Meishi Smile – Pastel
Suggested by reader Cathy: an artist who exhumes all our Shoegaze Feelings.
[Video][Website]
[6.13]
Thomas Inskeep: “Anime/J-pop meets shoegaze” is an apt, albeit super-simplistic descriptor. That said, I’m glad Garrett Yim is increasingly tilting toward the shoegaze end of the spectrum, as much of 2014’s LUST is a bit too sunshine-beat-filled for my taste. “Pastel” seems to take its cues from that album’s instrumental “AI,” though this track adds some heavily processed vocals that fit into the mix perfectly. It also recalls Ulrich Schnauss’s early-’00s work, only significantly more electronic. Dreamy.
[7]
Austin Brown: Hazy, indistinct, probably a little derivative, definitely beautiful.
[7]
Micha Cavaseno: Distortion. Robotics. Earnestness. Melancholy. Répété.
[5]
Scott Ramage: The shoegaze revival seems to be about slavish recreations of 1992, and while I do enjoy such nostalgia exercises, it’s easy to feel cheated by the familiarity. “Pastel” doesn’t offer surprises, but it does vary the formula by making the most of what modern production has to offer. The vocoder feels too harsh to be truly dreamy, but the thick synth bassline suggests that ethereality maybe isn’t the point. There’s maybe just a shade too much of M83’s stadium-sized obviousness, but it’s the kind of thing that’s exciting through its potential as much as it actually exists.
[7]
Iain Mew: Meishi Smile’s application of layers of gauze is as artful as ever, but there’s only so much sparkle that he can add that way when what’s underneath is decidedly non-magical. Which is to say that this is no “享受” at all.
[5]
Alfred Soto: I loved the synthesized thud of an opener, the cute vocal distortion. But beneath the clatter the melody is treacle worthy of an Adam Levine ballad.
[5]
Brad Shoup: I don’t want to throw around terms like “Owl City shoegaze” lightly, I really don’t. Like Owl City, the words dictate the exact register of the vocals. Or, maybe, what the vocals are willing to bear. I’d take a year of Owl City’s chirpy astronomy lessons over someone who thinks twice about making the line “an IV that drips through a torn vein” obscured. The track itself is fine; it reads like a nice melody dilated and scuffed, which is most shoegaze, to be fair.
[5]
Will Adams: “Pastel” paints with a palette of soft synth smears and robotized vocals, recalling Porter Robinson’s wistful Worlds album from last year. The gummy bassline is a major letdown, though; high in the mix and often resorting to a monotonous eighth note pulse, it clashes with the delicate textures surrounding it.
[5]
Joshua Kim: I abhor most everything on Zoom Lens so perhaps it’s all getting to my head, but this is definitely the worst sort of dream pop. It’s cheaply wistful, simple to the point of sounding amateurish (i.e. not effectively childlike or nostalgic), and immediately forgettable; the songwriting begins and ends with being emotionally resonant. Garrett Yim has improved since the Meishi Smile debut (and admittedly, “Pastel” sounds better within the context of the album), but there’s not much here that makes me want to stick around and see what’s next.
[2]
Stevie Kaye: Sharing a trans-Pacific cover connection and sound palette with Sui Zhen’s Secretly Susan, “Pastel” applies nügaze blur to vaporwave’s analgesic melodies.; I’m torn as to whether the hospital giftshopgrief kitsch — “Waiting Room” for waiting rooms? — is genius or redundant.
[6]
Peter Ryan: At first listen this prompted an inexplicable welling-up, which is significant given that I could not understand the lyrics — right now I’m blaming that piano synth countermelody, which I think must be tapping some as-yet-unidentified childhood memory. In seeking out lyrics I came across this, wherein the artist also Explains Things. This exacerbated my aforementioned condition. Recommended reading if you are 1) also a sap and 2) prepared for grandparent-related feelings.
[9]
Juana Giaimo: There is a pleasant dreamy feel in “Pastel”; it’s getting lost in coldness but being saved from it at the same time by a warm caress. It fades away too soon after it finishes, but maybe a unique experience is in these days — in which everything is in every device memory within reach — more valuable than being memorable.
[7]
Ramzi Awn: Admittedly good for a Notting Hill knockoff soundtrack. But that’s about it.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: Look, I don’t want to repeat myself but I also want to acknowledge how great this, so I’ll just say Meishi Smile made one of the year’s best albums, one of coming to terms with every wonderful and ugly emotion within yourself and finding beauty in each one.
[9]
William Love: “The simplicity of my heart shatters underneath the realty of the world” — let that sink in. It’s almost melodramatic (life sucks, and then you die right) but Garrett Yim doesn’t come off contrived. Rather, he speaks to every person who only wants to love and be loved, even when the world wills otherwise.
[9]
I did mean to blurb this, and then life got in the way, and even if I did, could I improve on Maxwell? ;) That said, here are some Bonus Jumbled Thoughts:
1. In some alternate universe, Garrett Yim is Oneohtrix Point Never and this track is “Sticky Drama.” After all, the man used to make harsh noise under the name “Yuko Imada,” and his label is called Zooms Lens. I like the Meishi Smile side of Yim better, but the first track off of …Belong is 2 minutes of straight, well, noise, and it reminds me that I once saw footage of Yim ending a live set by deep-throating a microphone and screaming for two minutes.
2. This is actually the album where Meishi Smile finally peeks out from behind computer vocalists to use his own voice, albeit distorted, yet the vocals in this track come off to me as distinctly robotic, like an inverted Auto-Tune. Imagine a computer sent into space, loaded up with a lot of Gregorian (the German band, not the chant style), and millions of years later, it sends back this attempt at songwriting. You can hear it straining during the verses, frustrated with its mechanical limitations, certain that what we humans find most touching are choral choruses, earnestly hitting the notes of the only phrase I can understand without written lyrics, that most stereotypically “human” thought — “everything dies.”
3. A Twitter friend once asked for songs that put you in the mind of a plane taking off or of soaring around in a Mario Galaxy game. This song probably isn’t what she was thinking of, but I hear the same kind of elation in “Pastel.” Most of this song is a wall of sound, and that moment in 1:40 where it all clears into just the sound of the repeated piano chord is like coming out of turbulence and encountering, briefly, the stillest blue sky. You think you’re on that flight, but then, as the song ends, you realize you’re grounded, like the Mission Control chatter around 3:05. The song takes off without us, disappearing into the space haze from whence the computer came, a white, humanless expanse, millions of years in the future.