The opening Musical Chairs is pure ’80s and even though that’s the one they used to promote the release, accompanying it with a lyrics video (and it is also the closest to what they did on META), still, that’s the weakest of the of the five songs. But fortunately Metahalf turned out to be much more than just a collection of new tracks in the same vein and while it still maintains that overall retro sound, each of the five tracks sees them branching out to new directions. While META was a strong album, especially on its own “revisiting our past” way, it was still a bit questionable if there is any point in reprising it for yet another release. While they released a live-album in August, Metahalf, the mini album that hit the stores early November is the first new material from the group. While Takahashi’s presence was by far the strongest, making many tracks sound like direct follow-ups to YMO’s later albums, actually everyone brought their own influences into the mix, which made it a very colorful and diverse release, that was a lot of fun to listen to. However Metafive’s first album, META, that came out this January was fortunately nothing like that: it did not want to save the World or be the best album ever made, it was simply a bunch of great musicians obviously having a lot of fun, doing what they do best.
A truly amazing lineup, but such super-groups are always a hit-or-miss: in some cases they turn out to be as good as you would expect from such a great collection of talents, but way too often they fail to deliver and the “we gonna make the best music ever” intentions lead to horrible, pretentious works. Metafive started back in 2014 as an all star super-group, formed by Yukihiro Takahashi of Japanese techno / electro pop innovators Yellow Magic Orchestra, including Tomohiko Gondo (from the band anonymass, who was already involved with one of Takahashi earlier projects, called Pupa), solo singer Leo Imai and a couple of globally known musicians, who surfaced with the Shibuya-kei movement back in the ’90s: Towa Tei, Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius) and Yoshinori Sunahara.
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