Tatsuro Yamashita’s second solo album makes space a question of arrangement.
The name SPACY appears to promise an unlimited universe. The record is a much more bounded object: Tatsuro Yamashita’s second solo album, released in 1977 after CIRCUS TOWN. Before assigning it a spacecraft, consider the domestic problem posed by an album. Something must go first; something must be allowed to leave last. Space can mean the interval in which one musical idea stops occupying the room and another takes its place. Read that way, the title becomes a proposition about design.
The official sequence begins with LOVE SPACE and ends with SOLID SLIDER. Between those outward-looking English names are Japanese titles pointing toward an afternoon and words left unsaid. That contrast is available on the sleeve before anyone presses play. It offers a useful scale for thinking about the record: expansiveness at the edges, human-sized occasions within. This is an interpretation of the sequence, rather than a claim that the songs document particular afternoons in their maker’s life.
A second album occupies an interesting position in a career. The first has obtained admission; the second has to decide what to do with the room. We need not attribute that thought to Yamashita to find it helpful. Instead of reading SPACY exclusively as advance notice of later achievements, we can approach it as an arrangement whose possibilities were not yet reduced to a retrospective list of classics. The smaller titles deserve the same attention as the imposing ones. An album need not wear its future reputation in every track.
On a City Pop map, roads tend to lead toward the most recognizable destinations. SPACY invites a stop along the way. Its two sides, its beginning and ending, and its movement between languages preserve the scale of an individual record. Those formal choices matter even when historical importance threatens to become the only available compliment. The album does more than forecast a later Yamashita: it keeps this particular group of songs together. Space has not been conquered. It has been thoughtfully allocated, a quieter achievement than the title’s imaginary spacecraft might suggest.