Chord

They once called him "neo soul melted in a microwave" "a one-man
Random Access Memories" and "Mac DeMarco of Koenji", but "Chord", the masterpiece new album from the mysterious, illusory "STAP Sigh Boys" (released September 20th on CD, download and streaming) sees him taking yet another musical detour.
Concise. Acoustic. Sentimental. Starts fun, ends beautifully. Chord
fuses hi-octane pop music with disco, jazz and vintage singersongwriter soft rock. The album is a recently re-earthed cassette mixtape
of songs recorded by STAP Sigh Boys on the cusp of 1970, just
before he was frozen in time for 50 years.
It starts with "Rodeo", a piano pop stomper, sounding like Ben Folds on Ritalin, swiftly followed by "Lovefool" - an ever-evolving acoustic digifunk banger, before segueing into disco-mode with tracks like "Let's Go!" and the Ginger Root tinged "Setouchi Magnet'.
On side B, the cassette takes a jazzy turn. The inhumanly intense bass solos of "Never-ending Lust for Chord" and "Chord", or the sweet bossa nova pop of "Melody" and "Sing a Song" are counterbalanced by the emotive electro-acoustic soul tracks "We Climbed a Mountain" and "H e l l o".
In the year that Elton John retires and Burt Bacharach passed away,
Chord seems to have arrived just in time to fill the gap.
The album is preceded by the quintessential sunshine pop single,
"Verbose Inroads" on August 23rd (Wed), including a collection of
Chord outtakes as b-sides.