Zazen Boy’s influence on modern Japanese rock continues to reveal itself with each passing day, especially to those who fill their hours navigating the elephant graveyard of MySpace where math-rockish groups continue to experiment with hyper-talked vocals. Though a few manage to get it right, a lot also come off as pale imitations hoping to…
The music industry’s decade-long struggle to make money has led to all sorts of artists trying out new ways of packaging product so people shell out real currency instead of just typing “album title .rar” into Google. Sometimes you can “pay what you want,” other times you can get an MP3 download by buying a…
By now, all these CUZ ME PAIN artists should be blurring together right? To some degree they are, though the synths and muffled vocals the majority of the young label’s artists use aren’t dissolving into samey goo. Rather, they’ve managed to create a label-wide style that each act tinkers with in their own way. Jesse…
Finally, a way to enjoy the theme song to My Neighbor Totoro without surrendering any masculinity if your the type who obsess about that. Something called IMAGINARY FLYING MACHINES have put together something called Princess Ghibli which takes classic songs from Studio Ghibli and adds, primarily, two things: – power chords – guttural howling So…
The actual musical content of Chatmonchy’s new song is pleasant enough – a bouncy bit of twee-leaning pop that would, in fact, work wonders at a seven-year-old kids’ birthday party. A fine little song, but the really gem of “Birthday Cake No Ue Wo Aruite Kaetta” is the silly video. In the clip, we learn…