If you like Bebel Gilberto, you’ll love Animaru by Mei Semones.
The opening guitar runs of Dumb Feeling are so light and pretty that you know you’re in for something special from the moment Animaru begins. The debut album from Mei Semones is whimsical, sweet, endearing, and astonishingly accomplished. Backed by an ensemble of her fellow music-school-trained players, this is a record that’s both deeply studied and effortlessly charming.
Dumb Feeling packages everything that makes Animaru great into the opening 3 minutes, with sudden stops, dynamic drops into hushed bossa nova licks, strings swelling like a film score, and the drums picking up pace as if the whole band is freewheeling downhill on a bicycle, with tempos lagging, accelerating, and breathing. Even its most complex passages feel breezy. Tora Moyo showcases Mei’s scat runs mirroring her guitar lines as the ensemble drifts and glides like a summer breeze, evoking the same calm as The Girl From Ipanema. The range is delightful, swinging between indie rock, classic bossa nova, and Japanese pop. Donguri leaves room for a tender bass solo, whilst Norwegian Shag and Zarigani are jaunty, playful, and light as air.
Chamber jazz for sunny mornings, Animaru has warm double bass lines, elegant violin and viola embellishments, and drumming that’s light on its feet but full of groove. Mei Semones is an astonishing guitarist, playing acoustic jazz lines with the speed and precision of a shred wizard, but in a way that never feels indulgent. Complex, music-school-level jazz writing is presented in neat, approachable three-to-four minute indie-pop packages, making the genre feel welcoming and playful without sanding off its intricacy, and the album doesn’t sound like anything else.
Listening to Animaru feels like watching a comforting little movie, and as a debut statement it’s remarkable. Part Japanese, part Brazilian, part French chanson, the cultural fusion is magic, flitting mid-line between English and Japanese without warning. Semones draws from a New York jazz education, Brazilian bossa nova, Japanese lyrical sensibilities and North American indie rock, and these disparate traditions twirl together with a profound emotional effect. In a world brimming with horrors and crises, Animaru offers a delightful reprieve with loving odes to animals, city wanderings, and the joy of being alive.
You can’t help but be happier at the end of the record than you were at the start. Everyone in the ensemble gets a moment to shine, and every flourish serves the song, with warmth radiating from every note.
On first listen, these songs feel like romantic love songs, but they’re not. Instead, they’re about connections with animals, small city encounters, and fleeting feelings of joy, finding delight in the gentle weirdness of life. It’s a record about falling in love with experiences, and moments that would normally pass without notice. Chords that would feel challenging in other contexts are dressed up in the friendliest clothes imaginable, with Semones taking intricate techniques and making them feel as light and easy as a conversation between friends. You could spend hours analyzing the way that her harmonic progressions lean into tension, or you could just throw Animaru on and feel instantly soothed, and this duality between deep sophistication and welcoming simplicity elevates the album from a clever debut into a brilliant one.
Notably, this is not Mei Semones with a group of interchangeable session players, but an ensemble of musicians who have toured and grown together, and you can hear that history in their playing. Solos never feel like showboating, and the string duo weave in and out in a way that you simply don’t get from studio musicians clocking in for the day. This is a group of players who care about building the same extraordinary thing.