TAMIW – Farewell Party | Album Review

Genre bending group TAMIW's new album Farewell Party is "an emotionally raw yet hopeful body of work, born from personal upheaval and artistic rebirth." As they deal with loss within their musical family.

Japanese group TAMIW have been bringing us strange, poppy, shoe-gazey, R’n’B flavoured electronic noises since 2018. Fronted by vocalist Tami Keem, the four piece produces a sound that’s hard to classify. There’s a little bit of everything in there, a lot of it the sort of music that would show up in one of those YouTube “lo-fi study playlist” videos, with opening track ‘A Silent Letter’ even sounding like it might have escaped from the soundtrack to Danny Boyle’s seminal 28 Days Later.

It’s been a rough road getting to this album, with the band losing not only their previous manager, but one of the founder members in the shape of Tomoaki Taguchi. That’s the kind of thing that leaves a mark and can change profoundly change a band’s trajectory and sound. The band’s three previous releases (not including an album of remixes) have lent a bit more towards the electronic end, while Farewell Party is something a little different, the band’s sound constantly evolving and changing. The record’s tracks often sound more like something you might hear from artists like Yoko Kanno, with both ‘Anthem of Sutra’ and ‘Deep’n’Shallow’ boasting the sort of chunky bass line that often accompanies animated shenanigans in the likes of Cowboy Bebop or Ghost in the Shell.

The album features some odder and more experimental moments as well. Primary among them is the frankly quite bizarre experience simply titled ‘A.H.O’ which is a light-hearted, sparkly little number accompanied by the sounds of dogs barking and cats meowing. A.H.O is how you say someone is a fool, or idiot, in the Kansai dialect and the song envisions a happy, carefree world where there’s no more humans and only dogs and cats exist. They’re all living peacefully together because all the fools and idiots have been removed from their lives. A nice little lesson for us all that our lives can be made better by removing the fools and the toxic people from them.

There’s also two “Interlude” tracks. The first is 1m and 48s of people drumming and clapping their hands like it was recorded at one of those drumming retreats for middle-aged businessmen, while the second is a slower, thoughtful piano piece that sounds like it might have come from someone’s piano recital or practice session. Tonally, this is a strange album to listen to, feeling very much like it’s broken up into thematic sections. The first three tracks are the more serious ones, then we have the interlude, then the bulk of the album is more upbeat and poppy. Then we have the second interlude and the final, rather meditative track, which was also the first track written for the album, titled ‘Overcome’.

The overall impression a listener is left with is of an album with a slightly confused personality. The album was conceived as an ending and a beginning, an acceptance of the losses that the band has suffered, but a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit, our ability to adapt and, yes, overcome. It’s not an album that’s going to appeal to everyone, and even fans of the band’s previous work might find this album needs more than just one or two listens to really appreciate what’s on offer here, but indie bands like TAMIW should be celebrated for being anything but mainstream, for trying things out, even if they don’t quite work, and for pushing the boundaries of what we consider a traditional album to be.