Kero Kero Bonito - Time 'n' Place
Apr 7, 2021 (updated Feb 4, 2024)
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As life passes by around us, we all have to come to terms with growing up, gaining responsibilities, and moving into a new stage of our life. We have no choice but to face those consequences ourselves as we mature, leaving our innocence behind like a worn-and-torn stuffed animal and entering into a vast, brutal, often obscured reality that we’re not prepared to face. “Time ‘n’ Place” perfectly encapsulates the frightening feelings of growing up, of watching the world move forward, leaving us in the dust, scrambling to pick up the pieces. The transition is jarring, abrupt, unsettling, anxiety-inducing, and inexorable, and all we can do is try our best to prepare. But even with knowledge of the inevitable, we tend to underestimate evolution -- it will always come down harder than we expect. It’s not a question of how but when. When our lives will be upended, when we will be forced to face an ever-changing, terrifying, ruthless society -- one that we’ve only ever viewed from the sidelines.

Kero Kero Bonito’s first full-length LP, “Bonito Generation” is a rather playful and carefree project, akin to the life of a naive, gleeful child. The album has neither a cohesive, overlying message nor a clear storyline -- it’s just pure, unadulterated fun. Each track on “Bonito Generation” celebrates the smallest, most trivial aspects of life -- from hearing a catchy song on the radio to jumping on a trampoline to not doing work, this project’s greatest strength comes from just how fun, untroubled, and feel-good it is. Every single hook on this album is catchy and the production is sparkly and cute, as are Sarah Bonito’s bilingual vocal performances. This album has clear and deep parallels with the innocence and blissful ignorance of childhood, putting it in strong contrast with their sophomore release. “Time ‘n’ Place”, ditching bright synths and twittering 808s for distorted guitars and live drumming, provides context, depth, maturity, and cohesion to KKB’s discography, and is significantly darker and heavier than their past works -- an extremely interesting and highly unexpected left turn for the band which had made a name for itself on bright, poppy, and euphoric tracks like “Flamingo” and “Trampoline”. Yet, the move made perfect sense.

An expedition of what we have before us, one person who had to face this the hard way, was Joshua Kusonoki from Japan, living in Austin, Texas. Until he was 12 years old, Joshua lived in Kyoto, Japan, before work opportunities for his parents led his family to move to Austin, Texas. These beginning moments, before the forced move, were memories he looked back on fondly, some of the best times of his life. Every day was filled with pure bliss, not a care in the world, nothing to overthink or stress over, just living life to its fullest extent. Times we would all yearn for to come back, struggling to come to grips with the unforgiving reality of human growth. There are striking parallels between this period and KKB’s debut, “Bonito Generation”. As described before, it’s akin to the life of a naive, gleeful child. But another thing that has eerily similarities to Josh’s life is the heavy and dark transition into growth, like KKB’s sophomore release “Time ‘n’ Place”. Joshua is only 12 years old, everyday being remotely the same but enjoyable for him. Getting up everyday isn’t a hassle, it’s something he looks forward to. At night he doesn’t want to go to bed, he just wants to play. His life was seemingly perfect, for the 12 years he was in Kyoto. One morning, he wakes up with a rainbow outside, from the rain from the night before, not knowing the storm to come...

*The storm enters… A rainbow is barely visible in the near distance, overshadowed by the loud thundering and the strong lightning striking the ground. His parents come in, elated with the news of the move, but he has no idea what’s happening or what’s about to happen. He didn’t understand the gravity of the situation, and only followed along, blindsided. Joshua, who had never had to experience the true feeling of sadness, had no worries in the world…*

*9 years pass by… Joshua Kusonoki is living in Austin, and has been for many years now. *

Why does everything feel so empty? Why is there a lack of comfort? Why do I want to stop trying? I lack the motivation to even get up in the morning, let alone work every day. What am I doing this for? The life I live now is mundane and monotonous. I work a 9-to-5 desk job as an intern and come home feeling as empty as I was when I left the door. This never-ending cycle… When will it stop?

