死神

"死神" ("Shinigami") is Yonezu at his most theatrical and least sentimental — a rakugo-derived novelty that turns into a genuinely unnerving piece of pop. It opens with spoken-word patter delivered in the cadence of a storyteller working a small room, then drops into a shuffling, minor-key groove full of hand percussion, plucked strings, and a bassline that struts rather than walks. The whole arrangement has the crooked swing of a carnival, but the harmonies keep sliding somewhere sour. Yonezu multi-tracks himself into a chorus of leering voices, pitching some down into a growl, which gives the impression of a crowd egging the narrator on. The source is the classical rakugo tale "Shinigami," in which a broke man is taught to see death sitting at the foot or head of a sick person's bed, and gets greedy about it; Yonezu keeps the punchline energy, the sense of a man laughing his way toward his own candle guttering out. It's a song about cheating mortality and losing — mordant, playful, faintly disgusted with human appetite. Best heard walking home alone through a shopping arcade after last call, when the shuttered storefronts start to look like an audience.