My thoughts on “brownie”, the latest mini-album from nuance.

Release Date: September 16th 2020

Tracklist

1. home
2. sekisyo
3. new music
4. aioi
5. kanashimi dance
6. hatsukoi pedal
7. hachigatsu no navy

There’s a lot to be said about image when it comes to the Idol scene, with groups of varying styles, sensibilities and what have you all vying for attention. You’ve got super colorful groups, groups with a cool aura, dark and edgy groups and pretty much everything else you can imagine in between all of those things. It’s fair to say most of you reading my website are probably more interested in the Punk, Rock, Hardcore, Experimental, etc side of things and are likely to not even give the release I’m talking about today a second look because of the very clean and orderly way it’s being presented. I always say that you should never judge a book by its cover though and that’s definitely the case here.

nuance are a group that I stumbled upon around the middle of last year when they were still rising through the ranks of the Japanese Idol scene. They’re much more popular these days but I’ll never forget when I first decided to check out their “town” mini-album (review here) and being very pleasantly surprised by the songs contained within. The basis was in Pop certainly, but the experimentation and risks being taken to push the idea of what a Pop song could be were what really grabbed my attention. When you’ve listened to as much of this stuff as I have at this point then it’s kinda hard to find songs that do something you haven’t really heard before but here they were.

The group then followed up that release with “botän” (review here) and I have to admit that I wasn’t really super impressed with it and certainly not as much as the release that had come just before it. I did appreciate the almost even more experimental nature of things though and that’s what happens when you experiment sometimes, the results don’t end up working out for everyone. Well, nuance are back to take another stab at redefining J-Pop with their latest mini-album “brownie”, which sounds delicious by the way. There’s 7 tracks included and I honestly don’t know what I’m about to listen to and that excites me. So let’s just cut to the chase and dive right into it, alright?

As is the case with a lot of mid to long-form Idol release of late, “brownie” kicks things off with a short opening track entitled “home”. It’s about a minute long and the first thing we hear is a field recording of sorts where it sounds like it’s raining and there’s some kind of fog horn going off nearby. A band of sorts is struck up not long after, playing out a tune on what sounds like some hastily slapped together instruments though things do become a bit more melodic as they build up some steam after a pretty rough start. The members of nuance show up around midway through to say a few words that act as a sort of opening dialogue for what is to follow I suppose. Things then fade out back to the opening field recording and the track quickly drifts away to allow the mini-album’s first proper song to take center stage.

There’s quite a lot to take in during the opening instrumental segment of the mini-album’s second track “sekisyo”, with a lot of very bold and unique elements being brought into play almost simultaneously. You have a very bright, almost guitar-like synthesizer melody along with another that kinda sounds like someone flipping through pages and eventually a mildly fuzzy beat is also added into the mix. It all comes together really well but it is quite a lot rather quickly. The track settles down into this more mellow brand of Electronica by the time the first verse hits though, which allows the members of nuance enough room to breath and be able to deliver a very ear pleasing and melodic vocal performance. While even I wasn’t expecting the Spoken Word/Rap parts that feature throughout the song, they fit the mood really well somehow and like I said, you shouldn’t be judging this group on looks alone in the first place. The choruses are more along the lines of your standard J-Pop fare, with all of the vocals coming together for some nice harmonic sections that, while perhaps not quite as much as the aforementioned Rap parts, had some pleasing hooks of their own too. The instrumental is probably a bit more interesting to me if I’m being honest, as I thought that the recurring Lo-Fi slant to things made for some pretty punchy moments that helped the vocals land just that little bit harder. In some ways this sort of song is probably what most people would expect from a group that looks like this, but nuance have then taken it several steps farther and put their own unique spin on it like they’re known to have a habit of doing. The results speak for themselves I think.

Okay so we have this, to most people anyway, kind of unassuming looking Idol group with a mini-album that has a pretty cute title of which its third track is titled “new music”. Raise your hand if you were expecting the chugging Rock riffs and hard hitting drumbeat that combined with a bit of synthesizer distortion to lead off this song. Well that’s what we’ve got here folks and it’s just as good as any of the groups that you’re probably already listening to so if there’s one track from this release that you simply must check out then I think you should make it this one. Okay sure, I personally would have preferred if it didn’t take on such a heavy Rap dynamic when the vocals came in but really, I expect nuance to push boundaries quite extensively but I would never peg them as a group to just randomly drop some harsh vocals out of nowhere. The lyrics are catchy and the girls all have a great flow to how they’re delivering their lines though, so even if Rap isn’t my favorite sub-genre of Idol I can still appreciate it when a group can pull it off as technically sound as nuance have been able to here. The instrumental is a bit repetitive while all of this is going on but I did enjoy the record scratching that they added in for effect at least. The choruses on the track seem almost out of place then with both how melodic the vocals are and how bright and Poppy the instrumental sounds. They do a good job of breaking things up though, even if I’m not the biggest fan in the world of the actual lyrical content which just seems a bit off of its rhythm, especially when compared to all of the other stuff that’s going on on this track. Come for the Nu-Metal nostalgia and maybe you’ll like the other stuff too but the latter isn’t quite doing it for me I must say.

