Plastic Tree
Träumerei

«It is one of those beautiful clear days when a little blue bird can fly. God can't find us and laughs. We look up, and through the branches the sky is like a puzzle. What words will it take to keep you with me?»
(from Aoi Tori)

"Träumerei" is the fourth album of the Japanese rock band Plastic Tree. It was released in 2002 at a very delicate time for the band: the drummer TAKASHI had left, and the guitarist Akira had started his collaboration with another group, COALTAR OF THE DEEPERS. The remaining members, vocalist Ryutaro (main lyricist) and bassist Tadashi (main composer), decided to continue anyway: after slowly growing in the live houses of Chiba and showing their love for brit-pop and American alternative with a great album like "Puppet Show", Plastic Tree couldn't break up. One fine day, Ryutaro wrote the song Aoi Tori on his own. It is a masterpiece. The single is one of the band's and the year's best sellers, still a total cult among Plastic Tree fans, and it revived everything. Hiroshi is the new drummer, and the first work in which his name appears is precisely this "Träumerei", which in the end will be the album Akira collaborated on the most as a composer in the band's entire career.

The word "träumerei" means "dream" or "reverie" in German; the inspiration for the title likely comes from a piece taken from Kinderszenen, a collection for children by the German romantic composer Robert Schumann. The piano piece in question is stunning, and the album inspired by it is no less; for the writer, it is the band's best work. From 2002 to today, Plastic Tree has not declined at all; on the contrary, they have achieved a completely recognizable and high-quality sound, but in this album, they best express their art with compositions that seem written in a dreamlike state and not always properly belonging to the world of night or day. Almost an hour of pure dream, indeed.

The second single released provides a clear and summary idea of this album: "Chiriyuku Bokura" ("They Tear"), written by Ryutaro and Akira, is a track that manages to perfectly combine an infinitely romantic and touching melody with a powerfully rock arrangement; Ryutaro is the arpeggiated acoustic guitar and cries, Akira is the cutting electric guitar and tells him to stay strong. The dialogue between the instruments is exceptional, the voice is broken and melancholic, the harmonic coloring exemplary: each part, in short, is in the right position and measure and at the highest qualitative levels. Every kid who grew up with "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" has found here, in "Träumerei", a worthy successor, and in Ryutaro Arimura, a Billy Corgan still attracted by the purple sky and the stars (slightly preceding, among others, the singles "Planetarium" and "Rocket", not included in this album). The whole album is like "Chiriyuku Bokura": dissociated like a teenager, sad like a love ended, precious like an object without venal value that reminds you of a dear friend. The theme of the album is love, or rather (returning to Schumann), romance. Better: not quite the 19th-century trend, to be clear, but that sense of romance and that internal strength you can only have when your age has two digits and the first is a 1.

"Träumerei" is an extremely romantic album even in the most mildly prosaic and sentimental sense of the word: it contains only love songs (a love almost always wrong, of course), often changes mood, and describes feelings through metaphorical and nostalgic visual images, full of those little details that sometimes, like in dreams, appear clearer than the context. Any youngster able to understand the lyrics could easily fall in love with it, and any adult who still has a bit of a youthful spirit will find great interest in this album. Beware: it's not an album for teenage girls, and I don't even want to mention those singers and groups that today dominate the production for this target; it is instead a work born in a difficult period and developed with the help and participation of four friends: it is therefore by translation, if anything, a representation of youth, of that youth that obviously struggles to grow in a world it does not know and that needs the support of loved ones to move forward.

Having turned thirty, as the Plastic Tree were in 2002, that period now takes on the dreamlike shades of memory, blurred in image, but vivid, very vivid in feeling. Exceptional tracks demonstrate this, like the wonderful, wonderful "Aoi Tori" ("The Little Blue Bird"), almost devoid of drums because it was written right in the period between TAKASHI and Hiroshi, or the hypnotic "Petshop", or the almost hard rock "Glider, or finally the painful closing ballad "Ame Ni Utaeba" ("Singing in the Rain"). 12 songs, and personally, there isn't one I don't like.

Plastic Tree will return even in the future to approach works of this enormous quality, and indeed quite often, but the sense of "made and played in the studio among friends" that is perfectly felt in the tracks of "Träumerei" is present in this work as in no other album of the band, and this is worth an extra star.