f there’s a glut of painful (and adjective-ridden) reviews of Kaito’s new album Hundred Million Years, blame the music’s ephemerality. Like cotton candy, the music is sweet, soft, and gone-before-you-can-describe-it—leaving you with only a sticky residue on your fingers to remember it by. Rather than offering a break from Kaito’s earlier work, Hundred Million couples familiar “lush atmospherics” with an aversion to basslines that would otherwise hold down ascending drones. In other words, the music will, in many music reviews, swell toward one transcendent metaphor or another. These Kaito clichés might be helpful for the uninitiated, but a spin with the music quickly makes them redundant.

The album’s greatest strength could be this inverse relationship: the difficulty of providing a thought-provoking description of Hundred Million Light Years compared to the ease of listening. That’s because Kaito has crafted an album of tints, akin to Eno’s idea of ambience—sound “suited for a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.” Music-wise, that might leave many underwhelmed, but Kaito is more malleable and better able to soundtrack everyday life better than any recent ‘ambient’ album of note. It’s just as easy to imagine “Holding a Baby” heightening the experiences of sitting behind a dusty car window on a sun-smeared day or slowly peeling an orange on a sagging couch without overtaking the experience itself.

Kompakt has famously described Kaito’s work as “MDMA for the ears.” In the intervening time between his debut and Hundred Million, however, the label has released a number of singles (from artists like The MFA and The Field) that more accurately fit that bill. Hundred Million Light Years, and its predecessor, gives only as much as you ask from it. The songs here are less neo-trance than nü-age—a term loaded enough to strike fear into the heart of any self-respecting genre-phobe. Kaito’s nü-age music can easily be foregrounded or left in the background, like the trickling synths of “Your Brilliant Flowers”—Hundred Million Light Years is as easily consumed as it is consuming.

I might be jumping the gun, as Kaito’s second album Special Love was a beatless version of his debut, Special Life. But the presumed upcoming ‘ambient’ edition of Hundred Million Light Years is bound to spin its cotton candy differently. Songs like “Life Goes On” and “Color of Feels,” with their defused clicks and gentle taps already sound like they belong on Hundred Billion Light Years. It’s this fragile balance that makes Hundred Million album sound dulled at first, but it’s also why (if you give it time) it will eventually tint your life.