CANTARO IHARA Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Deftly weaving everything from 70s soul to AOR to city pop into his sound, contemporary Japanese musician Cantaro Ihara makes pitch-perfect groove-forward pop music. His second album to follow his P-Vine debut, C, released in 2020, Portray moves into an ever-expansive compositional smorgasbord, erring more on the side of the symbolic and sprawlingly stylistic than the purely non-contextual, channelling a knowledge of music unbound by genre. From a Japanese-language cover of free soul legend Weldon Irvine's 'I Love You' to the Ihara original 'Twiny', the lead singles are already off to the races. Then comes a feature from Japanese trumpeter Yusuke Sase on 'Baby So In Love', which catapults the album into neo-soul territory, bringing a new twist to a timeless sound. Meanwhile, a feature from Bialystocks keyboardist Go Kikuchi on 'Yoru no Nagare (The Flow of the Night)' sees one of Ihara's most instantly iconic melodies played with a gentle sophistication that could move you to tears in one moment, and have you two-stepping the next. To conclude: this is a mellow, wide-ranging city pop bombshell from a rising star whose light is too bright to miss.