Grand Voyage

Shibuya-kei from France (Lille, to be precise); they've since relocated to Tokyo... for those not familiar, it's a microgenre that is glitchy, sugar-sweet, and dense with weird futuristic, modernistic, hyper-commercialistic (?) hyperpop with twee elements; here, we get some traditional shibuya-kei sounds, joined with their french intonations + je ne sais quoi; hard to describe, anyway, it's all FCC clean and all very good; mixture of fem + masc vocals, often within same song

RIYL Cornelius, Kero Kero Bonito, Daft Punk, Pizzicato Five, etc, etc

1. (1:05) *** Not really a song, ambient sounds of a futuristic mall, a spoken phone call; FLOWS INTO
2. (3:06) ***** strong bleepy and sunshiney beat, steady rhythm with synchronized voices, syrupy (good) intoning about a window seat; gets glitchier and spacier; glitchy breakdown at end
3. (5:14) ****** Brisk tempo with big fat bassline, glitchy 8bit soaring sounds, sweet; gets to a sort of go-kart game atmosphere, the chorus dropping this crunchy revving texture is so good; last minute or so is more loose and we hear swooping winds, more abstract glitch sounds, a car drives away at the end
4. (4:02) **** softer moodier opening swallowed up in crunchy timbres, clearer chorus; more of a junkyard breakdown midway through, soaring
5. (3:48) ***** Glunchy and bright opening with phone call excerpts, dial tones, etc; midtempo hyper ballad, hopeful and also claustrophobic with modern textures; ends like shutting a cassette player
6. (1:17) ** Interlude, spacey sounds, and a sad guy typing in a chat room to old friends, moody and short
7. (2:48) *** Very bright and squirty synth, male vox in verse, plodding and cute chorus; buzzy glitchy outro
8. (3:33) **** Warpo and sunshiny intro, "da da da"; shredded fem glitch-vox; fragile and fun sound; computer "let's go" in super-glitch segment 2 min in, hits steady-state and increasingly softening synth intro
9. (5:33) ***** Swaying, brisk but light, chanteuse in cyberland vibe; optimistic and wistful atmosphere, more insistent in back half, funkier and warpier and increasingly spacier and more detached, ends with mall ambience and gliss-out
10. (2:46) *** Slower and more quizzical; a little sparser than other tracks
11. (3:54) **** Dreamy glitch lush bed, wistful and sweet/sad fem vox; midtempo and plunky
12. (5:05) ***** Slow spacetrip computer voice countdown, lush and sweet texture; very slow and near-ambient... becomes sad floss-thin synth; later a sing-conversation with the robot; lusher and slower and sadder, until blowing up in a big tape reel avalanche, and CLICK