Takuro Okada: The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line Album Review

The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line couldn’t be a more welcoming, or easygoing, introduction to Takuro Okada as a solo artist. Cherry-picked from recording sessions over the past decade, this never-before-released survey of the Tokyo-based musician’s career doubles as an album of ambient soundscapes and experimental improvisations examining how we evolve over time. After his college band Mori Wa Ikiteiru dissolved, Okada continued his self-taught studies, becoming a revered experimental guitarist and collaborating with Haruomi Hosono, Jim O’Rourke, and Nels Cline. Now he’s amassed a big enough catalog to rifle through past work like a musical diary. The dusted-off recordings on his ninth solo album weave between the effortless dream-pop and introspective minimalist jazz of an overlooked virtuoso.

Every song on The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line begins with guitar. Often it’s the sole instrument, though its different applications permit texture and depth of field. Okada fades into view with opener “Following Morning,” a 2022 recording that summons the warmth of a sunrise with electric guitar and, simultaneously, the disorienting whir of memory, as captured by gentle cymbal rolls and guitar synths that flutter in reverse. Though the fickleness of memory is a running theme, the album maintains its soothing presence through unbarred ambient groundwork and mellow jazz licks. In a two-part exercise dubbed “Ohme,” Okada first plays finger-picked acoustic guitar with the fussy attention of a busybody; in part two, he picks up a clarinet, violin, and xylophone—all of which, paradoxically, lighten the load and ease the pace.

Don’t be embarrassed if you can’t decipher when Okada’s guitar imitates another instrument. In “The Room,” a blissfully sleepy track that stretches notes like yawns, he invokes a country sheen not dissimilar from the meditative intuitions of the late Susan Alcorn. It might sound like pedal steel, but it’s not—except when, two tracks later on “Before,” he actually does use pedal steel. This time, he plays faster, slicing between notes that hop up and down the scale in a trippy, theremin-esque sequence. The sound of trickling water, discreet but unmistakable, melts into the acrylic neon swirl of an LSD vision. (Okada could probably make a killing scoring luxury private sound baths.) The song that follows, “Mizu,” though recorded five years later, evokes those exact water sounds—plinking, dripping, rushing. But this time, Okada’s capturing it with his electric guitar and nothing else, manipulating notes with tranquility in mind.

Ordered without an apparent timeline in mind, The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line drifts from older compositions to more recent ones like a brain flickering from one memory to the next. The earliest recording on the album dates to 2014: “Evening Song,” a romantic, stripped-back number with scaling blues melodies that John Mayer would milk dry. Okada plays gently, sounding starry-eyed, as if under the spell of love. Immediately afterwards comes “Taco Beach,” a 2023 exercise in slinky Arabic pop, where his Korg Mini POP and electric bass court a different type of lusty romance. Despite the album’s largely wordless nature, evocative moments can’t help but enter the frame: a curling blues guitar riff that’s interrupted by the shrill barks of a puppy in “Howlin’ Dog,” or the translucent echoes of electric guitar in “Mirror” that fan outward in waves of disillusionment. For a second, we might feel we can make out a scene from Okada’s past. The album’s leaps through time are its own source of congruency: It speaks to how the artist’s intuition hasn’t changed over the years, only sharpened.