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Reveiw: √thumm’s Yamatopia

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Yamatopia, Nara trio √thumm’s second album, manages to meet every stereotype associated with the hotly-anticipated sophomore record while also marking an astronomical leap forward for the young group. Last year’s Coton burst into the world a catchy subversion, √thumm flipping the script on Japanese electro-pop. They took a sound often dependent on studio excess…the pop tinkering going on with Perfume and Capsule, or however the hell genre-fathers Yellow Magic Orchestra did it…and brought it to a more DIY-place. Those songs sounded simultaneously as glossy as the latest Yasutaka Nakata project while also being way more raw, pretty pop songs created by people who are clearly not pop-stars willing to experiment with it even more.

And now comes Yamatopia, every bit as immediately catchy as Coton but also so much more. This album dropped at the end of July, but, as the WordPress timestamp can attest to, it took a long time for this review to be written. This album needs time to fully bloom…it’s not a grower, as it pleases right away, but given time reveals itself as not just 10 hyper earworms (with bonus remixes!) but as an honest-to-goodness cohesive album. It’s just what the fledgling “techrock” movement needed – an album highlighting the micro-genre’s strengths and acting as a blueprint forward.

So, the non-revelations first: this album is packed with insanely catchy pop. √thumm know how to write a great song in the Perfume style – unafraid to smoosh as many noises into a song as long as they leave room for an excellent chorus. In this regard, Yamatopia easily matches Coton. See the thumping spin-around of “Fuji” or the strobing hook on the laid-back “Alive.” Best of all is “Kiss Me Kiss Me,” a hyperactive laser-light show of a song boasting the group’s best build-up to an insanely good chorus yet. Yamatopia’s songs – down to opener “Cubic Star” which recalls the last album’s “Health Voice” by serving as the neon-smothered warm-up full of nonsense lyrics – remain as strong as ever, part pop but also just as club-worthy.

√thumm could have coasted on an album of nothing-but rehashed pop-madness and probably been fine, but Yamatopia sees them pushing into territory often passed over by even artists they cop steps from. Two tracks in particular stand out for going down paths rarely skipped down by electro-poppers. The first comes on the album’s second song and lead single “Harukami,” which is a ballad. Coton’s slower songs came off as bright, incoming tides of sound, less proper songs and more atmospheric experiments. “Harukami’s” a legit J-Ballad run through a synthesizer, even opening with the faint sound of wind chimes that hints at the sort of every-sappy-sound-we-can-fit approach most artists seem to approach ballads with.

It seems set up to be a divider – no manic beat or chorus, even the vocoder seems turned down a bit – but repeated listens reveal this sort of song is actually ripe for √thumm. If most J-Ballads cram as many different sounds into the space of, say, four minutes, why can’t a group who does the exact same thing with electronic noises in pop pull it off? “Harukami” shoots its hand up to answer an emphatic “duh,” going to great lengths to show the versatility of electro-pop. Post-chorus strings get replaced with post-chorus synths, while lead singer lio makes the jump from pop-android to one of those soul-filled robots from Bjork’s “All Is Full Of Love” video, easily the best vocal performance from her yet. Not all J-ballads suck, and √thumm recognize they can work when you really sell them, and that’s exactly what they do (just check the vocal peak late in the track). It’s, oddly enough, one of their most unexpected turns yet and also the best chance they have of getting mainstream attention.

“Since Yesterday,” meanwhile, attempts to be the least-cluttered pop song √thumm have ever penned. Following the glow-stick-rich force of “Kiss Me Kiss Me,” “Since Yesterday” sounds like √thumm trying to be The Beach Boys. Or, more accurately, trying to write a very simple pop gem. Save for a few surplus drum hits and the liberal use of vocoder smeared over lio’s voice, this track comes off as minimal by this trio’s standards. Opening with plinking keyboard, “Since Yesterday” quickly becomes a colorful bit of melancholic bouncy pop. √thumm write the most coherent English lyrics of their career here, skipping the zany t-shirt slogans of prior songs to focus on the end of a relationship. “When tomorrow comes you’ll wish/you had today,” lio sings, the digital manipulation warping her voice so much she already sounds like a memory, “And as we sit here alone/Looking for a reason to go on/It’s so clear that all we have now/Are our thoughts of yesterday.” Whereas most √thumm songs seem mostly giddy, “Since Yesterday” (and “Harukami,” for that matter) show the band not only embracing new forms to fit their pop touch into to, but also writing surprisingly conflicted songs.

