Looking back, it’s hard to believe that the biggest talking point about Amber Bain when she started making music as The Japanese House was that she hadn’t given away enough information. At the beginning, the Buckinghamshire singer-producer’s real name was kept under wraps and there were no pictures of her face.
The fact that she was signed to The 1975’s record label, Dirty Hit, and traded in a similar mix of clean indie guitars and plush digital sounds, with layered, electronically polished vocal harmonies, led to speculation that this was a secret side project by the bigger band’s Matty Healy.
But by the time debut album Good at Falling arrived in 2019, she was front and centre, and singing about a breakup so unshrouded in mystery that she enlisted her ex, the singer-songwriter Marika Hackman, for Lilo’s music video, and called another song Marika is Sleeping.
As she returns with the follow-up, she’s been even more candid, explaining in the accompanying blurb that these songs are mostly about the end of a spell living in Margate as one-third of a “throuple”. It does feel as if her progression towards this conscious unthroupling has made her music 33 per cent sadder.
Sunshine Baby, which features Healy on backing vocals, finds her urging herself to “hold on to this feeling ‘cause you won’t feel it for long.” Sad to Breathe spends its first minute brooding quietly over piano notes before a sprightly beat arrives. Morning Pages, co-written with and featuring Katie Gavin from MUNA, is restrained in its melancholy, with tasteful synth touches and backwards effects leaving space for their sorrowful voices to stay at the fore.
The occasional glimmer of brightness suggests that she isn’t wallowing completely. Spot Dog is a playful production project that features some marvellous effects and never quite goes where you think it will. Friends sounds like the big pop single, with cut-up, speeded-up voices darting around disco guitar.
Bain’s distinctive vocal production, almost always sounding like three people at once, can put up a barrier and prevent the music from feeling fully human. So when the final song One for Sorrow Two for Joni Jones arrives, and it turns out to be an unadorned piano ballad about her late dog, the emotion is real. It’s yet another layer peeled away, until all that’s left is a great songwriter.