It’s morning again. Another mundane morning. I go “Outside” to find a foggy sky. The leaves are dewy, and I can smell the rain. No clear sky, no sun out, just a dull, cold morning. Before entering my car, I take a moment to look around me. I stood in the middle of my driveway, wind and rain greeting me. There is one glimmer of hope, a faint, barely visible rainbow -- distant, but still present, and it provides me with meaningless, shallow solace. I get in my car and drive to work for another day, numb.

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"Outside" is a short noise-pop track, at just shy of 2 minutes, and it's about a downpour cycle, from the early morning light drizzle to a rainstorm to a rainbow. It shows similar innocent characteristics to quite a bit of "Bonito Generation", as Sarah observes and personifies the outside climate. The track sets the tone for “Time ‘n’ Place” -- the distorted guitars and synths immediately represent a clean break from the electropop sound of “Bonito Generation”. Lyrically, the track sees the narrator waking up to another morning of rain, the drizzle coming down as they observe the outside world, and it juxtaposes the celebration of the little things that took place so often on KKB’s debut while reflecting on the “thunderstorms”, and that life isn’t always easy, but that we should still all try to strive for closure.

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I arrive at my office, a blank corporate building positioned in a seemingly infinite plaza of blank corporate buildings. I sigh as I reach over to my car’s passenger seat and grab a backpack with my computer, loose pieces of paper, and some of my belongings. Opening my car door, I open my umbrella, holding it over my head and running outside, my backpack slinged across one shoulder as I try not to get myself wet. Waving to one of my coworkers as I step inside the building, forcing a happy, professional persona, I sit down at my cubicle and open up PowerPoint. I stare down at the agenda for the day, plastered across my desk, as dark matter fills my mind.

Where did it all go wrong? All of the hopes and dreams filling my mind years ago now seem so far out of reach. They’re just mere ghosts of thoughts in my head, evicted by mundane office work, bills, and emptiness. I can't help but think about the day when the sun finally stays down. Will I even notice? Will I just be sitting around, ticking a list off, ruing what I said wrong? I can’t endure this life any longer. What am I doing this for? Everything I do is glaringly meaningless. I’m doing so much during my waking hours, so why does it feel so empty at the end of the day? Why don’t I feel any satisfaction in my work? And how long will this last? Will I be sitting in this cramped cubicle, making marketing presentations until I die?

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“Time Today”, the second track on “Time ‘n’ Place”, centers around the often meaningless work and to-dos we surround ourselves with, often not even knowing what we’re doing and what we’re doing it for. On this track, Sarah Bonito sings about adapting and coping by painting, writing, and making music, but that she doesn’t even have enough time to arrange her work properly, let alone reflect on it. She addresses passing on this song, contemplating whether she will just be wondering about what she did wrong until her death, “ticking a list off” for the rest of her life.

In Time Today's music video, Sarah is in a mental ward, going through life meaninglessly in the building -- singing, running and listening to music, talking with a stuffed bird, video calling with other KKB members. The video has an on-edge, eerie quality to it, and it makes me wonder -- what if this is what life is all about? What if this is all we’re going to be doing? What if there is no deeper meaning?

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“Enough of the sulking, time to go to work,” I tell myself. I avoid my co-workers as much as possible -- why try to make relationships with people I’ll only work with for a few more years? This place is, simply, soulless. There’s nothing to be happy with, but nothing to be mad about either except for how mind-numbingly dull it is here.

I have to play a tiring, worn-out facade every day -- every day, when I step into the office building, I become the “happy young guy in the workplace”. I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want anyone to worry about me, or even care about me. I’ve gotten used to shielding my emotions to keep away from interaction -- I’m deathly afraid of it. Something happened today that really ticked me the wrong way, and I just had a large outburst at a co-worker. It wasn’t my fault I mean, they were pressing me to make them coffee? Like get it yourself if you care so much. Everyone saw the real me… and I just had to leave.