The other new developments for the group on Yamatopia aren’t quite as thrilling as the above two tracks, but certainly deserve praise for sounding damn good. “ヤマトコトノハ” gives in to sounding distinctly Japanese – not “Japanese” in the sense of taiko drums or tea ceremonies, but rather how one would imagine a Pachinko parlor to sound in the 80s. “皐-satsuki-” may be the closest √thumm ever come to trance with its pulsing center and hypno-chorus. The only real misstep on Yamatopia comes on late cut “Rise On Prism,” in which the band dabble with hip-hop-ish beats and discover they don’t really mesh with their style of hyper-pop…and even that song boasts a killer chorus a remix away from being a beast.

Yamatopia’s biggest triumph, though, comes when you realize how it sounds like an actual album. Coton, great as it was, felt like a collection of songs – this sounds unified. The slight increase in Japanese lyrics…ones I mostly can’t understand, so accept I might be making a jump here…implies a focus on more personal subject matter best expressed in one’s native language. Though, even lacking a Japanese dictionary app for your phone, the English lyrics to “Since Yesterday” and song titles like “Kiss Me Kiss Me” and “Alive” hint at this album being about relationships, how they start and how they end, two appropriate instances given the extreme emotion √thumm convey in their loaded pop. The songs on Yamatopia just sound way more emotional – “Cubic Star” and (especially) “Kiss Me Kiss Me” bubbling over with joy, “Harukami” splitting somewhere between longing and whispering into someone’s ear, “Fuji” and “Since Yesterday” coming off as a bit more downtrodden. Members sujin and Shimaru deserve credit for delivering amazing music, but the emotional leap comes courtesy of lio’s singing, which has become far more confident since Coton. She’s also example one that artists can sometime make vocal manipulation work in their favor.

It all reaches a dizzying conclusion on the final track “Good Bye Bye!” √thumm flirted with “Star Space” on last year’s debut and always sound a bit cosmic, but it’s here they finally break through the atmosphere. On an album seeing them slowly branch out, they simply embrace their primary style on “Good Bye Bye!” and take it to dizzying heights. A fat acid-bass line wriggles beneath a typically bright collection of synths as lio delivers gibberish English…then the chorus hits. The music itself soars while that newfound vocal confidence goes even higher, delivering a simple line like “Let me good bye bye everything/I feel 8 rising sun” with catharsis. It’s an appropriate ending for Yamatopia – after exploring the highs and lows of love while also delivering a sophomore album both better and bolder than their debut, √thumm say farewell to it all and launch into places unknown.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRDjzqVnA0″]

Live Review: Kisses, The KNOWN At Osaka 2nd Line October 7, 2010

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Of all the venues in Osaka Los Angeles duo Kisses could have wound up in, they landed in the one most in contrast with their sound. The pair (joined by a drummer live) of Jesse Kivel (of Princeton) and Zinzi Edmundson craft tropically-tinged pop that flirts with late-night disco, the sonic equivalent of making a break to Club Med for a few days. Osaka’s 2nd Line stands in stark contrast to the beach – the club name ends up being completely literal once you realize the small live house sits directly underneath the second rail line in Fukushima. This means every few minutes, the insides of 2nd Line rumble as a train passes over the tracks. This frequent trembling seemed poised to disrupt Kisses’ sun-soaked pop – it’s tough to dream of coastal escape when a train’s passing over your head. Yet they pulled off a solid show, pleasing the sparse Thursday-night crowd and overcoming the freights above with lovely pop and charm.

