Asobi Seksu - Fluorescence Review

Is Asobi Seksu's new album enlightening, or is it as bad as that pun?

Asobi Seksu - Fluorescence (2011) – 6.4 / 10.0
Label: Polyvinyl

I’ll admit that I’m behind on Asobi Seksu’s work, but it doesn’t seem as though I’ve missed much. On the last Asobi Seksu album I heard, 2006’s Citrus, the band experimented with combining shoegaze and indie-pop into something unique. It was a good album, but it lacked identity, something I thought the band could easily find. Five years later, it sounds as though the band is still looking.

The first half of Fluorescence is typical indie-pop, with only Yuki Chikudate’s vocals as a reminder that this is, indeed, Asobi Seksu. Think Braids, but less experimental, and you have this album’s first six songs. Judging these songs in a vacuum, none of them are bad, but none of them bring anything to the table that you can’t get with most other indie-pop put out this year. The second half of the album is an improvement—the band piles on atmosphere to the point where they sound like an alien race doing Interpol covers (well, I like it).

The frustrating part about Fluorescence’s lack of identity is that there are so many ideas that the band could have fleshed out to make an entire album, only to cast them aside more often than not in favor of making music that all the kids seem to be listening to these days. Fluorescence is far from a bad album, and if you’ve stayed away from indie music this year, you’ll likely get more out of this album than I did (which is unlikely, given that you’re reading this to begin with). If you’re already a fan of the band, understand that Fluorescence is a very good EP inside of an unspectacular LP.