Shintaro Sakamoto: How to Live With a Phantom

The pace on How to Live With a Phantom is indiepop easy listening and relaxed about it. The music never frets, just bops along with its lounge-jazz saxophone, slide guitar yawn, and a bossa nova dab, willing to sound like an earnest dork and even blow dippy bubbles in a glass during track eight, which is called “Something’s Different”. But Sakamoto was a founding member of the underground-gone-overground Tokyo psych band Yura Yura Teikoku — formed in 1989, gently dissolved 21 years later — and he pushes the songs subtly out of easy listening territory, he makes them a little too blocky, or lays on the croon a little too persistently; there’s a softly angled subterranean disturbance going on throughout. But nothing serious enough to disturb the fundamental ambiance of breeziness, moody and civil.