Kyoto’s The KNOWN opened the evening. The duo mixes together the worlds of post-Postal Service electro-pop with open-mic-night strumming with surprisingly captivating…at times…results. The first half of their set saw the guitar-wielding half of the band favor an acoustic, while his DJ-ish partner swathed his chords in a mixture of club-friendly drums, ambient wash and vocal samples (highlight: some bits of dialogue from Willy Wonka to open their set). At it’s absolute best, the guitar cut through all of the electronic goo waterfalling onto it, leading to driving ambient-pop. Just as often, though, The KNOWN’s mish-mash of noises just blended together into a static cloud of boring music. It didn’t help that one song opened with a sample of crickets chirping away. Matters improved greatly in the latter portion of their set, as the guitarist switched out his acoustic for an electric that instantly added a level of aggression (and, thus, interest) to the show. Their best moments…one great song bleeding into the next…were truly memorable but seemed a bit too inconsistent at times.

Whereas The KNOWN’s brand of soft-electro pop often neared introvert status, Kisses take on it made sure to be as outgoing as possible. Their live show has legitimate swagger, the ability to get even the suit-wearing businessmen who must have come straight from work to dance to the breezy keyboard notes of opening song “Kisses.” Kisses sound so great – both live and on their debut album The Heart Of The Nightlife – because of how simple they keep their seaside pop. Princeton comes off as the west coast Vampire Weekend, not a bad thing at all but sometimes getting bogged down in intricate arrangements and clever storytelling. With Kisses, though, the songs come off as relatively straightforward, catchy numbers that give Kivel a chance to focus on sounding great instead of having to tell great stories. It all shows on their best track “Bermuda,” wherein elegant keyboard twirls with extremely pretty vocals while still maintaining a good beat. It’s their most gorgeously constructed song and also the most danceable, a fact made clear by their relatively faithful rendition of it at 2nd Line.

Given the group’s relative youth – formed just this year with their debut album just coming out – their set zipped by Thursday night, but featured plenty of highlights. “Kisses” and “Lovers” both rested on insanely catchy choruses, while the more minimal “People Can Do The Most Amazing Things” got by on bits of island percussion and guitar worthy of soundtracking a sunset. Even Kisses’ subdued numbers still give a little kick – with titles like “Women Of The Club,” it seems like a little way of reminding listeners where these tracks are seemingly set. The band members themselves, meanwhile, couldn’t have come off as more happy to be there. Both Kivel and Edmundson thanks the crowd…in both English and Japanese…countless times. Near the end of the slinky “Midnight Lover” Kivel goofed up on his guitar – everyone laughed it off. He tried apologizing multiple times, but the audience responded “no problem” – in great English! – to show it wasn’t a big deal. And on they played like nothing happened.

As for the train…Kisses similarly laughed that one off as well. When it rumbled by between songs, they just smiled and sometimes pointed up. “The train is making it’s own song,” Kivel said. Maybe it wasn’t such an issue after all.

Live Report: Boom Boom Satellites At Zepp Osaka 9/25/2010

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The Boom Boom Satellites live experience can best be summed up as “picture listening to ‘Born Slippy’ in a packed arena for two hours complete with woozy light show and overpriced beer.” If that sounds lame to you…well, stop reading right here, because that sounds like doing it right to me and ended up being a total surprise based on what I expected to see coming in. The duo’s latest album, To The Loveless, finds them shifting away from the hybrid dance-rock into a more straightforward “rock and/or roll” direction. It’s an incredibly frustrating listen – BBS deliver with tracks like the insanely good “Undertaker” and the ambient-flirting “Stay,” but more frequently pump out jock-jam rock buttered in electronic noises that might as well not be there for 70 infernal minutes. It should be noted many critics see this as a “return to form” worth celebrating, so it might just be a taste thing. Regardless, I entered a packed Zepp Osaka a little unsure of what to expect.

A few moments of over-the-top Flying-V heroics aside, BBS mostly avoided coming off as arena-rock in favor of abrasive arena-club this Saturday night. From the opening electro-squiggles of “Back On My Feet,” the duo (with a drummer in tow to add a little more punch) focused on getting the floor to dance while also fitting some guitar theatrics. That’s their clever trick – visually, the most lasting image of the show would be the two members of the band running around the stage while wildin’ out on their Flyin-Vs, as the drummer plugged away on her kit. Yet sonically this show was totally electro-friendly…the guitars were rarely the dominant sound, instead offering an aggressive sheen to otherwise thumping dance beats (obligatory “kinda like Prodigy” point goes here). Coupled with a laser light show that in the hands of many other bands would be spectacle but seemed necessary for BBS, the duo appeared to be playing rock show when, in fact, they were playing a club show.

