Wasuremono

The Japanese word ‘wasuremono’ or, ‘忘れ物’ in kanji characters, roughly translates to “something forgotten or left behind.” The debris, the detritus, the remnants, the aftermath, the bits and pieces that linger longer, stay stronger and are etched in the memory muscles all amount to the sense of what and who we are.

Follow-up to last year’s BBC 6 Music’s championed ‘Something left behind’ ‘Are you OK’ is a(nother) shedroom-studio technicolour-rich tapestry ridden with (mis)remembered recollections and fluctuating psychic states of things never being too late.

The lysergic panoramas of the Flaming Lips are an influence here (Wasuremono toured with them) along with Brighton sampledelics The Go Team’s ‘party through the pain’ philosophy. Ostensibly a one-man show, William Southward is augmented by three friends (Madelaine Ryan, Isaac Phillips, and Phoebe Phillips) to create this happy/sad collection that addresses mental health and the need to ask the simple questions such as the title track and the ‘we’ll try to fix ya … we will work it out’ ‘Self Help.

The semi-mythological Linn Drum, so beloved of 1980s pop-progressives Prince, Gary Numan and Peter Gabriel is the at the heart of the sonic back-beating, its retro sheen a reminder of technology’s once future-shock tendencies. Hazy, gauzy, woozy vocals add to the dreamy surreality the music constructs, a blissed-out narcoleptic state of liminality. Caught betwixt neither here or there.

Opener the Depeche Modish ‘Are you OK?’ is a first flush of summery love, the thrills, the spills, the meeting of wills. The filmic duet ‘A lesson to learn’ is twangy surf guitars allied to a Wild Swans/Beasts type glad-gloom where salvation is always a possibility.

The jaunty pop of ‘Nothing Is Easy’ is pure redemption, the sound of emergence from the depths of despair, the title uttered repeatedly like a yogic mantra designed to soothe and calm. A collective call to (extended) arms.