Full Circle by Shigeto
LABEL: Ghostly International

Brooklyn’s Shigeto has been busy this year, releasing two EP’s for fabled Ghostly International before offering us his first full length this week. Altogether, they feel like a literary journey in serial format, each segment offering one isolated component of a much greater picture. While the What We Held On To and Half-Circle EPs felt like novella’s, cut a little short, Shigeto has built up to his appropriately titled debut LP, Full Circle. And the story gets a lot bigger.

“The beats are thick and plentiful but never swallow the careful and sentimental melodies into leg-shaking inebriation.”

What’s so striking about Full Circle is its sonic removal from his EP’s on Ghostly. His first offerings on the label used plenty of field recordings smattered amongst his neo-hip-hop instrumentals, almost pulling back his original compositions. On Full Circle, tight melodies and rhythms play the central role, only augmented here and there in a smattering of acquired sound sources. As a result, the album feels a lot more cohesive and complete, while lacking some of the experimentalism of his EP’s.
  
Full Circle’s drawback is this oneness, which can border on redundancy. Field recordings, which made his EP’s feel so rich, are sadly lacking here, and, technically, his electronic sounds aren’t different enough from other electronic musicians to truly make him stand out in the group. Judging from the amount of material Shigeto has released, his LP could have been varied a bit more.

Despite these conceptual mis-steps, Shigeto’s lo-fi and Atari aesthetics will appeal to listeners of Mux Mool, Toro Y Moi and possibly Lusine at his most pop-oriented. The beats are thick and plentiful but never swallow the careful and sentimental melodies into leg-shaking inebriation. The album is produced with a lot of space for the songs to breathe, and there’s a reflective quality to Full Circle, and indeed, all of Shigeto’s catalog, that many of his contemporaries just can’t quite match.

I would recommend pairing up your physical package with the digital download from the Ghostly International store, as it contains the perfect closer, “A Close Keeper,” as a bonus.


REVIEWED BY NEIL LEVENS
NEIL’S FAVORITE TRACKS: “Relentless Drag” • “Look At All The Smiling Faces” • “A Close Keeper”


FREE MP3: “Relentless Drag”
FREE MP3: “And We Gonna (Samiyam Chopsticks Remix)”
FREE PODCAST/DJ MIX: posted on XLR8R



Preview and purchase album from the Ghostly Store

Shigeto - "Escape from the Incubator" from Ghostly International on Vimeo.