Stream 'Let's Dance Raw', the new album from Shintaro Sakamoto

The Yura Yura Teikoku mainman, a legend of the Tokyo psychadelic scene, delves into pop, folk and funk territories. Stephen Pietrzykowski of Fat Possum adds some background colour: “Sakamoto has digested a wealth of influences, be they from home or abroad, and morphed them into a kind of post-pop music. After-the-end-of-the-world music, if you like. And isn’t that what Bowie was always trying to get at? Even when you don’t quite understand and everything is falling apart around you, you can still put on your red shoes and dance the blues.”

Josh Madell of Other World goes into even further detail: “Amidst a dark melancholy, he captures the carefree essence of vintage radio pop, ‘70s funk and easy listening, skewed by a keen ear for psychedelia and experimental music, and his darkly poetic voice.”

It’s another fascination addition to Sakamoto’s canon. Bask in the surreal apocalyptica that he weaves. Congealing themes of mortality, utopia, happiness and death, he flies through jazzy AM radio, latin beats, post-war Japan, post-war USA, and all manner of exotic, temporal and extraterrestrial twangs. Explaining his intentions, Sakamoto had this to say:

“I had a vague image in mind for the overall album. The idea was that, sometime in the past, there were people who had tried to construct a man-made paradise, and these people were now all long dead, but their strong will to create that paradise remained, and this will permeated the earth long after mankind had gone extinct. To be a little more specific, the scene I had in mind was of a light-hearted commercial for a resort hotel playing on a TV that was sitting somewhere on earth, with no one around, because mankind had gone extinct.”

Listen to Sakamoto’s new record below, and grab it 15 September on Other Music/Fat Possum at all good record stores.