Strange and Exact

Shiina Ringo makes music that refuses to be simple. The drums come in wrong. The strings sound like they’re out of tune. Her voice sits somewhere between singing and speaking, flat and exact. Nothing about it sounds like someone trying to please you. It sounds like someone following an idea, trusting that the right people will understand.

She’s been doing this since the late ’90s, mostly in Japan, mostly unconcerned with whether the rest of the world was listening. The Tokyo Jihen, the band she formed, made some genuinely strange records before breaking up in 2012. Since then she’s gone solo, and if anything, the music’s gotten weirder and more precise at the same time.

There’s something in that refusal to simplify. Most pop music is trying to be likable. This is trying to be true. True to whatever she’s hearing, true to whatever the song wants to be, even if that means it’ll be strange for a lot of people. You have to trust it, and you have to pay attention.

That takes something from you. Not in a pretentious way, just honestly. But if you’re the kind of person who likes music that thinks about itself, music that doesn’t apologize for being weird, then yeah. This is it.