Luminescent Creatures and Soft Art

As you've probably noticed, I've been making an effort to highlight other writers/publications here lately. I know the link digest posts are copouts in terms of actually containing anything from the one writer you're here to read, but I also think they're overdue; way back when I relaunched this thing, I talked a lot about wanting to do a little something to revive the community-driven spirit of the blogosphere era, and it's taken me too long to step up my efforts in that area.

The main reason for the delay is that we're no longer in the blogosphere era. During Jefitoblog's OG years, it was incredibly easy to stumble across fun sites and distinctive voices; everyone was sending their signal into what felt like a shared, fairly open frequency, and sharing other people's posts was not only good business and/or the polite thing to do, it was also a great way to expand your own audience. These days, it feels — to me, anyway — like things are a lot more walled off. I suspect this is partly because subscriptions have become the norm, which makes it more of a zero-sum game; writers are naturally less likely to spend time shouting out other writers' work when driving eyeballs anywhere else could lead to a dip in revenue. It's also partly because of the walled garden-ish nature of places like Substack and Medium, which have encouraged writers to try and monetize by pledging allegiance to their proprietary CMS.

That being said, neither of those things make it prohibitively difficult to seek out new sites to add to your RSS. It's just that now, it's much easier to feel disconnected.

That feeling is what ultimately led me to start putting more effort into building out my feed. A recent project at Harmonic, which I really will write about in greater depth soon, forced me to confront the fact that I had become almost entirely disconnected from whatever was happening in music writing in 2025. In some ways, this is fine; I no longer really consider myself a music critic, and although I make a point of more or less constantly listening to new music, I also can't help the many ways in which I'm extremely removed from the aural demographic being targeted by a lot of it. When Jefitoblog was new, I knew I wasn't the type of listener who needed to worry about whatever Pitchfork or Stereogum were excited about; 20 years later, I know I'm really not that type of listener.

Really, though, what it comes down to is that I'm not willing to bill myself as a music critic mainly because I want to reserve the right to devote this space to whatever the hell I feel like writing about. Committing to reviewing new releases is agreeing to step on a treadmill that I lacked the energy to keep up with in 2010, and believe me when I tell you that I have far less energy now. It brings me a necessary degree of peace to know that I can approach my latest post by asking myself "What do I feel like writing about today?" and even if the answer is "Nothing," no one — or at least no one other than zoo enclosure enthusiast Dave Lifton, who just wants to haunt my subconscious — will complain.

And yet. And yet! I don't think it's strictly good that I allowed myself to drift so far afield that I had no idea who was making a habit of writing about new music in 2025, or who was widely seen as the cream of that crop. So these link digests are partly a reflection of the Jefitoblog manifesto or whatever, and they're partly a selfless act of community service for you, dear reader, but they're also the product of reading I'm doing for my own edification. After so many years of feeling alone in the wilderness, this feels good.

But that isn't what I'm here to write about today. Not really, anyway. I think it's good for you to know more about the feelings behind the Link Digests, but all this rambling was also a long way of letting you know why I've been reading a bunch of year-end best-of lists. I'm generally inclined to view this type of list as a waste of time, but they're currently at least 70 percent of what's coming through my RSS reader, and because I'm still getting to know the various voices I've added to the feed — and, yes, always seeking new musical discoveries — I've devoted a bunch of hours to investigating those picks.

(This is why there's no Blindspotting today, but I'm pretty sure I know which record I'm covering next, and I'm also pretty sure it'll make fart-derived hernia Dave Lifton happy.)

Anyway, the point is that when the 18-year-old came downstairs on her way to school this morning, I was in the process of going through Bruce Warren's favorite albums of the year, and because she is hip and I am not, I presented Bruce's list as an offering to learn what she might have heard of/listened to. She's an enormous Geese fan, so I knew she'd be cool with Bruce's top pick, but I came away feeling like I needed to listen to some others, including Ichiko Aoba's Luminescent Creatures.

After spending the early part of the morning getting acquainted with Turnstile's NEVER ENOUGH (which I really enjoyed), I settled into Luminescent Creatures, which turned out to be a journey very different from the one I was expecting. It's worth pointing out here that I had no idea what to expect, because I wasn't familiar with Aoba's work; if anything, I suspected it might be a new city pop record, because my kid, to her everlasting credit, loves that stuff. But Luminescent Creatures is not that.

