New York’s Asobi Seksu certainly had their unique angle in the mid-aughts shoegaze revival with their blend of dreampop and J-pop, complete with bilingual vocals from frontwoman Yuki Chikudate, but as the decade rolled over, their attempts to move away from the elevator pitch that made their early work so appealing yielded diminishing returns and they called it a day after 2011’s Fluorescence.
But their relatively brief career still produced four studio albums, one of which was and still is damn near sublime – 2006’s Citrus. On that record, everything they were doing and trying to do with songcraft and sonics came together perfectly. There’s highlights a-plenty on the album, but one of my faves is “Thursday”, which conveniently comes with a video.
The song also appeared in stripped-down acoustic and French spoken word form on their 2009 stripped-down acoustic album ReWolf.
Apparently the band reformed once in 2014 to support Slowdive in Boston, at the headliner’s request. Because even if you’re split up, when Slowdive asks you to play a show, you play a show.