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“Only Acting” is a noise-pop track, featuring Bonito Generation-like writing about playing a character in a play, interpolated with disorienting, loud noise passages at the bridge and outro. Many have interpreted this track in different ways, but I believe the track and its contrast tells two stories -- a story of the band and a story of keeping up a fake persona. The disparity between the innocent, almost naive writing on the track and its loud, abrasive passages, as well as the guitar solo (!) and instrumentation, represents that Kero Kero Bonito isn’t the band that it once was, especially as the album’s lead single and the album’s sole track to appear on TOTEP, an EP released shortly before the release of “Time ‘n’ Place”. I also view this track as based on trying to keep up a facade of how you think other people would want you to act. The show in this track is a metaphor for the environment we live in, and the loud, noisy sections of the track represent that no human can keep up such a facade for very long. We may try to hold a veneer of being some other person, someone more pleasant, stable or helpful, but the true thoughts we face derail us. The track’s bridge features the song’s narrator trying to instruct the listener how to act well, while manic screams interrupt and eventually dismantle the instruction altogether, and the song ends with a horror-esque noise closer, where Sarah’s vocals are chopped, distorted, and reversed. To me, this represents an absolute breakdown-- failing to even attempt to put on a facade for others, but going insane and revealing your “true self” to others.

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As I was walking back to the car, I looked back up to the windows of the office building, everyone glaring at me, quietly talking among themselves about things I didn’t want to imagine. I quickly glanced back at my car, the weight of every glare weighing down on me. What are they thinking of me? Am I out of a job?

I got into my car, all my papers shuffled in my hands, my backpack still unzipped, papers crumpled inside as I rushed out of the building before HR or my boss could say anything to my face. An email would be far easier. I’m scared to come back now to the office. What have I done this time?

I sit down in my car’s driver seat, driving away quickly to avoid confrontation and parking at a nearby lot, forcing myself to sit with my thoughts. As I broke down sobbing, opening the car’s center console unsteadily to pull out a bag of tissues, I looked outside of the car’s window to see a flock of birds flying by, unaffected by the man sitting right below. All flying forward in the air, carefree, reminiscent of my old bird from long ago…

It had been years since she had passed. My childhood pet. I vividly remembered the day I came home from school, my mother holding a pet parakeet in a cage, my face brightening up as I admired her for hours. She was there for me all throughout my childhood, and when we had to move, we were forced to turn her over to another household in our neighborhood. Memories flashed through my mind -- bringing her to my friends’ house to show her off, listening to her songs as I did arithmetic, trying to hold back tears as we entered the airport, leaving her behind. I pulled out my phone, swiping through archives of old photos before finding one specific image -- young Josh grinning, holding his new parakeet in his hands. That was it. I threw my phone against the car’s console, letting it fall to the ground, not caring about the damage. I looked back up through the window at the birds crossing above us, forcing myself to wonder about them. Where do they go? Where are they really going? Where is their end goal? Where am I going? Where is my end goal…

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"Flyway" is a shoegaze-y accolade of sorts to Sarah's late pet bird, who died between the creation of “Bonito Generation” and “Time ‘n’ Place”.The song sees the narrator watching the movement of birds during winter, contemplating ideas like whether their plumes freeze in the snow. However, the track additionally addresses heavier topics of human death as she sings in the outro about her bird and even addresses suicidal ideation -- “When I pick up the courage, I hope that I can join you someday”.

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I’m now on my way home, stressed and overthinking every potential consequence. I walk into my home, throwing all of my things onto the couch, walking to my bedroom, and collapsing onto my bed. This was, quite honestly, the only comforting part of my day, if you could even call it that. I look around my room and I analyze every detail, trying to get my mind off of what just happened. Things I’ve always overlooked in my room. These “items” were just things to me. Every single item had some bit of story to it -- how I got it, what I used it for, when I used it… but they were mere items, at the end of the day. I kept all of these things in my house for so long just because they felt important, but were they? What’s to say that this lamp is any better than the other lamp in the living room? Or this bed to the other bed in the other room? Or that toy to the other toy? They only held fond, lost memories, and that’s it. Fundamentally the same… but are they? These “things”, no matter how trivial, I can’t let go. All my life I’ve been just tightly gripping onto old, fading memories to the point where I can’t seem to make any new ones. I think about the bags of stuffed animals, and lamps, and furniture that we left outside our door the day we left, to be picked up by the garbage company. Each one of those things with value to me. Laying in my bed, with these thoughts floating around my head, I fall asleep.

