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Samantha Culp

Lullatone

Plays Pajama Pop Pour Vous

(Audio Dregs)

Lullatone have always made sleepy-time music - in fact, the Japan-based duo were spawned when American Shawn James Seymour began writing lullabies  for his Japanese girlfriend Yoshimi Tomida.

But on the pair's fourth full-length disc Plays Pajama Pop Pour Vous, they have taken this dreamy aesthetic to all-new lulls.

Although Tomida whispers 'wake up, wake up, get up sleepy-head' on the opening track (Good Morning Melody), that's the last thing a listener will want to do.

Mastered on cassette tape in their Nagoya  bedroom-turned-studio, these eight songs form a concept album on the space between sleep and waking. The sounds are soft: muffled electronic melodies overlaid with music-box plinking, barely-there guitar, light maracas and xylophone (the bass drum sounds were supposedly made with a pillow).

Bedroom Bossa Band has a little Brazilian swing to it (a nap in a tropical hammock, perhaps?), and Pajama Party Pop bounces like kids at a slumber party (the sugar high before the fall), but most tracks are far drowsier.

Songs such as Magical and Sleepytime Samba form an ambient carpet to lay down on, while the toy horns on Thoughts and Clouds are made for big cushy headphones.

Weaving through it all is Tomida's hushed voice, which owes a lot to Noriko Tujiko and a whole lineage of breathy, Japanese indie chanteuses but still sounds distinct.

Sometimes her quirky vocal pattern of 'high low, high high high low' gets repetitive, but its freshness adds a lot to Good Morning Melody, the first and  perhaps strongest single tune.

Though cute and floaty, there is subtle weight to those feather beats and Tomida's sincere instructions to 'put on your clothes and get to someplace'; the actual gravity of all this sleeping and waking we take for granted everyday.



Lullatone