Blossom Dream Cafe

Type: Album

Score: 6.5/10

Date modified: Dec 30, 2025

I'll get this out of the way right away: I'm not sure if this is even the album I wanted to listen to or if there was some mistake with Spotify or what, so do take this all with a grain of salt. I went in looking for "Blossom Tea Time" and I found "Blossom Dream Cafe" which sounded about right and had the banger "Whispering Flower" on it, so it seemed right, but it was also 11 songs longer than the version on Bandcamp and no, I'm never listening to anything on Bandcamp the woke left cannot make me. What I can best assume happened after a single look at the (attached) cover is that this is a combination of both Blossom Tea Time and their other album "Dreamścape" so do take any of the criticism about disjointedness with, like, a whole salt shaker's worth of salt.

Regardless of what it took to get here, this is a pretty cute jazz (adjacent at least) lounge album. I was a little concerned at first, as the first few songs were pretty slow, even for a jazz album, but by track six I felt that this album had really started to hit its stride and follows into the track "Blossom tea time" which is probably my favourite on the album. It feels like it forgoes all the gentle mellow vibes it had and gets really fun and almost jazz-pop-esque and perhaps even has some more electronic leanings. I can't explain this one; it really gives off the vibe of a cartoon character in the 80s walking down the street cheerily greeting their neighbours as well as giving off similar vibes to some of Pikuniku's music, though a little more toned down. I really quite liked the vocal chop (??) "hah " kind of sound too; it felt like it broke up some of the repetition in the track. I can't say for sure how a song that feels like this drastic a change of pace from the more mellow but sweet, upbeat kind of ambience the album seemed to have until this point affects the whole album's cohesion, but I feel like that was already thrown out the window when they slammed two albums into one. Even if cohesiveness was a concern, I feel like it should always take a backseat for a song this good because trust me, I locked the fuck back in on listening to this album after hearing this.

After that kind of turning point, there still aren't any songs quite as good as Blossom tea time but there is a notable markup in songs that I found more engaging as the album becomes a little more active, though in my opinion it does go a little far with this approach in songs like Madeleine, where I thought it started getting a little silly with it. The initial part of that song is pretty fine, but by about a minute or so I started thinking, "Ok, we're getting a little too silly with it now". It was a pleasant track, sure, but it just didn't feel like it fit, even less so than Blossom tea time to me, and it didn't really get to use the same excuse of reinvigorating this album and being extra unique, as much of Madeline's cues seem to be taken directly from Blossom tea time. I mean, it has the vocal chop, vibe and even the same kind of beat with a slightly slower tempo; just listen to the start of both. I don't know if this is common in jazz; I'm not a super big listener, to be honest, but it still just felt like I was hearing the same thing over, just in a less interesting way now. It made it even weirder how the energy of this album immediately seems to nosedive into a generally far more mellow vibe, reaching its lowest point in the sweet but not exactly hopeful "Water lily". I'm happy it's followed by the certainly much more enthusiastic "Whispering Flowers" and "Five flavor berry" though to be honest I'd have preferred this to end with Whispering Flowers as it felt like it had a wider range and kind of encapsulated this album better than Five flavor berry that, while I really liked the piano riff it had going on, felt much more standalone in a way. I also just really like the birds tweeting in Whispering Flowers, it's very cute.

There are also some (even) slower songs like the piano-centric ballad "Dreamścape: Glow" which I felt like is being really overlooked, having on 10k streams on Spotify. It begins a series of piano reprise's of earlier songs on the album which I thought were all just as good or even better than their original songs. I'm fairly sure these are more like bonus tracks so I counted Five flavor berry as the actual ending to this album as these songs randomly backloaded in the end wouldn't really make much sense to me.