The Morning After: Midori Hirano's Klo: Yuri

Klo: Yuri, released October 14th on Noble Japan

Midori Hirano feels like what happens when all the nerds in school get together and try to make pop music. It might not always be pretty, sometimes it’s just plain awkward, there are instances of pleasant surprise, but in the end, at least they’re giving it their best shot. And Klo: Yuri, Midori Hirano’s sophomore release, feels like the progressive culmination of all this, as its gathering of music theory books and computer savvy results in an academic and sometimes brutally modernist approach to post-classical music. And if you ignore the fact that Midori Hirano is a well-educated and worldly Berliner from Japan, picturing her as the leader of a band of clumsy Americans isn’t a huge stretch.

While it’s true that obscure musico-intellectual structures often seem emphasized over enjoyment on this album, some pretty good things come of Klo: Yuri. Nice tracks such as “Feathers” and “Null” get to the root of the strange nature of the solo effort, with monotonously counting in German acting as a contrast to what are often lush and complex arrangements. And digging further finds more fine moments, such as album linchpin “Out,” a subtly mechanistic take on pretty-pop that acts as the collection’s cutest and most single-worthy track. Stripped of orchestral strings and most of the ornate elements present in other songs, the tune is left unexpectedly bare and held together by incidental pieces of percussion—in essence, it’s a gentler, cuddlier center to what sometimes feels like an over-thought graduate school thesis. And when it all comes down to it, this is an intriguing little mess of an album—not always pretty, a little awkward, and maybe, just maybe, put together by someone who sat by herself at the middle school lunch table.

Report Card: B