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“Dump” is a track about, as the name implies, a dump, and a surface-level reading of the lyrics would insinuate just that. However, the track is about something much deeper than just going to a trash dump and observing the happenings -- the song and lyrics sees the narrator realizing that many things at this dump were once important to their owners. A parrot cage, dial phones, electronics -- each of these things meant something to their owners at one point. Even the smallest things, like clothing items, had memories made with them, and the dump is ultimately where each of those memories goes to die.

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Where am I? What is this place? Why does it feel weirdly nostalgic? Almost immediately, I feel a strong sense of bliss flowing through my blood. Why do I feel young again? The bright, vibrant light of the sun rising in the distance dances around the edges of my peripheral vision. Cherry blossom trees cover the hills and mountains… people walking on the sidewalks and the streets, food vendors on the roads fill my senses and overwhelm me. A food I haven’t smelt in awhile. Am I in Kyoto? At last? After years of never having seen the city, after leaving so fast I couldn’t even say goodbye. I haven’t felt so alive in years. I can’t wait to go back to what I saw so many years ago. I can’t wait to go explore things I’ve never seen before. I can’t wait to-

My alarm goes off. Where am I? I then realized where I was, “home”, in Austin. It was all a dream. But it felt so real? Is this a dream? I pinched myself until I almost bled, but this was reality. I was still home and I was never back in Kyoto. It felt so weirdly real, and I was hoping I was back in the place that made me truly happy, but I guess it was too good to be true. I collapsed back onto the bed, not ready to face another day, wanting nothing more than to go back to Kyoto again, even if it was just in my mind.

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“Make Believe” is a track about keeping your innocence, even if it’s just in your head, and detaching from reality as it comes inevitably onward like a speeding train. The track’s narrator sings about finding time to “make believe”, but life stops her from doing so, and so she dreams about alternate realities. “At night, the sunlight beats upon my skin / In here, I see everything, and until the morning comes, I feel it”. She also sings about dissociation -- a common symptom of depression, along with lucid dreaming -- saying that she often just loses control of the real world, and how real it feels despite her knowledge that nothing in her mind can hurt her. The track ends with the sound of an alarm clock, signifying that no matter how real our dreams feel, and no matter how much they transport us, they can’t stay with us forever -- the real world always wins, no matter how unpleasant.

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*A few weeks pass…*

For years, I’ve been staring this day in the face. The day when I’m either the happiest or most depressed I’d ever been, I told myself. The day when I read my time capsule. At this point in time, I need it the most…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been dreaming of the same thing, Japan. It’s been awhile since I’ve dreamt of the country and my old life -- the last time I remember doing so was before I was locked into this mundane, boring life of pointless work. I was almost fine with it -- I had only come to realize now that it's not what I wanted. The past few weeks have been, to put it lightly, hell. I can’t take this turmoil anymore, I need something to remind me of a better time, a glimmer of hope.

I made this time capsule when I was 9 years old, a young schoolboy in Japan. At first it was supposed to serve as a school project, but I took it to heart and kept it with me, through my move and all of my life experiences. It’s one of the last few items I still have from Japan, and I never opened it. 12 years. The time has been so distant from when I made this, I had completely forgotten the contents of the box. What could I possibly have put in here?

My heart pounding and tears welling up silently in my eyes, I opened the box, its cardboard fading slightly. The first thing standing out was a letter, and I was finally reminded of what I did with this box over a decade earlier. I opened the letter, holding the fragile piece of paper in my hands. It wasn’t very lengthy, and it was in complete Japanese. I don’t remember what it said, but I planned to translate it later. The second thing to catch my eye was a little bonsai tree. It was small, maybe 5x5 inches, but the plant was dead. I set it on my nightstand, and planned to keep it. Everything else in this box ranged from just different toys that I had. A lot of old memories came to my mind from this and I felt happy and melancholy at the same time. These conflicting feelings made it hard to enjoy what I was doing.

Later that night, I decided to translate the letter, and it read…

“Dear future self…

Hello Josh! How are you? I don’t know if you’ll remember by now, but I made a time capsule for you in the future to remind yourself of the past! I left a few things for you that mean a lot to me right now, and I hope you like them.

I hope everything is great, and I hope you became the man you wanted to be.”