BBS did find times to expand – sometimes, as mentioned, for the worse on the less interesting rock-by-numbers songs. Yet they also tackled To The Loveless’ two best tracks with great results – “Undertaker” ran through its various stages (weirdo spoken word, dramatic build, floating resolution) well, standing out as the one song the group played at Zepp where the vocals were absolutely essential and not just another dance-enhancer. They also fit the drifting ballad “Stay” right into the middle of this dance-a-thon without throwing off the momentum one bit. These diversions aside, BBS surprised me by being so damn club-centric…I though their latest album was a sign of badness to come, but instead they ended up delivering a solid show full of good music and freaky lights that would make Underworld proud.

Review: Texas Pandaa’s Down In The Hole

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This review comes nearly five months after the official release of Texas Pandaa’s third album, and as much as I want to blame some outside force for preventing the writing of this piece…like, how I didn’t see this album on sale anywhere except Tower Records in Akihabara…I can’t. Whereas some groups warrant quickly written critiques in order to capitalize on spin-cycle fast hype, Texas Pandaa just makes boringly great music that gets better with time. Down In The Hole rarely deviates from the path previous albums Days and One Gleam After The Shadow traveled leisurely down. This isn’t an album I was particularly excited to buy (despite, thanks to the bands decision to thank every single fan of them on Facebook, my name being printed in the accompanying booklet) but one I certainly expected to be great. Hole isn’t a “grower” in the sense that it can be a difficult listen at first…it’s as smooth as skim milk even on go number one…but rather an album that grows in greatness given more time.

Hole finds the band playing to their strengths as they did on their previous releases to great, albeit not hype grabbing, results. Texas Pandaa makes dreamy music that could easily be confused for “shoegaze” though their slow, guitar-centric sound sits somewhere between Galaxie 500 and Low. Guitars drone into mind-grabbing swirls, but Texas Pandaa avoid simple repetition in favor of jumping from intimate to enormous at a second’s notice. Hole standouts like “Suddenly” and “People” both open sparsely before going widescreen mid-track, transitioning from simple backing noise to an enormous swell of noise. Considering the most common complaint with this type of music is that it’s “boring”…see this review…the songs on Hole rise well above simple background noise.

Texas Pandaa’s best technique, though, is the use of dual vocalists. Lead singers Asako and Mikiko approach vocals like twin dancers, at first twirling around one another oh-so cautiously before joining together for breathtaking results. Swaths of loneliness envelop “Suddenly” until the secondary singing creeps in and adds a a touch of sweetness and then, come the chorus, catharsis. The sparse trudge of “Frogs,” meanwhile, becomes more mournful when the voices come together. Blessed with incredibly great singing ability…check the “season changed” section from “Just In Time”…the pair singers of the group give Hole real energy, real soul.

Save for the pop-up-book feel of the title track…the closest the band comes to a departure, as they nearly write a straight-ahead indie pop song blessed with those voices…the tracks on Hole transform mundane moments from daily life into instances of startling importance. Like Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto’s work, Texas Pandaa transform small moments into life-altering ones, the band using the lyric sheet and that ability to go from intimate to galactic sonically. Most of Hole focuses on moments of realization, often of love ending – see “Suddenly” (“He left so suddenly/It was too hard to leave this heaven” the song starts before the protagonist realizes “I wind up suddenly/alone to find myself in this vacant”) or especially the upbeat-music-downer-lyrics of “Gone” (“I’m staring at empty cans/left on the table/thinking about what we talked last night/such damned things” before the bluntly piercing “now you’re gone/I’m so alone”).

