Despite the looming threat of police crackdowns on nightclubs in Osaka, the music scene continues to thrive. Some of the most promising sounds are coming from that city's Innit collective and their imprint Day Tripper Records.
Day Tripper's third release comes from one of Innit's founders, Masayuki Kubo, aka And Vice Versa. "E.Tender" is his second album and it offers up 12 tracks that hop and skip between established genres and templates in a fascinating manner.
Kubo's approach sounds like a slightly refined take on "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks," a fairly common approach in this age of digital culture when artists can often find themselves lost in endless possibilities and details. To be fair, Kubo manages to sidestep some of the more obvious pitfalls, though his tunes are sometimes overloaded with ideas and the album can feel erratic in how it unfolds. This might have been avoided by arranging the tracks in a different order — putting the hip-hop together and having them lead into the more upbeat sounds — Kuno could then guide the listener through his sonic explorations more logically, instead of having the tempo jolt up and down.