Shugo Tokumaru
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So.

I wonder who would ever come to read a review of Shugo Tokumaru, I mean, the guy is Japanese, hasn't released any album in Italy as far as I know, and his last album in the U.S. sold 520 (!) copies. The name sounds a bit like a nonsense phrase by the way, and I stumbled upon it just because on one site it said that on another site some guy had written about a Japanese artist resembling Sufjan Stevens who plays 50 instruments, all by himself, and had written 4 albums in 3 years, or vice versa. A Bright Eyes or Ryan Adams kind of thing, I thought, that if instead of making 5 albums, he had done one with the good tracks and played the others live when he finished the encores wouldn't it have been better? But I'm digressing.

So anyway, being curious about the single "Parachutes" that you can find on YouTube I start looking for the album, and through various means, I find it.

Well, you know what? It sounds good! The single, "Parachutes," is a sunny day in shorts, in a strange language that isn't English, I would say, maybe Japanese, but in which the refrain pro-sciutt pro-sciutt pro-sciutt (which should be Parachutes perhaps?). The other tracks are fun, playful, almost cheerful, more so than Sufjan Stevens, even though like in Su St's albums, improbable instruments appear (gravitational banjos, guitars that sound like organs, vice versa, xylophones, triangles) and the 4/4 occasionally turns into a 7/4 or even worse without you noticing, but it never bores you, never gets cerebral to the point of annoyance, rather it leaves you in good spirits you didn't even remember having.

And then you don't even have to struggle to understand the English. Because if I understood correctly, it seems to be all sung in Japanese. Or else I really need to go back to studying English, and seriously!