Fuubutsushi – Meridians

Across markers and zones, through ripples and echoes, it fluxes and dances and drifts. Fuubutsushi is the quartet of Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek, Matthew Sage, and Patrick Shiroishi; they have returned across minutes and days and months and years with Meridians, their first proper full length album in two cycles of seasons. The album, a double LP, comes in succession after their heralded tetralogy, Shiki (composed of four albums, one for each season) was released from 2020-2021. Praised by NPR and Pitchfork, those first four albums were a sort of gathering, processing, learning, exploring and measuring of time during a global crisis. Since these first releases, the group has been patiently ticking away at a new body of work. Meridians showcases the band chiming in their familiar musical vocabulary – ambient-leaning jazz informed by folk, new music and post rock – but with time’s accrual, they feel and sound their most refined, focused, and polished to date. Fuubutsushi feels no longer like a pandemic-borne catharsis, but a fully gestated and realized musical entity, and Meridians feels like their most coherent statement as a group so far.

The quartet maintains their usual roles, with their usual flexibilities too; Jusell on violin, Prymek on guitars, Sage on keys and percussion, Shiroishi on saxophones. It’s not unusual for members to veer far from their allotted lanes though; Jusell may suddenly erupt on vibraphone, or Sage may curl through a song on warbling clarinet, Shiroishi’s serene voice is more angelic and more prominently featured than ever, and Prymek’s ambient Americana touches lend the album a shimmering and pastoral delicacy. Across the four sides, or time zones, of the album – Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern – the group continues their liquid explorations of melody and timbre. Though all four artists live in four states, and were, yes, living and recording in one of each of those time zones during the album’s making, the album feels more than ever “in the room.” Everything they’ve done before they continue to do here, but with more aplomb. This group has an enormous body of work already, but Meridians sees them ratchet up on their previously established qualities. The ballads the band has garnered a following for are in fine form here; songs like “Light in the Annex,” “Hamilton” or “Meridians,” feel tender and glacial, more adrift, more orchestral. The more upbeat songs fans have come to expect hiding in Fuubutsushi records are here too; “Distance Learner” or “Tenel Ka (First Crush)” both clip along joyously. The group dabbles with distortion and seering production here more than ever before – see “Spent for Light” – in ways that find them further evolving and unfurling. Meridians feels at once the band at their most seasoned and also their freshest. Whether writing deeply romantic love songs – “Nora Nora” – or thrilling naturalist sagas – “New Flora” – the group navigates tropes and musical terrain with grace, daring, and pleasure