~ Josh

Not only did this letter show the hopefulness of my past self for my future, but I just seemingly never became the man I wanted to be… I had disappointed my own past self.

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“Dear Future Self” is a time capsule of sorts -- a track the narrator is singing to her future self, or perhaps one her past self is singing to her present self. She sings about herself as “the girl you buried way back when” and goes through the ordinary motions of a typical time capsule (“Do cars ever fly? Have you travelled time? Or is it just the same old thing for you and I?”). However, she also approaches more human feelings, wondering about her future and how she’ll end up faring -- ““But I heard all the years’ll leave you hurt / Everyone you love disappears and nothing works / Please don't say you hate the world / I hope that I won't”.

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My phone rang. It was the middle of the night. “Huh?” I asked myself, slightly pissed at being shaken out of my dream. I picked up the phone. “Your mother has been admitted to the emergency room after experiencing acute pains.” I didn’t even wait for the call to finish before I was suddenly out of the house. Void of all thoughts, I sped to the hospital. She was sick, and I needed to get there quickly. Speeding down the highway, I had no time to even think about the implications of the situation until I got there.

Running through the hallways, the ringing in my ears so loud to the point I couldn’t even hear my own yells for my mom, asking what her room number was and where I could see her. I ran to her door, looking in through the window. The doctors wouldn’t let me in. I sat down on the bench outside the door, overcome with anger, fear, and sadness. I passed out.

*A few hours later…*

I woke abruptly to a person calming tapping my shoulder. “You can visit your mother now.” Immediately, energy ran through my body, relieved and elated. I walked in and all I could smell was the strong scent of Lysol and bleach, uncomfortably void of the familiar smell of my mother. She didn’t look too great at all -- the doctors told me she would be okay, but in the condition and care she was put in, how could she be okay? The clearly uncomfortable bed, the lack of food and water by her side, her droopy eyes, empty of all emotions… It didn’t look like everything would be okay. She couldn’t recognize me at first, but when she did I asked, “How are you? Is the food okay?”

I was not there for too long after that. She seemed fine and she insisted I go home as she fell asleep. I insisted that she should rest while I was gone and that everyone missed her back at home. I went home with the stress lifted off my chest, at least a little bit.

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"Visiting Hours" is about a visit to a sickly friend or family member. The track was created after Gus' dad was sent to the ICU after a dangerous accident. The verses were composed almost verbatim from discussions between Gus’s parents, and as a result, despite feeling somewhat mundane, they feel painstakingly real, from getting your cherished one the food they need to readjusting the hospital bed to dreaming about the day that they can at last get back. Even despite these things, it’s still a hopeful track -- realizing that your loved one is recuperating and will be back with you, despite this run-in, and the overwhelming feeling that they’ll be okay.

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The sound of my alarm went off, and I instantly got out of my bed. I immediately went into my parents’ bedroom, giving them both quick kisses and going to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Today we were going to go into town. I ate some cereal and changed into my clothes, ready to head out for another day.

Usually, when my family and I go out on these “adventures'', we weave through the local flea markets, looking at all the toys laid out onto large wood pallets. In this small part of the town, everyone knows each other. Everyone recognizes us, and we recognize everyone else. A smile was painted on my face the whole time we were out as I pointed out every little detail to my parents. Next week would be my 12th birthday, and I told my parents about what I wanted.

After our visit to the flea markets, our family headed home. I had gotten so much that day for my birthday, and I was on top of the world. Before I could open it all, to my dismay, my dad told me I had to go to bed. While preparing to go to bed, I could hear my dad yap in excitement. He profusely says thank you many times to someone he’s on a call with. I peer outside of my room, and see my mom in excitement too. What could he be so excited about?

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“If I’d Known” is a track that centers itself around the many-worlds interpretation, which states that all potential results of any choice occur in some alternate reality. On this song, Sarah glances back at the past and each choice and the prospects of those choices, every one “giving birth to a dedicated universe", and thus decisions aren't a point of worry since she “feels all worlds at once”. A typical concern of life is how choices will affect our fates, however, on this track, Sarah considers the fact that all impacts of a choice will happen regardless of what we decide about them, which is a point of comfort and yet one of anxiety and even sadness.

