Caught Sleeping: Shigeto— Lineage mini-LP

​I have to be honest here; I haven’t really been sleeping on this album. I was basically in love with this record as soon as it came out. If I’m not mistaken, I think I wrote about my favorite song on the album, “Huron River Drive,” when it dropped. We all just realized though that nobody wrote anything about the whole thing… and that’s a big problem.

Lineage’s concept is fantastically inspirational and beautifully inspired. The front cover includes a photo of Shigeto's great grandfather's house from 1916 in Hiroshima, Japan. The back cover includes a photo of his great grandfather, Shigeto Ohmura, at the Amache Internment Camp in Grenada, Colorado. It’s almost impossible to not be intrigued by such meaningful packaging.

In writing Lineage, Shigeto allows us to travel with him on a journey through time, back to his childhood, where he first began cultivating knowledge about his heritage. It’s planned almost like a letter to himself for preservation, each song a paragraph or memory that defines him. Lineage is his ways of giving us insight into what it’s like to walk in his shoes.

Regardless of its heartfelt message, Zach Saginaw is extremely talented. He is a drum master (to be certain, I challenge you to see him live) and he lives in a variety of genres. Spanning the spectrums of jazz, hip-hop, funk, and folk, Saginaw pulls from each to create tunes that are light in feel; you can basically sense some of the jazz piano flying away. At the same time, however, the songs are grounded by his past, a very real indication that his mind is heavy with historical burdens.

Lineage may have been released early this year, but it’s a record that will definitely make strong showings on yearly round-ups everywhere.

Purchase Shigeto’s Lineage mini-LP right here.