Shutaro Noguchi & The Roadhouse Band 
In its marquee ties, to both Shutaro Noguchi and The Roadhouse Band, On The Run proves slippery. Fans of Noguchi’s 2018 album, Love Super Terranean would certainly find it a far cry from the psych sizzle therein. Folks familiar with The Roadhouse Band won’t find the complex country that’s marked them as an engine of Ryan Davis’ more recent work. The band’s adventurousness remains, though, and the record retains some of Noguchi’s early pop charms, albeit bent and ballooned by the Roadhouse/Ankh axis behind him. Noguchi and the band turn his City Pop into something singular for On The Run, much in the same way they digest and discard the roadmaps for country with Davis. The arrangements bloom and blossom here, pulling back to let Noguchi wax lonesome, then curdling the Canterbury quotient for a bit. It’s a hallucinatory pop confection that winds through the wires with an intensity like corroded Techinicolor.
The record is both opulent and homespun, often leaning into The Roadhouse Band’s knack for arrangements and letting them glitter the air with embellishments. The title track comes out of a dream; gameshow glitz and Library Music tinged with the taste of soap suds. “Drive My Cape Cod” crumbles between the spools, a memory that mumbles through its manifestations. The opener sets the stage; a pulsing, prodding odyssey that’s charred around the edges., The record opens into a wider world, works that seem like a whisper between the wires, a seance of synth and striated rhythms. The record is smeared with neon and rain, an album that crackles to life in a cherry of cigarette ash only tp waft away on the breeze. It’s a fitting farewell for Noguchi, an album that takes time to parse. It’s a maze of pop reflections and pocket-psych picnics. The veneer reads warmth, but the rippled of uncertainty finds the record pulling away at the seams, a portrait of an artist projecting composure while constantly taping up the tapestries when the audience’s backs are turned.
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