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I decided to take a 2 week leave from work, the dreams having won their battle. For the first time in years, a smile filled my face, a genuine one. I was packing my bags, brushing my teeth, got some breakfast, and was ready to go. I had planned my trip only a day prior -- impulsive as it was, it just felt right. It’s been too long. I couldn’t stand looking at old letters and items, and remembering old dreams and memories. I had to be there. I got in my car, ready to go to the airport.

As I was arriving, everything felt evocative. I pulled up to the airport, remembering this was the airport I came to America for the first time. This was where I saw my first glimpses of a new life. I wondered how different life would be if I could’ve warned my old life, convinced him to stay back.

“Enough of the sad memories, it was time to make new ones,” I told myself as I walked through security, grabbed some lunch and took a seat at Terminal 3, a flight straight to Kyoto.

A few hours later, I boarded the plane. I looked out the window, saying goodbye to Austin, Texas as our plane took off.

I couldn’t believe this was happening. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a dream this time. I looked out the window once more, and saw we were near landing. I remembered this place. Everything felt so new but nostalgic at the same time. It felt like an old friend.

I got off the plane and just looked around. This is the place where I want to be. I walked outside, took a deep breath, and was ready to go out into the boisterous streets of Kyoto, old memories filling my mind.

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“Sometimes” is a lo-fi song that has the nostalgic, simple vibe of a campfire sing-along -- the slightly blemished chorus vocals, the simple guitar strumming paired with occasional, quiet electronics. It’s the most instrumentally basic but one of the most powerful songs on the album -- it preaches a message of hope, that the “happy days are coming again”, no matter how bad life is. KKB and the “Sometimes Singers” about loss of hope (“The raindrops keep falling, you're soaking to the bone, and you can't see for the clouds”) and the injustices of life (“You win some, you lose some, and then you lose some more / you even played your best”). It is, nonetheless, interpolated by messages of hope, and despite everyone getting the blues sometimes, it will all be okay. We’ll be fine.

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It was nearing the end of the first day in Kyoto, and I was ready to lay down and go to bed, but I remembered a familiar place as I was driving around. The beach of Kyotango. Oh, it’s been so long. I had so many memories of lying out here in the sand, playing in the water, running around all day with my family, and of learning how to swim with my mother. The sun was setting and I decided to go out on the beach. I sat on a nearby bench, admiring the sun going down over the sea, the small waves hitting the shore, the sand filled with seashells. The emotions that filled my body were overwhelming. Memories filled my brain like looking through an old camera’s footage, everything was falling into place. A tear drops from my eye, but unlike before, it was out of happiness.

I ended up leaving abruptly, the feelings becoming too much for me. I got into a bike and started riding around the town. The people there were so unfamiliar, unlike before, some who I wished to meet. I have no idea how long I rode on that bike for, but it seemed like I went through all of Kyoto. The busy streets, the empty and serene outskirts, the hills and mountainous areas of terrain, all the way to this small little rest stop. I didn’t see any service, but the lights were on and a sign outside said, “We’re Serving!” I sat down at a booth, looked at the view ahead of me, and fell asleep quietly, with a smile on my face.

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“Swimming” is the penultimate song on Kero Kero Bonito’s “Time ‘n’ Place”, and, in my opinion, its magnum opus. The track contrasts memories of swimming in the ocean -- one as a child, one as an adult in the same ocean. The track’s narrator reminisces about going to the beach with her mother and learning to swim for the very first time. “Mama led me by the hand, 'til the grit stuck with the damp / And the foam fizzed adrift when we both strode in”. She sings about stepping into the water, feeling the detritus lifting and starting to swim, with a sense of freedom and happiness. In the second verse, she sings about going back to the same beach many years later, “memories floating in the wind”. She enters the water, but it feels different -- she feels nostalgic for her early, innocent years, tearing up as she enters the water. I view this as the summation of the ideas explored on the album -- innocence, childhood, growing up, nostalgia, and facing old memories, and it truly is one of the greatest songs ever made.

This album’s outro is the track “Rest Stop”, one of the most surreal and experimental tracks on the album. The instrumental is quite soft on this song for a large part of it, featuring Sarah singing about a deserted rest stop. However, a bit over a minute in, the track explodes into a wall of noise and electronics, and after, the track loses all of its instrumentation, aside from a tad bit of noise and static, as Sarah sings distantly about Armageddon and the apocalypse -- it feels like a dream.

