CoSign: The Japanese House Is Moving Past Straight Lines
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The post CoSign: The Japanese House Is Moving Past Straight Lines appeared first on Consequence.
CoSign is an accolade we use to put our stamp of approval on an up-and-coming artist or group who is poised for the big time. For June 2023, we’re highlighting Amber Bain’s project The Japanese House and her latest LP, In the End It Always Does.
It was at the end of the writing and recording process when Amber Bain began working on “Boyhood,” the first single off The Japanese House’s sophomore studio album, In the End It Always Does. But the song came about from some rather unorthodox inspiration: While working in the studio with producer Chloe Kraemer, the two stumbled across a video from the 2000s that featured a bunch of gay cowboys line dancing in front of The White House.
“Gay marriage wasn’t legal yet, and there must have been like 20 really sexy gay guys in cowboy hats and cowboy boots and little vests doing this really amazing dance,” Bain describes to Consequence over a video call. “It was both hilarious and heartbreaking; there’s something so powerful about the video. I showed it to my dad and he actually shed a tear… and then he just said, ‘It’s the courage of it all.'”
This resonated with Bain, who sought to imbue In the End It Always Does with a similar kind of spirit. Throughout the album, she cycles through themes of transformation, heartbreak, and queer identity; the music spans from funk-inflected pop to more naturalistic folk and country-esque arrangements, all highlighted by Bain’s warm, versatile vocals. She recruited label mates and previous collaborators Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975, MUNA’s Katie Gavin, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who help take Bain’s indie pop stylings to expansive territory without ever losing her touches of intimacy and personality.
The album’s title and asymmetrical cover art are intended to suggest a cyclical pattern — whether that be in relationships, personal identity, or in the presentation of the music itself. Bain designed the album to be continuously looped: the final song, “One for Sorrow, Two for Joni Jones,” culminates with synths and the whack of a drum stick, all leading back to the bubbling synths of the album’s opening number, “Spot Dog.”
“I think it’s a sign of progression,” she says, “Before, everything was straight lines. If you look at all the artwork that I chose, the press shots that I like, all the EPs and album covers… everything is straight, perpendicular lines. So it’s kind of funny to go from that to just an asymmetrical circle.” She confesses that while she’s generally drawn to “easy-to-process minimal imagery,” the cover art also mirrors the album’s thematic approach around gender and identity.
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“We were messing around a lot with gay symbolism and signifiers… like how gay men would often wear a handkerchief outside their jean pocket, and the color would signify whether they were a top or bottom. I think because of gender, I relate more to gay men and gay men imagery, and I kind of feel jealous a lot of the time. So we experimented with subverting gay male imagery and re-owning that as a lesbian or a gender queer person or whatever the hell you want to call me, I still haven’t figured that whole vibe out,” Bain says. It’s not the first time she uses the word “whatever” to define her gender — but on In the End It Always Does, she leans heavily into those grey areas.
It’s why gender envy is a larger theme for Bain — particularly in “Boyhood,” which we named as one of the Top Songs of 2023 (So Far). Across a quick, throbbing beat, Bain ponders whether the grass would have been greener had her gender been different, eventually landing on the idea that who she is in the present is more important than if things had gone another way. Even more illuminating is the video for “Boyhood,” which features Bain riding horseback with her best friend. “It was like lesbian Brokeback Mountain,” she says.
For Bain, it’s important to acknowledge the explicit queerness in this album. “In this record, there are female pronouns on nearly every song,” says Bain, “Which was not on purpose, but I don’t even think about it anymore and I think a few years ago maybe I would have been very conscious of that. But I think it kind of is effortlessly queer, because it is queer. I’d like to think that somehow that slips through, especially on songs like ‘Boyhood’ and ‘Friends,’ which sound quite gay to me. So I’d like to be in the ‘gay’ genre bracket.”
It’s safe to say that she found comfort and creative freedom working alongside Kraemer, whom she claims is now one of her best friends. “She reflected myself back at me in a lot of ways,” she says. “These songs are all about queer experience and being a queer woman, and I think that working with another queer woman helped get those songs out and treat them with the kind of romance that they need and deserve.”
She feels like the partnership also helped rewire some of her songwriting techniques. “For a long time, I was like, ‘Okay, it’s just a song, who cares? Let’s just do it. Let’s just make it.’ And now, it’s like, ‘No, let’s treat it as though it’s romantic and artful.’ We’re making music, we’re not writing an essay, you know? I think for all these songs, it was important for me to have the experience of working with a queer woman, because I haven’t had that before.”
Bain goes on to describe working with MUNA’s Gavin, who lent a hand to “One for Sorrow, Two for Joni Jones” and “Morning Pages.” “We met at South by Southwest many years ago,” she reflects, “We’ve been good friends ever since. Often we’ll send each other songs when we’re working on an album; she’s someone I find very inspiring.”
She recounts the origins of “One for Sorrow, Two for Joni Jones”: “I’d written this instrumental piece on the piano, and I’d had it for ages and didn’t really want to deal with it — Matty [Healy] said it sounds like Joni Mitchell, but I just didn’t have any lyrics for it for a while. So one day, when Katie was coming to the studio, I woke up and I just wrote this poem straight away. I was quite hungover and I just wrote this really ridiculously sad poem. It kind of just poured out of me. And then I texted her and was like, ‘This is what should be sung over that piece of music.’ And she was like, ‘I’ll give it a go.’ And so she just stood at the microphone and the exact melody that’s on the record is what she sung… It was one of the craziest, most spine-tingling experiences that I’ve had in the studio. She just turned around afterwards and on her recording she just goes, ‘That was fun.’ And then she turns around and me and Chloe are just, like, sobbing.”
The song also reminds Bain of a major feature in In the End It Always Does: physical performance. “It’s so easy to use AI in a weird way or as a sample generator — you can literally type into a synth generator, ‘I want a soft, sad, alternative synth pop sound,’ and it just gives you something straight away, and it kind of takes the romance and poetry of making music out of it,” Bain says.
The Japanese House, photo by Devin Kasparian
“It’s much more interesting and fun to play actual instruments, get really good at a part, or have an actual performance. That is kind of the cool thing, and why I think that AI is probably going to peak and trough. People want to experience an actual human emotion, and the only way to get that is through the fallibility of performance. So we tried to incorporate as much performance as possible.” It’s a fitting subject considering how difficult some of the arrangements on the album are — the slick guitar work in “Sad To Breathe” and the homespun groove of “Baby Goes Again” are full of personality, demonstrating that Bain’s ear for clever melodies is unmatched.
As she prepares to finish off her 2023 with some lengthy tours in Europe and North America (get tickets here), she recalls a recent evening that’s sure to inspire her as she returns to the stage: seeing the rising queer artist Chappell Roan in London. She hadn’t been super familiar with Roan’s music beforehand, but by the end, she was obsessed.
“It reminded me of the power of performance, because I don’t know if I would have naturally connected to that genre of music as much as I have without seeing her perform,” she says. “Also, to see a space in which being queer is the norm… being surrounded by queer strangers is so special. I just love that that’s her audience. I think that’s really special. And since I’ve gone away and come back again, I’m hoping that I’ve grown my queer audience as well. It feels a lot more gay now than it did when I first started!”
It may be a vulnerable turn for Bain, but perhaps the album is summed up best by her father’s quote: “It’s the courage of it all.” Despite much of the album’s sonic and thematic choices living in grey areas, there’s a clarity that commands each track, born from the complicated and rewarding task of seeing and being seen.
Having trouble seeing the interview video above? Watch on YouTube.
CoSign: The Japanese House Is Moving Past Straight Lines
Paolo Ragusa
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