The first time I heard Asobi Seksu was when my sister arrived back from New York with a copy of Citrus. She had heard it some record store and immediately asked them what is was and bought it. It turned out to be Asobi Seksu’s second album, Citrus. That was about three months ago and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. A more accessible blend of shoegaze and dream pop, Citrus is a collection of songs perfectly combining the beautiful ethereal vocals of Yuki Chikudate with the peddle heavy crashing guitars of James Hanna which bend and weave up, down and beyond the octaves of the six string. The 2006 album was re-released by One Little Indian in Europe in August and now Asobi are on a massive European tour.

As Yuki sat in traffic in Manhattan, I gave her a quick call ahead Asobi Seksu’s first Irish. Starting out in New York at the height of the Strokes popularity, Asobi Seksu are a band that have struggled to command attention. Even in their home town of New York, Yuki explains that when Asobi Seksu “first started out, people were not so open to what we were doing.” Back then “it wasn’t a very popular sound” but a few years on and things have changed “it’s exciting for us now that people are actually paying attention.” And with Lyrics that hop, skip and jump between Japanese and English, AS make for interesting listening.

The Asobi Seksu sound while it may be raw at times is extremely honed and finely tuned, Citrus had a master plan to make sure everything came together in recording “we had crazy charts and we arranged everything before we went into the studio, there was a lot of preproduction.” Time well spent in my opinion, as the songs possess certain dynamics that go beyond the obvious My Bloody Valentine comparisons. Although MBV are clearly a big influence, the comparisons do get a little taxing for the band at times “obviously it’s a band we like a lot, you know and it doesn’t bother us that people see the comparison that they reference that band but at a certain point it gets to be a little too much but it’s just that one band, there were other bands around at the time who were experimenting with those textures and with that kind of guitar sound.”

What makes Asobi Seksu so good in my mind is their ability to merge really upbeat pop vocals with psychedelic synths and layers of pitch bending tremolo laced guitars. They don’t just emulate the sounds of those that have gone before but instead make the sound and textures their own. When I asked how it felt to continue touring with the same material for the past two years, Yuki simply replied “every song feels new because of the audience” and because of that it gives the songs “a whole new perspective, a fresh new take”. So with that in mind, try catch them live and see what your perspective is.

Asobi Seksu play Crawdaddy, November 25th.

Brendan McGuirk is the editor of Analogue, and former Chair of Trinity FM.
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