01. Tada no Tomodachi
02. muse'ic
03. Sailing Days
04. Kokoro
05. Utai Mashou
06. Dorei
07. Rainboots de Odori Mashou
08. s(o)un(d)beams
09. Mirror Neurotic
10. Hostile To Me
11. Tsuduki wo
S(o)un(d)beams is Salyu’s album, a celebration of everything great about her past work and a grand rebirth, like Lady Gaga hatching out of an egg if that actually resulted in something. To properly understand why this is, a little history lesson is in order.
Despite being the “mainstream” side of the project, Salyu never really has been an A-list J-Pop star. She first popped up not as Salyu but as Lily Chou-Chou, a fictional singer in a movie in 2000. Four years later she finally debuted as, well, herself. Her albums tend to chart well – sophomore effort Terminal remains her best-selling album having moved 87,000 units and climbing as high as number two on the Oricon album charts (the follow-up got to seven, while S(o)un(d)beams hit 12). Her singles chart all over the place though – at her peak she’s gotten as high as 10 by herself, usually following somewhere between 15 and 23 (before that, though, adjust to something like between 30 and 100). A collaboration with Bank Band titled “To U” remains her best known song, having reached the second spot on the singles chart. Salyu’s not an obscure artist, but she doesn’t demand attention like cornballs Koda Kumi or Aiko.
Her strongest tool has always been her voice, a soaring sound capable of pushing upper registers without losing any power. Last year’s “Atarashi Yes” highlights everything great about Salyu – that voice, mostly, but also the way you don’t have to know a single word of Japanese or even what “yes” means to get the emotional oooomph of the single. She’s shown flashes of the same vocal power Bjork boasts. Yet Salyu’s never had a good album to her name…”Atarashi Yes” was among a pocket’s worth of good songs on her third album Maiden Voyage, a bloated affair weighed down by half-hearted stabs at mainstream balladry. Earlier releases Landmark and Terminal don’t fare much better. Salyu’s not a top-tier pop star, but whoever puts together her full-lengths desperately want her to be. Bjork carved out an identity while still in The Sugarcubes, whereas Salyu remains caught in J-Pop R&D. Up to now, she’s mostly been a case of “what if.”
Yet here, name doubled up, she’s set free to chase her “Muse’ic” without fear of censor. Cornelius hasn’t improved on Salyu’s voice, but rather crafted a sonic world wide open for her to do her thing from all sorts of angles. It’s not perfect – at this point, it should be acknowledged the album opens with a relative thunk via the annoying “Tada No Tomodachi,” a case of both Salyu and Cornelius relying too much on the gimmick of “a lot of voices at once!”…but what artistic re-emergence is? On S(o)un(d)beams she finds someone willing to let her experiment, and she dives headfirst into an opportunity that it seems like she has been waiting a long time for.
So…whereas in the hands of a more chart-obsessed person “Sailing Days” (the latest in a string of songs finding Salyu obsessed with boats) probably would have ended up a minor-key ballad, here it’s a little shanty that turns into a crescendo of Salyu’s crashing against the shore at a dizzying rate. Cornelius steps way to the background on “Kokoro” and just lets her sing hauntingly around minimal strings. “Dorei” and “Rain Boots De Odorimashou” find Salyu having some of the most fun she’s ever had on record, playing with the extremes of her voice on both (screech-iness on the prior, calmness on the latter). “Hostile To Me” doesn’t just feature a Bjork-like title, it finally finds Salyu making something resembling a Bjork-ish ballad. It all comes back to “Muse’ic,” where she emerges from a cocoon with big bright wings and like eight mouths just ready to sing the praises of art.
It’s tempting to give Cornelius more credit than he deserves for how Salyu sounds here, since the draw of Salyu X Salyu has always been “Salyu’s voice all over the place!” He deserves a lot of praise – excellent placing of her various vocal tracks, not to mention creating the music that that allowed her to sound like this – but he’s just an arranger for the most part. Salyu is the one giving the vocal performance of her career, one that doesn’t feature anything resembling the big pay-off moments like “Atarashi Yes” but rather sees her exploring every corner of her sound. From: https://makebelievemelodies.com/review-salyu-x-salyu-soundbeams/
