Album Review: The Japanese House – Good At Falling


Good At Falling



Do so many people no longer sing songs about love because it no longer exists, or simply because they’re afraid of it?

It seems sometimes like fewer and fewer writers are willing or able to look at the emotional contours of wanting someone to want them back, to be honest with themselves about the raking scratches of infatuation, heartbreak, sex and regret which only love can bring. Amber Bain, aka The Japanese House, has written a love album in the grand tradition, one that takes an unflinching gaze at a relationship which collapsed around her whilst she watched on.

There are moments during Good At Falling when the sense of objectivity is a little claustrophobic, bordering on voyeurism; on We Talk All Time she rationalises, ‘We don’t f*ck anymore/But we talk all the time so that’s fine’, the line a scarred admittance that, as the fractures finally rupture, what would once have been unacceptable becomes the frozen norm.

It’s a journey she didn’t have to take; having already produced four EPs since arriving in 2015 there was the lower risk option of throwing those together and calling it a single body of work, a viable one too given the reassurance of working with Matt Healy’s Dirty Hit label. Instead, Bain chose to express herself through a clean slate, drafting in collaborators BJ Burton and The 1975’s George Daniel to make an album of broken, off kilter pop which takes her through a dozen scarred Polaroids.

At times things are disarmingly simple – the Carpenters influenced separation guilt of Faraway, You Seemed So Happy’s freewheeling, elfin strum-a-long, but Good At Falling is the singer walking through a maze: ‘I keep looking for something/Even though it’s not there’, the chorus of Maybe You’re The Reason, while Everybody Hates Me features the messy graft of post-hangover anxiety over relaying synth and piano lines that sound like tumbling confusion.

This sort of self-destruction is often the last resort of the wounded. Bain though has the perspective to take what she can from the times that were good as well, the first moments when attention flows neatly into desire channelled through the warmly un-selfconscious Lilo, and on Follow My Girl the pan-harmonies and bedsit house are about making choices for better or worse.

Although reality lies at the edges, plenty of this world still lies in dreams, particularly the hazy laptop pads of Marika Is Sleeping and opener Went To Meet Her’s heavily auto-tuned buzz, both weaker moments in what otherwise is a glossy finished article.

As a title, Good At Falling seems like something of a misnomer; for the most part the idea is about lacking control, the result of an accident either of time or mistaken motion. Throughout it though, despite the maybe-heartbreak, there’s still a lack of rawness, another layer that if pulled back would surely give the listener access to a far more obsessive, connectable world.

Love after all is the sort of muse that gives us more when it’s left us with nothing.



(Andy Peterson)


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