American artist Cameron Lew’s appreciation for popular culture from Japan’s Showa Period (1926-89) helped form the music he makes beneath the title Ginger Root. Along with his new album “Shinbangumi,” he desires to emphasise that’s not all of the challenge is about.
“I really feel like everybody desires to dilute and simplify what you do, and I believe the buzzword that got here to thoughts was ‘metropolis pop,’” says Lew, 28, over a name from California. “I wasn’t upset about that or something, and I’m very influenced by that style of music. However I really feel like as a musician, I grew up on a bunch of different stuff that led me to metropolis pop and gave me the vocabulary to dissect why metropolis pop is so vital to me.”
Launched final month, “Shinbangumi” highlights Lew’s diverse musical inspirations and worldview. The glimmering pop echoes of Japan within the Eighties — which got here to the highlight on previous EPs “Metropolis Slicker” and “Nisemono,” collections that helped him achieve a following world wide — stay. Now they’re joined by songs nodding to the nerviness of Devo, the unfastened rock-pop of Corridor & Oates and even Haruomi Hosono’s ’70s explorations of exotica to create a challenge that digs even deeper than what got here earlier than.