Japan’s envy has been at it for 32 years now, and have over 20 releases (albums, splits, EPs/etc) to their credit. Their last album, The Fallen Crimson made my year-end list in 2020 in part to some utterly gorgeous female vocals enhancing the already mesmerizing, soaring post-rock/metal.
Now, four years later, we get Eunoia (a word describing the mutual feeling of goodwill that exists between a speaker and their audience), and in these divisive, conflicted times, this is the album we need as it is one of the most uplifting, hopeful, warm and heartfelt albums of 2024, if not the last couple of years.
Still, plying their form of mellow post-rock with bursts of screamo, envy are absolute masters of shimmery, minor key melodies laced with Tetsuya Fukagawa’s spoken words, soft croons, and pained shouts/rasps (it’s about a 70/30 split).
And that same split applies musically, as most of Eunoia is this absolutely gorgeous, heart-rending post-rock that glistens with sun-flecked warmth and emotional, introspective passion. For example, the likes of “The Night and the Void”, “Beyond the Raindrops” or appropriately cimactic “January’s Dusk”, are just sooooo fucking beautiful, but still somehow pained, it almost moves me to tears (it’s my allergies, I swear). It is the musical equivalent of whalesong.
But sometimes, they give a nod back to their more abrasive, tumbling earlier releases as heard on the almost blackened Vallendusk-ish finale of the gloriously uplifting “Imagination and Creation” or Thursday -ish “Whiteout” and “Lingering Echoes”.
The only downsides to this knee-wilting album are that it’s barely 30 minutes long and the female vocals from The Fallen Crimson are absent. With a four-year wait, a little more material would be nice. But otherwise, yet another wondrous effort from one of Japan’s finest musical exports.
