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Sawayama picks her way through formative musical loves to produce a risk-taking musical cocktail of R&B, goth rock and video game soundtracks
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Rina Sawayama’s debut album should be a mess – the kind of idea that looks interesting on paper, but sounds horrendous coming out of your speakers. Its musical influences are the product of that preteen period when you love music indiscriminately, or at least without worrying what it says about you, what your friends like, what’s deemed cool or how certain genres define themselves against each other.
Sawayama was born in 1990, which means she hit that period at the turn of the millennium. Her debut album is the sound of someone who absorbed early 2000s pop culture letting her memories gush out – a world where Britney Spears happily coexists with nu-metal; where a love of Destiny’s Child and Timbaland’s futuristic take on hip-hop and R&B doesn’t preclude devotion to the mock-operatic goth rock of Evanescence; when video game soundtracks become as indelible as whatever’s on the radio. The soundtrack of Final Fantasy finds its way into Sawayama closer Snakeskin; the music on Paradisin’ feels like it’s emanating from a Nintendo, and Akasaka Sad blends futuristic R&B with the day-glow electronic din of an amusement arcade. If you were forced to describe her debut as succinctly as possible, you’d probably opt for a pop/R&B/nu-metal hybrid with a dose of stadium-rock bombast, which sounds like the winning entry in a competition to find the most appalling genre-fusion in musical history. Continue reading...