiful collection of songs, ones that we were lucky to lend an early ear to, and ones I’m thrilled to see now step into the light to such deserved applause. A careful, intimate and elegantly spun thing, soporific and somehow clandestine, its homespun idiosyncrasies allow imperfection to crease the songs’ attentive craft perfectly, allowing the spaces between those subtle sonic marks made to stand in momentary light. These are the human spaces music needs to be truly alive. And alive these songs most certainly are: you can hear them breathing.
This is a crucial and deliberate choice I’m sure – one made time and time again in the quiet hours of tinkering that have no doubt been spent bringing these songs to their finished state. And those hours, days, weeks, years no doubt, have all been worth it. Light’s Leak is worth savouring.
Reference points are clear but not obvious – and there will be many who want to return to the new worlds shaped. Sparklehorse has often been shared by Taku Sudo as a sonic and conceptual influence – and you can hear that at times here – particularly in the analogue hum and pulse of the more ambient sections, where glockenspiels shimmer and keys wheeze in quivering pulses. But there’s an earlier, jangling folk-pop quality too – particularly in those dancing melodies – where melancholy lurks but so too a buoyancy that hints to something brighter. It’s a thing of beauty either way.
Although there is an undeniable outward seeking sentiment in these recordings, there is also something pensive, confidential almost, that runs like a filigree thread through these lulling and lyrical songs bringing careful cohesion to the undulating whole- their gentle folk-pop textures subtly shimmering like phosphenes. Sometimes things open up into broader sonic brushstrokes – the occasional fuzz of fizzing guitars or a tremulous discordance breaking the stillness- but even then these songs feel like whispered secrets. Secrets worth sharing. Raining and Raining is a particular highlight where desksnail’s delight in direct simplicity reaches gentle but undeniable magnificence.
These songs take hold in secret, stealth-boldened waves. There is a sadness to it all but also a sense of quiet hope – the warm, trembling arrival of more ambient atmospherics opening up like a freshly risen sun on a soft and secret summer’s morning. No more so than on Torch – a hypnotic little interlude that weaves its own warbling spell. This is music that sounds like home, dust falling, like light dancing through the breeze-danced curtains as you drift into a new day. Thank you desksnail. It’s a thing of wonder.
“So come on let’s go
There’s laughter I’m told
Where the rain soaks your soul and the spirits are gold
So come on let’s go”
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
