Make Believe Melodies Logo

Category Archives: Review

Live Review: The Brixton Academy, Canopies And Drapes, The Telephones, Orland And Hotel Mexico At Shibuya Womb January 28 2012

Posted on by

Booze has always been prevalent when I’ve seen The Brixton Academy live, the band popping open bottles of Champagne to share with the crowd or downing shots post-set. Yet their January 28 show at Shibuya’s Womb – which, for the uninformed, is the place those deaf kids make out in the film Babel – was soaked in more alcohol than usual. Seeing every member of the group pop open a bottle of bubbly, corks comically smacking into Womb’s extravagant disco ball, or the band’s guitarist drunkenly spank away at his bongos seemed appropriate given that this was the final stop on their Bright As Diamonds tour, one last gig in front of a hometown crowd.

Yet this sea of liquor flowed because this turned out to be the final Brixton Academy show featuring the band’s current incarnation – the group announced midway through that this show would be there last, to a girl-heavy wave of shock. Although a three-person version of the group will play a show in March, post that the members will remain in music, but in what form they don’t know. With this news, though, a typically drunk Saturday show turned into one last hurrah for one of the best live groups in Japan today.

This impromptu finale boasted a pretty great undercard, too. Kyoto chillwavers Hotel Mexico opened everything up with a whirling set that came with an appropriate light show. Live…and blessed by Womb’s tip-top sound system…the group sounds bigger live, a song like “Dear Les Friends” even stronger than in recorded form. Nagoya’s Orland followed, a mess of 80’s synths tripping over one another to create deliberately nostalgic dance music (the fact half of the original Tron played out behind them drove the point home – we are Orland, and we love the 80s). The group is fine, but sharing a bill with similar-sounding Brixton Academy exposes their biggest weakness – whereas Brixton place earnest words over their New Wave hodgepodge and come off as almost embarrassingly sincere, Orland just sound like the music you sometimes hear in a Tim And Eric sketch.

The Telephones, out of place on this bill both in terms of sound and popularity, gesticulated all over the stage next, an endless barrage of aggressive rock guitar, shouting and posing. The group is undeniably energetic, as evidenced by the sort of crowd I would have loved to be in the middle of when I was 19. Yet, as a cynical 20-something, I heard a group with buckets of energy and like three song blueprints done over and over again. Canopies And Drapes came next, joined by several members of The Brixton Academy. When I saw her in Nagoya in November, her set surprised me because she (and Brixton) were able to turn three-fourths of her dreamy music into something funky. That Nagoya show was great – her set at Womb, not quite as memorable. Opening with her two weakest live numbers (the shoegazey “Stars In Bloom” and “Live In The Snow Globe,” the one instance where injecting funk into a song detracts from it, as “Snow Globe” is a lyrical wonder), things got better with the jaunty “Perfect Step,” and she has a great set closer with “Sleeping Under The Bed” which, moment of honesty, I have yet to get sick of.

Yet this Saturday night belonged to The Brixton Academy. At this point, I’ve seen them three times in the past three months, and their show barely changes each time – they open with the bongo-assisted “Neons Bright” from last year’s Bright As Diamonds before diving into the best cuts from that LP and their debut Vivid, with the long-burning “Nightclub” popping up near the end of the set. Yet despite knowing what to expect, Brixton Academy’s skill and energy turns what should have been choreography by now into a still-captivating show. “In My Arms” remains delirious, ”Youth” still demands fists pumped into the sky and “So Shy” remains a slice of triumphant sadness.

This wasn’t just another (great) Brixton Academy show, though, but a surprise finale. Once the sounds of shock faded, the remaining songs seemed more urgent, imbued with something special that words can’t really capture (uhhhh you had to be there?). They dusted off older songs I hadn’t heard at the previous two shows – they broke out songs I’ve never heard period – and gave the crowd what they wanted. Corks flew, an encore happened and then they left the stage for the last time.

So what’s The Brixton Academy’s legacy? Two albums ranging from “pretty good” to “great,” an EP and some singles, not to mention an incredible live show. Vivid, their debut, stands with any 80s-aping album of the last half of the decade, while we named “So Shy” the best song of 2010 and stick by it fully. They did pretty decently for a band their size in Japan, but The Brixton Academy always struck me as a group that could have gotten a lot of looks from the West too, given the 80’s sound and earnestness. Yet they never really did, unfortunately, but leave behind a great collection of music and, for me personally, great memories of wildin’ out at a tiny Nagoya club. They deserved those drink for sure Saturday night.

Hey, someone uploaded a video of the band playing “So Shy” at this even!

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

Review: Perfume JPN Part 1

Posted on by

The Only-Music Review Of Perfume’s JPN

The following only deals with Perfume within the context of Perfume – no mentions of outside artists, or outside distractions. Stay tuned for part two, which will tackle those issues.

