Brooklyn-based band Georgia Weber and the Sleeved Hearts recently released their six-song EP Big in Japan via Princess Veronica Records, an homage to the Japanese art and stories that inspired them.
The cover art features a character in an all-black suit falling from the sky with a bass, and the EP's title appears in uneven red lettering behind them. The style is reminiscent of numerous Japanese cartoons and manga, creating an EP that embraces its heavy Japanese influence in all of its aspects–from sound to art.
Big in Japan opens with a one-minute track titled “Jo.” Reminiscent of a haunting music box melody, it sets the dark, dreamy tone for the rest of the project.
The band follows the opener with "Kintsugi," a nearly five-minute track that maintains the slow pace while introducing Weber’s lyrics about finding love and the feeling that all problems have suddenly been solved.
The second half of the song repeats the line "it's the sweetest of worst days now," expressing the notion that even your worst days are better when you have someone to comfort you. Weber also sings the line: "these cracks repair with gold." This gives the track its name as it references the Japanese art of Kintsugi: repairing pottery with gold. Weber uses this art form as an image for repairing hardships with genuine love, feeling like one's cracks were mended with gold.
"Wind Telephone" is the third track of the EP.
Here, Weber uses the image of the telephone to represent a link between two people even in the darkest of times: "even if in this life we will never meet again/ The telephone/ The telephone/ The telephone will call you home." This track is immediately followed by "Urashima Taro Intro," a track which uses one minute of an intense solo drum beat to signal the second half of the EP, with the following track titled, fittingly, "Urashima Taro."
"Urashima Taro"begins by continuing the drums from the previous track, but soon pushes them into the background with the onset of Kenji Herbert's guitar. In this track, Weber uses lines like "suddenly a minute/ a minute into nights and years" to reference the Japanese fairytale of Urashima Taro, a man who saves a sea turtle and is later rewarded by an undersea princess. Taro believes he has spent only a few days with the princess, but upon returning to his own world, he discovers that he's been gone for a hundred years.
The EP closes with "Koinobori," a short instrumental that brings the project full circle, returning listeners to the same music box and the same magical world where it began. Weber's myriad references to different forms of Japanese art and culture throughout this EP give it a clear element of care and love that can be heard in each track. The EP is available to stream now.
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