Shugo Tokumaru

Say, October-ish, Shugo Tokumaru stepped out of the Oink-less ether and rewarded the stiffening cockles of our hearts as only a mild-mannered Clark Kent could, with the most unabashed, self-contained music he’s made yet. In fact, CMG died a little inside when Shugo was unable to get us, we had hoped, a cover of “For Reverend Green” in time for our Fantasy Podcast. Busy, what with scoring top ten sweet on a, ahem, cover of “Young Folks” and all. But Shugo, being the explicitly gracious guy that he is, might just record it sometime next year because, power fistpumps aside, we dearly want to hear what kind of rockcandyhump of melody that’ll turn into.

Still, the gravest injustice to CMG and to 2007’s elite ranks of segmented sunshine pop was in how difficult it was for Exit to seize a North American audience; only available through the very un-English P-Vine Records, Shugo’s third record casts his amoebic voice into a populist pond, assimilating Western pop cues (spaghetti, folk, Vegas lights, and, um, klezmer) into something too innocent or unscathed for kitsch. Can we truly believe in a record that ostensibly gives us everything we want without the campy luggage? Because Exit came out of nowhere, literally, and built of everything continues as nothing: can’t buy from Amazon, can’t look it up on Allmusic, won’t find it yet on iTunes even though three singles have been “released” with complimentarily lysergic videos. Couple that with Shugo’s unintended condoning of the Western way: can’t read Japanese? Just steal this shit from somewhere.

And I hope we all get that familiar pang of guilt because, hands down palms up, the simplest success of Exit is how — bristling with unadorned melody despite all the instrumental wonk — Shugo puts to shame the Field Musics and the Of Montreals based on how labored they seem in comparison. “Button” is only as “Button” does, sail rigging knocking against a dock of organs, splashes of movement existing because they move; its happy chorus is an inertial spread that includes, radially, the “Parachute” jig on acoustic guitars meant to sound like banjos or the banjos meant to sound like treefrog hindquarters rubbed laterally together through the closing of “Wedding.” If every bit of Exit seems to be nonsensically spinning, it’s because Shugo’s gotten to the point where he’s got to make his own orbits. He’s doing all the work for us.