Tenniscoats are the torchholders for a rich tradition of Japanese experimental lo-fi. The duo of Saya and Takashi Ueno approach the avant-garde from a refreshingly accessible, poppy angle and explore themes of sweetness and nostalgia, and occupy a singularly Japanese borderland between the cute and the strange. There is something about Tenniscoats’ music – its natural openness perhaps – that lends itself willingly to collaboration. Previous hookups have included fellow pop envelope-pushers Deerhoof, indie royalty the Pastels and Swedish post-rockers Tape.
A date with Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich seems like a natural move. There is something light and airy in the Canadian duo’s jazzy, loungy avant-pop that lends itself to such a collaboration. Krgovich’s singing is rich and soft, and his lyrics are often inspired by Eastern ideas, while Shabason cited Japanese new age music as a key influence on his saxophone playing while making 2020’s Philadelphia, alongside Krgovich and Chris Harris. Another influence could be Maher Shalal Has Baz, Tori Kudo’s purveyors of dusty, freely improvised jazz-folk (who, incidentally, have also collaborated with Tenniscoats).
This particular meeting of like minds came about when Shabason and Krgovich toured Japan in 2024. They enlisted Tenniscoats as a backing band, and although the newly-formed quartet only managed a couple of brief rehearsals, they performed a string of well-received gigs. From that point on, things moved quickly. A two-day stay at the Guggenheim House in Kobe resulted in the recording sessions that became Wao, an album of improvisational quickness and deliciously original melodicism.
The instant accord between the four musicians is palpable throughout Wao. A Fish Called Wanda begins with a nursery rhyme-like call and response before Krgovich lists different shapes of clouds. Muted, plucked strings and impressionistic wobbles of sax trade places with stately keys, before Shabason shuffles into jazz mode for the song’s final few seconds. It’s all wonderfully loose and sweet, calming and a little weird.
The rest of Wao carries on along similar lines, but thanks to the improvisational alacrity on show it never gets stale. At Guggenheim House foregrounds the piano and Krgovich’s lyrics. He is a master of imbuing the mundane with strange magic. It’s not that he makes slippers and spiders and staircases into sacred objects or shrines; rather, he celebrates the quiet importance and individuality of those apparently meagre things. Saya’s singing, which can feel tense or exploratory or cute (and sometimes all of these things at once), provides a perfect foil for Krgovich’s observations. When her vocals take the lead, as on the first half of Departed Bird, a song can hint at melancholy and exaltation simultaneously.
Shioya Collection combines eggshell electronics with open-ended piano chords and Shabason’s soft-focus sax. The final verse, where the two voices weave in and out of each other before being joined by the sax is a minor masterpiece of rainy-day atmospherics. Our Detour, the album’s most dramatic moment, is glitchy and wonky, and Saya’s voice acts for once as the song’s anchor rather than its wings. Ode to Jos’ is full of loaded pauses, which translate into moments of sympathy or compassion or longing, while Look Look Look is staccato and uncharacteristically percussive, but it still finds time to fill itself with an accumulation of fond lyrical details. It stands in stark contrast to the final song, the billowing, comparatively maximalist Lose My Breath, where the quartet for once give in to a rolling melody and a more textural, layered approach to instrumentation.
Wao is living proof that two utterly distinctive musical acts can collaborate successfully and create something new without losing any of their own potency in the process. This outwardly unassuming album is as wise and beautiful and unexpected as anything currently happening in the furthest-flung outposts of music.
Wao (August 29th, 2025) Western Vinyl
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