Let’s bring things down a little bit after all of that loudness and excitement shall we? Fourth track “aioi” is looking to deliver something a bit more on the classy side with an instrumental that blends together many elements from Jazz, Funk, Lounge and even a bit of a Latin inspiration too to make for a nice rich, smooth soundscape. Lots of nice, subtle instrumentation going on here if that’s something that you’re into and plenty of little melodies and instrumental parts to pick out throughout the track so well worth some repeated listens on that basis alone, as if the overall composition wasn’t already reason enough to give this track some repeated spins. The vocals match the mood in the room, being delivered in this low and similarly rich and smooth tone which further pushes that idea of this being a slightly more upmarket affair. The lead-ins to the song’s choruses are especially cool as they give each of the members a chance to have their own, and in several cases quite powerful, solo part so just in case further proof that this group of girls were all incredibly capable singers was needed then you can hear that right here on this track if you need to. The choruses themselves follow a similar tone to the verses but performed in a much more uptempo and energy laden style which definitely helped them to stand out from the rest of the track and the quicker nature of the vocal lines made for some particularly catchy moments as a result. Some of this exuberance does bleed out into the rest of the track here and there but for the most part everything is fairly well contained. For me that was the right call but depending on what you’re looking for I could certainly see a case to be made for doing things the other way around also. I have a soft spot for these really smooth, Jazzy Lounge numbers though so I was content with how this track played out.

We continue the Lounge-y vibe into the next track on the mini-album “kanashimi dance”, which I initially thought was going to end up sounding like a rather dark and broody number by how the instrumental started off. It eventually kicked over into a more upbeat and rather rhythmic arrangement featuring the aforementioned Lounge style combined with a bit of a Lo-Fi Rock flavor which I thought all came together to work out rather well in the end. It has this Kinoco Hotel sort of feel to it so if you’re familiar with that band then that’s probably the best way I have of describing to you what’s going on here. The vocals are fairly low tension and do have a bit of a gloomy mood to them, so maybe what I was picking up early on is more of an underlying theme of the track but I liked the echo-y effect on them which once again reminded me quite a bit of Kinoco Hotel and is definitely something that has been proven to work very well with this style over the years. The choruses aren’t substantially different in tone or style to the rest of the track but they do up the brightness of everything a decent amount, along with the tempo which does make for an effective change of pace but there are times where things do sound a little bit shrill or verging on blown out but these moments are fairly few and far between thankfully. Honestly, there’s very little that I dislike about this track and in fact it actually hits on a lot of things that I’ve been enjoying musically lately both inside and outside of the Japanese music scene. Great stuff then as far as I’m concerned and for me personally this is the biggest highlight of what has been a very diverse release thus far.

Penultimate track “hatsukoi pedal” rather fittingly opens with a very nice solo piano piece that I honestly thought was setting this track up to be the prerequisite Ballad for this release. I was then pleasantly surprised when a band of sorts was struck up and things took on a very bright and mildly energetic tone. A nice beat is blended with some catchy synthesizer melodies along with a horn section to create a very feelgood, almost party-like atmosphere while still holding onto more of that slower tempo Ballad style that I was expecting when this track initially got going. That’s about where the vocals fall in the end so I can kinda see what they’re going for in that regard. You still get a very nice melodic performance out of nuance here which is something that we’ve come to expect by now but it still bears mentioning because they’re great at what they do. I might have liked a bit more intensity at times but nothing here, be it verses or choruses, is difficult to listen to by any means and on the whole it all makes for a very enjoyable listen. They’ve taken what could have otherwise been a fairly straightforward arrangement and tried to put a more interesting spin on it and at least for me I think that it worked out pretty well. The song definitely trends more towards conventional Pop than perhaps much of the rest of the mini-album does but that’s fine be me at this point in the proceedings. Not super flashy, but still very solid stuff.

Closing out the mini-album we have “hachigatsu no navy” which at almost 5 and a half minutes is clocking in at by far and away the longest track on this release. I’m not really a fan of super long songs in all honesty and that kind of holds true here as well. I said we were probably due a Ballad and that’s pretty much what this track is. It features a warm, soft feeling instrumental that’s mainly comprised of muted guitars, piano and a slow, steady drumbeat which while very nice to listen to initially does sort of leave you wanting a bit more variety by the time the track’s 5 minutes have passed. At least I did anyway but then again this sort of style isn’t really something I’m typically listening to in the first place to be fair. There are a few interesting instrumental moments along the way, be it a piano melody here or a guitar riff there but for the most part the track is playing things pretty straight down the middle. Vocally it’s also pretty much what you would expect from a song like this, with the nuance members delivering yet another ear pleasing, melodic performance in keeping with the emotions and tempo being crafted by the rest of the track. There’s some nice individual performances throughout and the chorus while not exactly sticking out too much was still a nice example of how well the group can come together and harmonize like they did here. A fairly typical way of closing out a longer form release like this and while not quite as groundbreaking as some of the other material featured here, it’s still a great showcase that nuance can pull off both the conventional and slightly less so equally well.

Of the nuance releases that I’ve reviewed on this site thus far, I would say that “brownie” sits comfortably above “botän” and maybe just slightly below “town” in my personal nuance ranking as it stands right now. There’s some great variety in genres featured here, some of which even I never expected to hear out of this group and no matter what style is being performed the tracks all feature incredible vocal work from all of the nuance members. Definitely worth a listen even if you don’t think this would be something that you would be interested in for whatever reason.

It’s always hard to predict what nuance are going to come out with next, as experimenting and pushing the boundaries of Pop is pretty much what the group is all about. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but either way I’m always excited to hear whatever they come up with and they’re definitely one of the better examples in the scene of why you should never judge a book by its cover. Though unfortunately it seems like a lot of people still do.