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I have really fallen in love with the new Asobi Seksu album, but not quite the same way that I fell for the first one. While I wouldn’t go so far as to describe Cit­rus as a “sopho­more slump” record, I will say that I don’t find it to be quite as clever and con­ta­gious as their debut album. That hav­ing been said, this record does a fan­tas­tic job of cap­tur­ing more of the band’s live sound. The key word with this album is MORE: Take every­thing you like about Asobi Seksu and Cit­rus does it to the power of ten. Cit­rus more than one-ups the band’s sweet coc­coon of melan­choly, shoegaz­ing pop (even going so far as to ref­er­ence the bass line to the Beach Boy’s “Sloop John B” on the album’s third track, “Strings”) as well as simul­ta­ne­ously crank­ing up the abra­sive, dis­so­nant, Thurston Moore-esque noise assault with some amaz­ing and unex­pected results (my favorite being the totally left-field feed­back bomb in the mid­dle of “New Years”). With the release of Cit­rus Asobi Seksu con­tin­ues to be one of my favorite new bands and a band I almost go to see when they are in town. I find myself begin­ning my dis­cus­sions of the band’s music with “I’m not nor­mally into this kind of stuff, but…” and their lat­est effort aug­ments that sentiment.

Asobi Seksu will be play­ing at Rel­a­tive The­ory Records this Sat­ur­day (June 10th) at 8PM. Meet me there. We’ll hang.