It’s not all heartbreaking – the woozy “Blue Drapes” starts off setting a surreal scene (“Blue drapes were around the room/the old man was so tall/Little Jefferey was there too”) before catching the narrator finding joy (“I started dancing with him/”because I wanted to be happy”). Yet for the most part, Hole is full of sadness, but not of the “woe is me” variety. It’s of the far more devastating I-know-it’s-over-now moments, less a depressed Tumblr update and more of a specific snapshot of incoming-sorrow. Those moments take time to fully hit, and Texas Pandaa know oh-so-well how to make them stronger with time.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaCnCUybyE”]

Review: Hotel Mexico’s His Jewelled Letter Box

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Hotel Mexico’s being pushed hard as Japan’s first chillwave band. The Kyoto-based six piece has garnered attention from indie-leaning magazine Snoozer to national newspaper The Japan Times because they offer an easy gateway to the hottest blog-centric trend of the moment. Even chillwave-depot Altered Zones wrote a blurb about the band, wherein they dropped the word “shimmering” and compared them to Delorean. Hotel Mexico themselves certainly help play up the image – in the Times piece it’s revealed the band released a live performance on VHS and their first EP on cassette. Bass player Kai Ito says the band “are very attracted to analog as a format.”

All this branding has done wonders for the band’s PR game, but it’s also terribly misleading. Hotel Mexico’s debut album His Jewelled Letter Box sounds very little like chillwave. Of course, a statement like that must be followed up with the clarification that NOBODY has really given a clear definition of what this genre sounds like outside of “see Washed Out/Neon Indian/Ariel Pink/Beach House (?).” Well, Washed Out sounds nothing like Neon Indian, who in turns doesn’t much resemble Toro Y Moi, who certainly doesn’t evoke Beach Fossils. Accordingly, Hotel Mexico don’t recall any of those bands save for a general lo-fi feel. You could get into the whole vague nostalgia/sincerity angle of chillwave…but such abstract discussions would get away from this CD, which features some great music regardless of what you try to label it.

Waiting to greet you from the get-go, though, is the album’s most chillwave-ey number “It’s Twinkle.” Responsible for the majority of Hotel Mexico’s blog exposure, the song opens with gauzy/hazy/swirling guitar which could easily be called “nostalgic.” Yet instead of riding out this noise for three minutes, the band instead builds with it, adding in guitars and honest-to-god drums. Whereas as some chillwave songs seem content to spin their wheels, “It’s Twinkle” build up to several different climaxes. The only other glo-fi-ey (remember that one?) aspect of this song doubles as the album’s biggest weakness, the faint vocals. They sound too muddled, to un-committed throughout Letter Box. You wish they could have scraped together enough cash to get a better mic.

Outside of the singing though, this album rises well above the typical chillwave trappings. I have a theory why – whereas a lot of chillwave artists take dance music and make it more introverted, Hotel Mexico create music that can actually be danced to. The Japan Times’ article reveals every member of the band also DJs, so they probably have a good idea of what gets people moving and they apply it to Letter Box. Trick one – real drums. Masaaki Iwamoto brings a real pulse to Hotel Mexico’s songs, giving even the relatively formless “Archaic Smile” a path to follow. Those same drums, coupled with slinky bass, give “G.I.R.L” a funk feel making it ready for the dancefloor. Real percussion goes a long way to making Letter Box strong.

Elsewhere, the band dabble in other sounds. “The Beneath” sees Hotel Mexico paying homage to Glass Candy, minimal instrumentation with a vaguely creepy feel backing up talk-sing that at times gets a bit clunky (sample lyric: “even TV On The Radio is on radios and on, of course, TVs”). “Starling, Tiger, Fox” follows in “It’s Twinkle’s” footsteps, starting small with only some keyboard and violins before slowly bursting into color. “2nd Floor” powers forward on a beer-commercial beat that’s also the only time the band approach anything resembling “tropical” sounds.

Credit should be heaped on Hotel Mexico and Second Royal Records for knowing just how to market Letter Box. Though the blog attention isn’t gonna land them any mainstream attention, it’s still the most hype I’ve seen any other new Japanese band get this year. Smart branding aside though, tagging this album as exclusively “chillwave” remains highly dubious. It’s much more than that, and anyone who dismisses this on those grounds will be missing out on one of the better lo-fi Japanese albums of 2010.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSytPR7a3fM”]