- The J-pop star teams up with Floating Points for a laid-back 11-minute acid house epic.
- On the cover of their new album, BAD MODE, J-pop star Hikaru Utada looks positively cozy, leaning up against the wall of an apartment in a sweatsuit as their son walks by. It's an unlikely image for one of the genre's biggest crossover exports, but it reflects the mood of the music: comfortable in its own skin, grown and sexy. Across the LP Utada works with producers like Skrillex and A.G. Cook to conjure up an alternately subtle and flamboyant sound that veers between dance pop and lounge music, but it's with Floating Points that Utada can really melt into the music. You feel it on the Shibuya-kei style title track or, especially, album closer "Somewhere Near Marseilles," which unfurls across 11 minutes of hypnotic, spirally acid house.
Over an on-and-off rhythm produced by Floating Points and Utada themselves (they play electronic hand drums and shakers), the only constant is an acid line that winds and zips throughout the song as Utada's pleas get more urgent. "Somewhere Near Marseilles" is a smoldering torch song sung to a distant lover, inviting them on a "rendezvous vacay" to the South Of France. As the Japanese-American vocalist switches effortlessly between Japanese and English, the song paints a portrait of class and luxury, in-between Utada's confession that they're "afraid of love." As they repeatedly contradict themselves—"Let's go fast / Then go slow"—every new line is its own hook.
The vocal production sits so perfectly on Floating Points' gentle rhythms that once Utada begins to fade into the track for its extended outro, you barely notice. It just feels right. Their voice, clarion and strong, reappears every one in a while, firm in their delivery and confident despite the vulnerability of the lyrics. It's not quite a dance floor album—it's too subtle and stately for that—but it's somewhere wonderfully in-between, an amorous ballad you can tap your foot to, a track that channels the frenetic energy of acid house something a little more relaxed, the kind of thing that makes you dance around your apartment in your comfiest clothes.