Baby Stardust

There's a different register here — still unmistakably Thee Michelle Gun Elephant in its refusal to be gentle, but operating at a temperature that allows something more ambiguous than pure aggression to come through. The track has a melodic core that surfaces and submerges throughout, the guitar sometimes pulling back to let the song breathe before reasserting itself with controlled urgency. Chiba's voice softens marginally — not into sweetness exactly, but into something that might be called yearning if you're being generous, or restlessness if you're being accurate. The production has that characteristic rawness the band never surrendered, but there's a spaciousness here that gives the emotion somewhere to expand. The bass tone is particularly warm and round on this track, creating a low-end counterweight to the guitar's sharper edges. The "Stardust" in the title suggests the song is reaching for something cosmic or transient — a relationship, a moment, something that burns bright and leaves traces. In the context of the Tokyo alternative rock scene of the late nineties, TMGE represented a generation of Japanese musicians who had metabolized their influences so completely that the result was wholly original — this track is a smaller flame from that same fire, less pyrotechnic but somehow more lasting for it. For the hours between midnight and the first trains running again.