(2021) Tashaki Miyaki - Castaway


Review:
Ten years into their band-life, four years after the release of the debut full length album The Dream, L.A.’s Tashaki Miyaki are back with Castaway. The sophomore album is a stunningly beautiful body of work and a glorious mass of contradictions – in turn esoteric and accessible. Always thought-provoking and emotion-stirring, yet spatial and relaxing. Lush and orchestral, yet somehow wonderfully sparse. Essentially, it all works. They’ve come a long way. The band formed in 2011, the same year as the Tashak it to Me debut EP, though initially it was simply a recording project for singer, drummer and producer Paige Stark. She had been left frustrated by her former band, Stone Darling, and the lack of cohesiveness over an agreed sound. “I had an idea in my mind of what I wanted things to sound like and they just weren’t coming out that way,” Stark told us by phone. “So I started learning how to play drums. In that band I played guitar. I was writing songs with a simpler drum beat, inspired by Moe Tucker and that early Velvets stuff with the glam rock shuffle. We weren’t trying to start a band, I just wanted to make recordings that sounded cool. I put it on Bandcamp as a way to share it with my friends and it got picked up by blogs in the UK. Suddenly we were being flown to the UK to play shows. To be honest, we weren’t ready to play shows but I was super young and excited, so I just did it. The first time we went to the UK, we had no bass player.” Words such as “dream pop,” “shoegaze” and “psychedelic” have been used to describe the band over the years, but to Stark they are simply a rock band. “I feel frustrated that, in music now, everyone is like, you have to be in a box of a genre that someone else understands,” Stark says. “I don’t like that. To me, we’re a rock band with a lot of different influences.” In ten years though, the sound has evolved. Initial desires to sound like a blend of My Bloody Valentine, the Jesus & Mary Chain and Mazzy Star gave way to ambitions for something more unique. “Now I’m trying to figure out how to have those influences plus the myriad of other influences I have, and still make it unique to me and have it not be in a pile with other stuff,” Stark says. “I want to be my own thing. We dialed back the fuzz and reverb on this one.” One thing that definitely has influenced the Tashaki Miyaki style is geography. All of the band – Stark, bassist Sandi Denton and guitarist Luke Paquin – are from California. Stark and Denton are specifically…





Track Listing:
1.Castaway      04:23
2.Help Me       04:04
3.Gone          04:17
4.Comedown      05:23
5.Baby Don't    03:11
6.I Feel Fine   03:27
7.U             04:09
8.Wasting Time  03:38
9.Alone         03:36
10.Forget Me    04:33
11.Good Times   06:40


Media Report:
Genre: dream-pop, indie-pop
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits