Ringo Shiina
Sanmon Gossip

After ten years of a career where honestly fans didn’t know what else to expect given the stunning heterogeneity of her work (read: they couldn’t wait to dive into the void again by buying her new album blindly), the singer, songwriter, musician, producer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, actress, creative, and who knows what else, Ringo Shiina has finally released the fourth album of her solo career. Most of her fandom believes that this Japanese artist gave her best at the beginning (her first album "Muzai Moratorium" was hailed by the Japanese critics as a landmark work of the '90s) and as a vocalist for Tokyo Jihen, but that same fandom pleasantly changed their minds upon listening to this new album. "Sanmon Gossip is beautiful: it is an album of absolute, total maturity, with broad scope, deserving of international fame and all those Grammys that instead are given out like candy. Unlike the Ringo from Liverpool, the Ringo from Saitama improves exponentially with the years and miraculously hasn’t hit a single wrong note yet: there are more and less beautiful ones, sure, but all her work fits into a perfectly coherent artistic journey whose purpose is to traverse the entire world of music; Ringo hops and skips along this path, turning cartwheels to avoid the potholes, making peace with the wolf instead of fleeing it, and choosing the right direction at every crossroads: step by step, she reached in 2003 to release "Kalk Samen Kuri No Hana", a masterpiece record manifesting the impossibility of writing a manifesto for the musical world of this singer as vast and all-encompassing as her horizon, and in 2009 here comes "Sanmon Gossip", yet another demonstration that music is not dead yet and indeed still has a lot to offer.

"Sanmon Gossip" means "three-penny gossip", but it has nothing to do with Brecht or the album's content or the sound or anything: Ringo Shiina chose this title because she likes the Gibson SG, she likes the SG acronym, and has matched the letters with the words "sanmon" and "gossip," which are her favorites in Japanese and English. In conclusion, this is the album of the things she likes, and listening to it, it seems she only likes beautiful things. Having in her journey touched upon virtually every form of pop and rock, songwriting, contaminations with classical music and any type of electronics, it is now time to open the jazz chapter: a Ringo Shiina album, however, is never "just" rock or "just" pop or - in this case - "just" jazz, but it is always an enormous potpourri where the artist colors her songs with arrangements of stunning power and imagination. Listen to believe the wonderful opening track "Ryuukou" ("Fashion") where the dialogue between jazz, rock, and rap (rap!!!) is perfect, or that sort of James Bond-like track which is "Mittei Monogatari" ("The Story of the Secret Agent") with its flutes and xylophones and walkie-talkie voices, or again the electro-chic composition "0 Chiten Kara" ("From Point 0") to realize in about a quarter of an hour the shocking potential of this album in which her three favorite guitars (Gibson, Fender, Gretsch) often make star appearances. And, over all this jazzy melting pot, reigns the only consistent instrument in all the songs: Ringo Shiina's super-nasal, super-shrill, super-acidic, and super-recognizable voice, which it is unclear how it manages, but it always perfectly marries both the flourishing orchestra of "Tsugou No Ii Karada" ("The Body Suitable for the Purpose"), which seems to come out of an American '50s comedy, and "Mayakashi Yasaotoko" ("Counterfeit Gentleman"), a disconcerting post-modern samba post-Kraftwerk post-cotton club, as well as "Bonsai Hada" ("Mediocre Talent"), a heartbreaking existentialist ballad accompanied only by the French accordion. "Sanmon Gossip is one of the rare albums that prevents the listener from skipping tracks: it can only be listened to if one has 50 minutes free, aware that it must be heard from start to finish, not so much because it is a concept album to be followed mandatorily, but because the beauty of the sound and instrumentation is so enveloping that one feels no need to skip songs nor desires to stop. Each track is equally beautiful, and none prevails: a choral album, if it can be so called. So important is the very tight relationship between the pieces that no single was extracted: although not an album without interruptions, "Sanmon Gossip" is conceived as a single flow of uninterrupted music, always different, always new, always brilliant. There are some rather explicit citations, however, there is not a moment of banality or déjà vu: it is, quite simply, a truly excellent album.

Should Ringo Shiina ever become famous worldwide and should she leave something to posterity, it would be her mastery in arrangement: Sanmon Gossip might not be an excellent work of melody, harmony, lyrics, organization or anything else (but it is, it is), but it is without a shadow of a doubt a masterpiece of arrangement (probably the best ever in this regard), brilliant in representing all the music of the world in every detail, without being heavy or didactic or pedagogic. In Ringo Shiina's work, there is everything, and in Sanmon Gossip there is a great representation of this everything. A miracle of sonic balance.