Let everybody come together, The world at peace as one.

We could live a dream forever, It's really up to us.

We'll make it there if we work hard enough.

Keep on, keep on, and give it everything you've got.

‘Cause, only then, we'll reach the end, the land where we belong.

So when we walk among the clouds, hold your neighbor close.

As the trumpets echo round, you don't wanna be-

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*2 weeks pass… *

It was time to leave Kyoto. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay so badly, but I knew the inevitable. This time leaving Kyoto, I knew what was going on. Years before, I still had a smile on my face, but now I didn’t. At least, now, I can take my memories back with me. I don’t want to go “home”, because this felt more comfortable than my home. This is my home away from home -- my true home. This is where I wanted to live…

I then realized. What’s stopping me? My parents? They’re somewhat far away from me, they don’t have a grip on my life, nor would they likely object… What's stopping me from just staying here forever? Paving my own path, exiting the expectations of the life I thought I had back at home, reentering the future of what I dreamt of as a kid.

What is going to stop me?

Right then and there, I decided.

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Joshua ended up staying in Kyoto and lived a prosperous, happy life as a storyteller. His parents were in full support of the move and change, yet frightened by the sudden shift in his life. He ended up finding happiness in himself, and the environment around him. He was finally able to do what he wanted to do.

He became the man he wanted to be.

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Thank you all for reading this review. It took SMT and I quite a lot of time and effort, so if you did enjoy, please drop a like and be sure to follow @SMTCubes on AOTY. “Time ‘n’ Place” is to both of us one of our favorite albums ever and something I’d say we’re both passionate about and we were glad to be able to make this.

Once again, thank you for reading! :)

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MattsReviews’ Favorite Tracks: Outside, Only Acting, Make Believe, Dear Future Self, If I’d Known, Sometimes, Swimming, Rest Stop
MattsReviews’ Least Favorite Tracks: N/A

92/100

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SMT’s Favorite Tracks: Outside, Time Today, Only Acting, Flyway, Make Believe, Dear Future Self, Sometimes, Swimming, Rest Stop
SMT’s Least Favorite Tracks: N/A

100/100

36 Comments
2y
Worst review I've ever seen unfollowed
2y
kero kero bonito
2y
Sorry for the delay, some final edits lol
2y
*doesnt read*
*scrolls down*
*hearts it*
Alright I’ve done my part!!!
(Jk I’ll read soon)
2y
love this review
2y
wow this review really freaking sucks
2y
holy crap mate wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
2y
I actually cried what the fuck are you two doing to me
2y
@halbery don’t cry 💖
2y
@halbery i don't know whether to be happy because i wrote something that made someone feel emotions or to be sad because you're crying and i cant give you a comfort hug
2y
@halbery WHY NOOO
2y
It’s just such a good review...
2y
@halbery SMT wrote the whole thing!
2y
Pogggg
2y
Bro this is literally the review
2y
@Chode The review of All Time?
2y
this is a review 😡
2y
weaboos
2y
You should make your review longer I think you can pull it off
2y
Shoutout @SMTCubes for showing some appreciation for a very obscure aoty user
2y
This mat guy seems cool
2y
howdy
2y
@TomBejoy Hey I actually did something too 😡
2y
The saddest part of the whole story is that he moved to Texas... TEXAS. Like even if he lived in like Oklahoma this story would be just as sad. Texas is awful

Ok but on a more serious note this review was phenomenal
2y
underrated
2y
@Riskr What's underrated
2y
The review
2y
@TomBejoy I just realized you asked us to make THIS longer
2y
obivously a joke
2y
You and Matthew seriously made the best reviews on the entire site and i am just now reading them.. damn
2y
@Blyizz We had plans to make a lot more of these but due to his leave, we never got to :(
2y
@Matt ah that sucks :( do you have RYM? Maybe you two could do something over there since he’s still active on that
11mo
Easily my favorite review on my account.
6mo
Incredible review, in tears....
6mo
@Sinjei Thank you ❤️
6mo
Good Job Matt
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