Artwork by: Greg Leppert

Style: Art rock, indie prog, chamber pop (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: The Dear Hunter, Sufjan Stevens, The Family Crest, The Decemberists, Arcade Fire
Country: United States
Release date: 25 February 2006

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Let me tell you the tale of one of the most ambitious and lushly maximalist albums of the 2000s indie scene, a work that took a soft, emotionally vulnerable indie-folk core and bolstered it with layer upon layer of lavish orchestration and exultant choirs until it became a larger-than-life magnum opus. With its intricate, genre-blending arrangements, rollicking polyrhythms, and sizable conceptual scope, one could consider it every bit as progressive as the baroque-pop stylings of prog rock’s late ’60s pioneers, reinventing the style in a truly serendipitous bit of convergent evolution. Beneath all the bells and whistles, though, at its heart was a sensitive, introverted young man from Michigan whose lyrics wove together grandiose mythology, delicate, oblique word paintings, and just enough Christian imagery to feel spiritually resonant without coming across as preachy. All told, it’s a damn shame that such a brilliant album has become as forgotten as it has–

Hm? What’s that? You’re saying that Sufjan Stevens‘ Illinois has not, in fact, “become forgotten”, but is in fact a beloved, well-known cornerstone of the indie rock canon, one that has even been adapted into a goddamn Broadway musical? I’m not talking about that album, silly! I’m talking about Floating World by Anathallo, an entirely different maximalist, conceptual chamber pop album with obliquely religious themes released by a Michigan-based artist in the mid-2000s, one that takes inspiration from Japanese folklore rather than tales from the Land of Lincoln. Did you even read this article’s title? 

To be fair, the Sufjan comparisons that plagued the band from the very start weren’t exactly unwarranted¹, with non-intro opener “Genessaret (Going Out Over 30,000 Fathoms of Water)” greeting us with a familiar-feeling combination of warm, plucked acoustic guitars, hushed, closely-harmonized tenor vocals, and a long, cumbersome title. But there’s also something deeply distinct and utterly absorbing about the atmosphere that Floating World conjures forth from its very first notes. As intro track “Ame” fades in with its droning synth and accordion beneath the chaotic, raindrop-like clatter of wood-block percussion, there is a sense of the soundscape reaching out and enveloping the listener, ensuring audiences are seated and paying rapt attention in much the way an orchestra does as it warms up. Following that, “Genessaret” is free to spin its haunting tale of rainswept seas and half-remembered childhood adventure, maintaining its delicately balanced surface tension as extra layers of backing vocals, guitars, and percussion build until the clouds are parted by a brief pivot to a major key and… jeez, I should really speed things up, we’re only halfway through the first real track!

As is evident by the sheer amount of words I was just able to squeeze out of a mere five minutes of runtime, Floating World is a gloriously overstuffed cornucopia of musical ideas, capable of shifting with mercurial ease from movement to wildly different movement. I know I used the word “lush” earlier, but this album really is the dictionary definition of the word, with intricate layers of sonic color bursting joyously forth from every fiber of its being. Even gentler, sparser tracks like “Cuckoo Spitting Blood” feel all-enveloping, with their gorgeous stacks of backing vocal harmony that swirl like mist over pools of gentle, echoing guitar work. It’s kind of like experiencing that one synesthesia scene in Ratatouille, except with sound instead of taste – one can picture shimmering, silvery strokes of dulcimer and piano being suddenly set alongside the bold, bright blues and greens of thrumming electric guitars, while the intricate black linework of its polyrhythmic percussion is complemented by bursts of bright orange brass. In fact, those horns take an unexpectedly central role here, ranging from the explosive, odd-meter playfulness of “Hoodwink” to the intimidating, discordant interjections in “Two: Floating World”, and their prominence certainly helped Anathallo‘s sound stand out somewhat amidst the aughts indie landscape. 

