Landing soon!
From the label responsible for the recent 800 Cherries reissue comes this first of two retrospectives documenting the output of Kawasaki indie-/dreampop duo, Sugar Plant. Featuring content spanning their 1995 debut to the present day, the temptation might be to label Signature Collection a 'best of...', though I think more accurate is to understand it as an introduction for the uninitiated, notwithstanding that it will also function as a convenient means for fans to access the band's music on record (those albums are slim on the ground). Like 800 Cherries (and many of their peers), it's not always been easy to access Sugar Plant's music outside of their home country, their reach, pre-internet and beyond, seemingly limited to those intrepid seekers who were willing to extend their purview to the import bins. Perhaps it's a distribution issue, perhaps it's due to some strange cultural bias within the genre and its associated media? Whatever the reason, it's strange it should be this way, since this is the kind of starry-eyed, romantically phrased dreampop that seems to hold great universal appeal, replete with all the appropriate signifiers of the genre while in possession of its own particular charms - good taste, great application! They take a different path to 800 Cherries, less redolent of Stereolab and more inline with the chiming testimony of Galaxie 500, the emotional range of slowcore ala first album era Low, and the lovelorn melodicism of Sarah Records or Hydroplane, all aligned with a gently experimental touch that recalls that other great Japanese dreampop unit, Nagisa Ni Te. Just the eight tracks here (all of which are fairly substantial in length), but it's quite the impression, giving off the sense of a great lost act that somehow we have the great fortune of still seeing in operation today. Vol. 2 in soon, but get yourself (re)familiarised now - there's a new (old) favourite waiting in these grooves.
FFO: 800 Cherries, Ozean, April Magazine, Galaxie 500
