Buy Now
| Buy on |
|
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Feb 27, 2025With this latest album, Ichiko Aoba has created yet another subsuming listen, an oceanic and blissful record that is a masterclass in escapism.
-
Mar 3, 2025Yes – this is possibly Aoba’s best work. Music incomparable to anything else, beautiful and eternal.
-
Feb 26, 2025Aoba doubles down on the grandeur with a record that’s even more accessible, and perhaps even more thematically cohesive than its direct predecessor.
-
Mar 4, 2025On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s exquisite and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi further broaden their horizons.
-
Mar 3, 2025By the time Luminescent Creatures closes on the wind-sampling "惑星の泪 (Wakusei no Namida)" ("Tears of the Planet") -- a fingerpicked guitar song that refers to dreams, the birth of a story, and "a melody of a million light years" -- listeners will likely have felt transported to another world.
-
Feb 28, 2025Soothing as a sound bath, yet powerful in its world-building, Aoba’s continued ascent to stardom might seem unlikely, yet this is nurturing music for bleak times.
-
Record CollectorFeb 26, 2025Luminescent Creatures confirms Aoba as one of folk music's most consistently beguiling artists. [Feb 2025, p.102]
-
UncutFeb 26, 2025Its watery, dreamlike soundscapes are totally immersive on one of those records that - temporarily at least - can make the cares of the world seem to melt away. [Mar 2025, p.29]
-
Feb 26, 2025These songs can be small, even womblike, but no less detailed or ambitious for it.
-
Mar 5, 2025There are minor exceptions here – the wondrous flourishes of opener "COLORATURA", the lilting inflections Aoba rides on "Luciférine", the aching nostalgia of the centrepiece "FLAG" (for my money, the one true Aoba classic here in every sense of the word) – but you'll be hard-pressed to find a record so full of subtle details that puts so little emphasis on the spectacle of individual moments, that drifts so freely within itself.
Awards & Rankings
There are no user reviews yet.