toe (lowercase on purpose) is a beautiful reason why brick and mortar stores will always be valuable in the music community. There’s a good chance I might never have heard them if I wasn’t visiting Needle + Groove, my local shop. Amanda, the manager at the time has one of the most eclectic musical tastes I’ve ever encountered, and it was my luck she was spinning the band’s songs, ideas we forgot compilation and I was instantly hooked by their use of odd rhythms and beautiful melodies. I devoured everything, but it was years before Now I See The Light, the band’s fourth full-length and first in almost a decade was released. Far from losing a step, the record shows the band honing the songs to within an inch of their life, and the results are gorgeous and fragile, delicate as the mist in early morning.

The band has remained consistent since their formation in 2000, and the interplay between each member is telepathic at this point. Yamazaki Hirokazu and Mino Takaaki’s handle acoustic and electric guitars, respectively, while Kashikura Takashi and Yamane Satoshi taking the rhythm section on drums and bass. They’re supported on Now I See The Light by Nakamura Ke Isaac on keyboards, and rather than layer and suffocate the band’s signature sound he brings very subtle shading to the already delicate framework the songs sit on.

As a whole the album sits somewhere in the ether between the more playful math rock of their earlier output like the seminal my idle plot on a vague anxiety from 2005 and 2015’s much more restrained and post-leaning Hear You. Yo can hear that sense of play on opener “風​と​記​憶” which translates to “Wind and Memory”. Over lovely guitar arpeggios the bass and drum lay out a winding groove that carries the guitars forward, rather than support the lead work. It’s a cozy reversal and reveals a dexterity and facility with songs few bands of any genre possess.

It’s not all instrumental: both “Loneliness Will Shine” and the title track feature Hirokazu on dreamy, laid back vocals. Not knowing the translations, it’s just an added voice (figuratively speaking) to the instrumentation on hand. “Loneliness Will Shine” in particular is a great track, one I’ve been returning to often in the past few weeks as I build out my various end of year lists. The syncopation that opens “Todo Y Nada” is a marvel of playfulness, and Satoshi’s bass is a standout here. If I had to make a comparison I couldn’t but one thing that came to mind was the ultra popular technique Tim Henson employs in Polyphia, a band I do not like but definitely admire from a technical perspective. The way Hirokazu and Takaaki handle the guitars has a similar, percussive vibe, but it’s employed to very different ends here. It’s also reinforced with electronic flourishes such as what opens with the drums on “Close To You” or how the band plays with backwards tracks on the lovely segue “Madness Summer”.

It’s incredible to find a band this expressive, this capable of pulling moods and tones out of the air without falling to tropes or getting mired in layers that detract from the delicate skeletons the songs hang on. toe have been doing this since their inception, and the beautiful thing about the time between albums is I’ve yet to get tired of playing what I have again and again, finding in the repetition of notes new meanings and feelings. Now I See The Light encapsulates the band’s entire career to date, and feels like a summation I’ll keep coming back to.