Of course, colorful soundscapes alone can only get an album so far, no matter how labyrinthine their layering, and this is where Floating World‘s other main point of strength comes in: its unapologetic emotionality. This album is completely and utterly sincere in every fiber of its being, with nary a shred of irony or bathos to be found, and there’s a genuine sort of beauty in that. To be fair, more jaded listeners may hear the overly dramatic falsettos in “I – The Angry Neighbor”, or the bit in “By Number” where a Biblical psalm is sung in Japanese² by a choir of the most audibly Caucasian people in existence, and consider it a bit overly twee, perhaps even… cringe. But Anathallo was never the sort of band to let such cynicism drag them down, and this pays off handsomely in tracks like “Dokkoise House (With Face Covered)”. Here, Matt Joynt’s soft, delicate vocals evoke the fragile, transient image of a flower in muddy water before a stunningly-layered three-part backing chorus arises to sing an intricate, polymetric ode to the flower’s fading – a buildup that never fails to leave me breathless. It’s powerful stuff, and throughout the album the ever-evolving arrangements are capable of shifting the mood from heart-racing euphoria to delirious unease to gentle yet devastating melancholy at the drop of a hat. 

Yet all these swirling feelings seem to point back towards a battered yet wounded optimism in the end. Four-part suite “Hanasakajiji” (based on the eponymous Japanese folktale) is told out of chronological order³ so that it closes on the imagery of the old man using his dead dog’s ashes to make dead cherry trees blossom, while closer “Kasa no Hone (The Umbrella’s Bones) is a simple, gently sung tune that compares the speaker’s wounded psyche to a broken umbrella and implores the listener to fix him instead of throwing him away. The band’s name comes from a Greek term meaning “to renew, refresh, or bloom again”, and this music, in its shifts from the somber and sour to the soft and sunny, evokes that moniker to perfection.

Unfortunately, as a band, Anathallo would not pull off any sort of rebirth of their own. They did manage to stick around for a few years as well-liked but second-string figures in the indie scene, touring with artists ranging from Joanna Newsom to Manchester Orchestra. They released a follow-up in 2008, Canopy Glow, which was a perfectly serviceable record but sanded off many of the unique progressive edges that made Floating World so fascinating. Eventually, though, the band succumbed to the same tragic transience as the flowers they sang about, quietly dissolving in 2009. The only confirmation of their passing was a brief blog post from trombonist Bret Wallin, essentially saying they simply wanted to put the band to rest and live quieter lives without the chaos of touring. Most of the members kept pursuing music to some extent, whether as hobbyists or as indie film composers, though bizarrely enough, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost would later rise to much greater (yet similarly brief) prominence as a member of 2012 two-hit wonders fun.⁴ In the end, I suppose such a fate was inevitable – after creating such a work of delicate, heartfelt beauty, it was almost natural for Anathallo to fade away and accept its natural end. But even now, all these years later, all one needs to do is press play on Floating World, and the gorgeous blooms of sound burst forth once more – to blossom and be renewed, again and again.

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Recommended tracks: Genessaret (Going Out Over 3,000 Fathoms of Water), Hoodwink, Dokkoise House (With Face Covered), The Bruised Reed
You may also like: Adjy, The Circle of Wonders

Anathallo was:
– Matt Joynt (Lead vocals, guitar, piano, percussion)
– Andrew Dost (keyboards, flugelhorn, percussion, vocals)
– Bret Wallin (trombone, percussion, vocals)
– Danny Bracken (guitar, percussion, vocals)
– Seth Walker (bass, vocals)
– Jeremiah Johnson (drums, vocals)
– Erica Froman (vocals, percussion, clarinet, autoharp)
– Jamie Macleod (flugelhorn, percussion, vocals)

1. The band’s decision to go on tour with him shortly after the album’s release likely didn’t help matters either. ↩︎
2. I could write a whole separate paragraph of how this album’s poetic, impressionistic lyrics manage to both evoke the 1700s-era Japanese artistic style of ukiyo-e (from which its title is derived) while also bridging Japanese and Christian mythologies with its themes of death, rebirth, beauty, and rewarded virtue, but I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to ramble slightly less. I don’t think it’s working. ↩︎
3. Interestingly, The Decemberists pulled a similar trick, namely a multi-part suite based on a Japanese folktale played out of order (moving the last part to the beginning), with the title track of their acclaimed album The Crane Wife. That album released seven months after Floating World, however, so if anything they’re the ones who copied the idea. ↩︎
4. The other instrumentalist in that band was one Jack Antonoff, meaning this album has a lot fewer degrees of separation from Taylor Swift than I imagined. ↩︎