damn

The sharpest, meanest groove on LOVE ALL SERVE ALL, and the one where Fujii's spiritual streak turns satirical. Built on a slinky, minor-key funk figure — muted guitar, a bassline that walks with its hands in its pockets, drums mixed tight and small — it's a portrait of desire as a treadmill: wanting things, getting them, wanting more, cursing yourself for it. The single-word English title does a lot of work, functioning as both exasperated interjection and self-verdict, and the Japanese around it stays in his usual dialect register so the whole thing sounds like private grumbling amplified to record volume. His vocal is at its most rhythmically loose here, phrases starting late and ending early, half-swallowed consonants, the falsetto used as a sneer rather than a swoon. The production is deliberately restrained — a lot of empty space in the arrangement, so a single guitar scratch or a keyboard chord lands as an event. It's the album's shadow track, the one that makes the devotional songs credible: someone singing about surrender who's also honest about being a grasping, envious, ordinary person. Good for late-night walking when you're irritated with yourself and don't want anyone to make you feel better about it.