What it is instead is an album that is resolutely beautiful in the softest of ways. This is a collection of songs that wouldn't necessarily be called adult contemporary — there aren't enough synths, key changes, or drum machines — but it is the type of music that, if you are old and square enough to know who Henry Mancini was, you could picture him leaning back and blissing out with a smile on his face and his eyes closed. It doesn't float so much as it puffs.

Upon first listen, I recoiled from Luminescent Creatures. These songs struck me as... twee, maybe? Certainly boneless. It felt like the type of record that, were it to come to life, would look like a cartoon character with big adorable eyes. Probably an adorable farm animal of some sort? I feel like you get the idea. And you probably also don't think what I'm describing sounds all that bad, which is great; in fact, that's really the point.

Because my child recommended this album, I didn't bail; instead, I decided to buckle in and confront whatever was putting me off about this music. And I'm glad I did, because it gave me an afternoon to contemplate not just this particular record, but my own knee-jerk response to something that's all sweetness and soft edges. As TCM-inhaling Friend of Jefitoblog David Lebovitz is fond of pointing out, I have written many words in cautious praise of numerous sweet, soft artists, including former Chicago frontman Peter Cetera, so I'm hardly in a position to criticize anything for not being tough enough. I would like to think, however, that we all recognize there's a softness continuum, and on that continuum, there's a certain amount of difference between middle-aged men crooning about love lost and a multi-instrumentalist folk singer channeling Studio Ghibli.

This does not, however, mean that channeling is bad and crooning is good. Both sensitivity delivery methods are equally and perfectly valid. All I'm saying is that one of them — at least in me — is prone to provoking a negative knee-jerk reaction, and while I spent several hours listening to Luminescent Creatures, I wondered why. Is it because there's a layer of musical or emotional dissonance salting the sweetness of your standard adult contemporary fare? I mean, you could argue that, if you really felt like it, but I don't think it's an argument that would lead anywhere worth following. If anything, I guess I'd argue that there's a certain amount of romantic pain or yearning expressed in your average AC song, and while I can't claim to understand what's happening lyrically in Luminescent Creatures, my guess would be that Ichiko Aoba's concerns lay elsewhere.

Near as I can tell, this album is a paean to the beauty of the natural world, which is a theme so universal and yet also so dead simple that more than one prog rocker has tried and failed to hinge a record around it. Yes, the world is awe-inspiring; yes, life is amazing. How do you write 35 minutes of music about that? Well, in this case, you do it without a hint of dissonance, which — at least in my case — provokes a certain amount of distrust. It's as if all this beauty feels... unearned, somehow.

But finally, after my third or fourth listen, on a day when we learned of a beloved filmmaker's horrific final moments and endured the smugly narcissistic response from our supposed national leader, I came to the conclusion that, in a world that increasingly seems to agree with Thomas fucking Hobbes, we shouldn't have to feel as though beauty is earned. Instead, it's a privilege we should greedily accept wherever we find it. I personally have had a hell of a year and change, and the handful of years leading up to that stretch weren't particularly rosy either; while I don't know each of your stories intimately, I would be willing to bet you'd say much the same. In line with the plans laid out by the cartoonishly stupid and evil fuckers currently smearing their taints across the levers of power, we are a nation — if not a world — in trauma. So why should anyone react to the opportunity to observe gentle beauty with anything other than greedy appreciation?

I'm sure there are good answers to that question, and I would be willing to bet that some of them have to do with overproduction, clichéd lyrics, and chintzy drum machines. But at this particular juncture, I think I'm also willing to submit that we have allowed ourselves to become far too cynical where the fundamental pleasures of this stuff are concerned, and at this time of national and shared emotional crisis, we might be facing a critical juncture of opportunity. An opportunity, perhaps, to embrace the corniest shit that's ever been foisted upon us, and appreciate the simple, universally relatable emotions that anchor it.

I'm not saying that 2026 will be a year of soft art appreciation here at Jefitoblog. But I'm not saying it won't be, either. Consider yourselves warned and/or beckoned, and until then, spend a little time with this guileless, unapologetically lovely record and let me know what you think.