Kikagaku Moyo – Kumoyo Island – 2022

It’s always a weird feeling when you discover a band making crazy interesting music only to find they are no longer together.  The first two that popped in mind were Slint and Neutral Milk Hotel.  While those bands did in fact reunite to tour, I have no idea if this group will do ever do the same. You can tell, though, that their live shows were probably pretty great based just on the musicality and chemistry.

I was chilling one evening surfing chaotically through the youtubes as one does when the track “Decending Blue” popped up.  Its intro starts with an odd cello line that’s quickly followed by a funky wah-guitar and killer groove from bass, and I was hooked. 

The band is full-on psychedelic and full of surprises.  Each track has its own sound and groove, but as a whole, it maintains a consistent feel.  They’ve got the musical language of a jam band with that sense of easy musicality, but the compositions are really well put together.  This album is great with low-key chill vibes and danceable catchy tracks.  I think this might be one of my summer go-to’s.

AllMusic.com – 4 stars

In 2022, after roughly a decade of psychedelic exploration, Japanese psych band Kikagaku Moyo announced they were going on an indefinite hiatus, and that their fifth album, Kumoyo Island, would be their last. Kikagaku Moyo's output took many different forms over their various albums, but the band approached both their spaced-out jams and tightly composed songs with a thoughtful technicality that felt precise and intentional even when traveling the outer limits. Kumoyo Island is no different, and the versatile set of songs finds Kikagaku Moyo seamlessly traversing cosmic funk, airy folk sounds, ragged kosmiche-informed garage rock blasting, and more, often shuffling through a multitude of styles and sounds in a single song. Rather than coming off as disorienting quick changes, however, the band arrange their rapidly morphing songs carefully, and the end results always feel comfortably organic. The pulsating lo-fi space rock groove that begins "Cardboard Pile" is quickly abandoned for a completely different rhythm, spindly guitar riffs, and a distant brass section. The brilliantly arranged "Dancing Blue" is based around a core of warped funk, growing into a euphoric midsection that includes floating acoustic guitars, gentle bell-like guitar plinks, and shimmery clouds of electronic noise. The song shifts melodically underneath all of the instrumental changes, reconfiguring Dots and Loops-era Stereolab into a far more psychedelic form. As Kumoyo Island plays out, the band wanders through moments of early morning post-rock softness ("Effe"), crunchy power chords and dazzled guitar leads (“Yayoi Iyayoi”), chaotic, repetitive jamming ("Field of Tiger Lilies"), ambient dreamscapes ("Maison Silk Road"), and other diversions. These various curiosities flow into one another, and any moments of chaos are completely controlled. Stunning playing, unexpected turns, and precisely detailed sonic architecture are all commonplace elements of Kikagaku Moyo's sound and the stylistic tangents and world-building atmospheres of Kumoyo Island feel more even more like a statement than any of the band's already seriously crafted previous albums.
AllMusic.com Fred Thomas