The Japanese House review, In the End It Always Does: Artist’s second album is a deliciously fragrant affair

The whole thing is woven through with the influence of great female singer-songwriters: a drizzle of detached Suzanne Vega here, a puddle of swooning Sarah McLachlan there

(Jay Seba)

Petrichor, that lovely smell that accompanies the first rain after a long dry spell, is a once-obscure word everybody now seems to know. And it’s the perfect term to conjure the gentle refresh-and-release of Amber Bain’s second album as The Japanese House. Backed by soft sprinkles of guitar, splooshy dollops of synth and suffused with hazy poetry, In the End It Always Does is a deliciously fragrant affair.

While her 2019 debut album, Good at Falling, tracked the tumultuous arc of a love affair, In the End It Always Does offers more scattered, diaristic meditations on the way identity shifts and drifts, as romantic relationships drift into friendships or separations. She’s described one track – “One for Sorrow Two For Joni Jones” featuring Katie Gavin from MUNA – as “a sort of ode to that feeling when Emma Thompson stands there and cries when she’s holding the CD in Love Actually”. Yet the delicate impressionism of Bain’s lyrics are a world away from the sledgehammer sentimentality of that film. Over the felt-hammer ripple of a piano and the swell of an accordion, Bain sings: “Maybe I want to be free/ Maybe I don’t, subconsciously…”

The whole thing is woven through with the influence of great female singer-songwriters: a drizzle of detached Suzanne Vega here, a puddle of swooning Sarah McLachlan there. You catch echoes of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” in the stand-out “Boyhood”. Through the throbbing synth, Bains sighs: “I wanna change, but it’s nothing new/ I should have jumped when you told me to”. The beats patter down until the song seems to evaporate into squiggly clouds of electronica. There’s a little Fleetwood Mac swagger’n’swirl to the electric guitar of “Touching Yourself”.

In the indie haze, you’ll find inflections of freeform jazz, and a sharpness to the lyrical observations that is clearly indebted to Joni Mitchell. The brittle strum and haunted, subway horn of “Indexical Reminder of a Morning Well Spent” certainly has echoes of the lonely, Hejira-era Mitchell studying the world from her icy altitudes. “I leave my things around/ Look at this clip I found.” Bain sighs, offering fragments of a love that’s diffusing. Her voice is warmer and her statements less barbed than Mitchell’s, which is interesting, as she told The Independent this week that she was an angry kid. Clearly, music now offers her a place to reflect in tranquillity.

On “Friends”, Bain reflects on her experiences in a throuple (when the other couple had been together for six years before meeting her). “Do you like the way it turned you on when they f***ed in front of you?” she asks with a sharper edge over a funk bass and danceable handclap beat. A flute-effect shimmers and wobbles between two notes at the top of the mix, reflecting the singer’s conflicted emotions. Her friend and label mate Matty Healy (from The 1975) joins her on the companionable, melodic drive of “Sunshine Baby”. There are chimes and a windows-down, elbows out vibe, to the acceptance of sorrow as she sighs: “I miss my dog/ I miss falling in love.” Love in this case being elegantly compared to “the feeling when the windscreen wipers line up with a song”.

Bain delivers these carefully crafted lines with a raindrop-on-the-face air of spontaneity. There’s a playful skip and skitter to many of the beats, and the backward-spooled strings and plinking pizzicato on “Spot Dog”. It’s an album that cools and shimmers its way through a delicious range of nuanced moods and subtly layered musical ideas. Delightful.