Restraint is a highly admirable skill for a composer of any kind to have. It’s also not without its pitfalls. As impressive as Odori can be when it isn’t going all George Winston on us, the listener must endure hiccup after hiccup to get there. Helmed by Hirohito Ihara, Radical Fashion adeptly skitter from spare, bare-boned piano pieces to electronic flourishes without raising a big fuss, and while the approach sounds cherry-picked for the silver screen, it feels a little bit underdeveloped without visual accompaniment.
It also depends on which track we’re talking about, as many of them translate just fine. Certain to suffer from close attention, throw this gentle, tranquil li’l devil in the player and dust your shelves. Hell, while you’re at it, clean the kitchen and plant a garden; Odori will be waiting when you get back. Problem is, it continues to wait and wait and wait and wait and wait... you won’t find many droplets of deviation disturbing the calm waters of Ihara’s vision until the first five or so movements drift by your window. Much of this is essentially a pleasant sequence of piano solos; only when new sounds emerge from the keystrokes does the concoction hit home.
The arc of “Suna” is indicative of a typical Ihara (ad)venture. It spellbinds with a nice piano line, but only becomes genuinely interesting when a weeping string phrase shines through and carries the track home. Sadly, this grand, sweeping moment lasts all of 30-odd seconds. Ditto for “Thousand,” which finds Ihara again making sweet love to his pianer for several minutes before a churning beat machine joins the fray. Again, we’re only allowed a brief glimpse into more variety before the song subsides and yields another ode to minimalism, “Usunibi,” an audio exploration so frail I hesitate to designate it as a song. “Ballet” rouses Odori from its sleepy-time slumber party, but it doesn’t change its stripes, and equates basically to the opening credits of public TV’s Nova with a few wrinkles added.
From there, tracks like “Shousetsu” and “Shunpoudoh” perk up like rock-hard nipples, seeming positively gregarious compared to the tracks that preceded them. So really what we have here is a two-part album, with the second portion deserving to wear the ‘Better Half’ T-shirt. Hell, save it the last beer in the fridge, too; it deserves to live a little considering how far back it is in the batting order. Individual bursts of inspiration render Odori a decent dance through pixelated tunnels — as a package, however, it fights with itself too much to woo and wow.
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