The easiest knock against JPN is that it barely constitutes a new album, more of a glorified compilation disc given the fact nine of the 14 songs here were released as singles over the last year and a half. Dismiss “The Opening” as simply an opening and that leaves only four new tracks from Japan’s premier techno-pop trio. Even the hardcore types populating Perfume message boards wish for more fresh material, seeing as they already own all these singles and are essentially paying $30 for a quartet of tunes they haven’t heard.

Yet two thoughts make me view this complaint as silly. First, Perfume are a big, popular J-Pop act and not every Japanese person is an obsessive shut-in ordering 7,000 copies of the latest pop single to boost their imaginary girlfriend’s sales. Nope, they are ordinary people who probably buy like three or four new CDs a year, and Perfume might as well be one of them so naturally it is a collection of material released over the past year they’ve heard on TV but would also like to play in the car.

Second, and more convincing to me, is that these singles are strong. I’ve written about nearly every track on JPN at some point starting in 2010 which is why scribbling this seems sorta difficult – I’ve already gushed about or gnashed my teeth at the bulk of this record, and just seeing the tracklisting for the first time convinced me I could write the majority of this review back in October. This series of six (!) pages probably work better than the following sentences, as those see me reacting to each new Perfume song as they appeared. “Voice” remains a classic slice of auto-pilot Perfume, while the stutter-stepping “Nee” comes off as clumsy compared to the much-better executed retro whirl of “Laser Beam” (here presented in a slightly choppier mix that isn’t as strong as the single edit, but hardly torpedoing it). “575” still stands as Perfume’s sexiest hour, all sleek synth minimalism and fuzzy longing building up to a joyful “rap” segment. “Natural ni Koishite” is pure pop written in Batman “bams!” and “zonks!,” still gushworthy. “Kasukana Na Kaori” remains one of the worst, middle-of-the-road types of balladry by a group who shouldn’t be reduced to such end-credits drudgery. Only “Fushizen Na Girl” sees me swinging my opinion around – back in spring of 2010, this song sounded like ho-hum Perfume, especially compared to the boom-bap of “Natural.” Here, positioned as the penultimate track, it ends up a surprisingly memorable number, a wooshy rush that feels like a climax on JPN.

So that’s two personal best-of locks (“Natural,” “575”) two really really really good songs (“Laser Beam,” “Fushizen”), one pretty good number (“Voice”), one meh (“Nee”) and one unmitigated disaster. That’s a pretty solid hitting average, yet to be honest JPN feels like a slight disappointment because it COULD have been much better. Going into Tower to purchase this thing, visions of this being a top-three album danced in my head – the existing singles just needed a push from the new tracks. Unfortunately, the four debuted songs on JPN aren’t strong enough to elevate this LP to the next level. Three of them are solid enough – “My Color” boasts copy-paste Perfume verses but also features a strong chorus, highlighted by burbling electronics and particularly high-pitched synths. “Have A Stroll” sees producer Yasutaka Nakata summoning up the spirit of Perfume around the time of <em?Complete Best, the ultra-simple structure bringing to mind “Vitamin Drop,” yet also standing as a reminder of how much Nakata and Perfume have grown since those days. The best new cut is “Kokoro no Supotsu,” which works like a reverse “My Color.” The intro is all rain-against-car-window keyboard as Perfume gaze out and sing wistfully about something (at this point it is important to note lyrics rarely prove to be of much value to Perfume’s music), a surprisingly lonely backdrop for the usually cheery bunch. Everything surges into a “why am I so sad!” chorus, a catchy bit that also isn’t as interesting as those more sparse seconds. Rounding out the new songs is “Toki no Hari” which makes the aforementioned “Kasukana Kaori” sound like Revolver. Although this song presents a cool idea – a song where Perfume aren’t vocally manipulated by computers – Nakata wastes this on sub-nursery school marching music existing only to appear on the CDs wedding houses have on hand when the couple forgets to click “burn” on iTunes. Just dreadful.

What got my hopes up for JPN to possibly be a blockbuster album were the two singles dropped a month before the official release of the album, a pair of songs that stand as some of the group’s sneakiest, best work to date. “Glitter” is pure ecstasy, Nakata’s maximalist pop production sparkling extra bright. Perfume have often been labelled as “dance pop” or “techno pop,” yet “Glitter” actually comes close to sounding like dance or techno music, run through the group’s chart-focused filter. Check the album-mix intro, shining off until Nakata peels back layers to reveal some piano chords that could have been jacked from “The Strings Of Life.” It builds up and then…Perfume themselves enter and “Glitter” turns into pop delirium. It’s the sound of Nakata shunning proper structure in favor of a spinning feeling, spiked by the way they murmur the titular word post chorus, like the sounds coming out of their mouths were made of the party supply.

And then there is album closer “Spice.” Initially it sounds like something Nakata could toss-off before slipping to sleep, a Perfume song unfolding at half the speed and seemingly without most of the digital fireworks that have come to define their sound. Yet “Spice” hides considerable depth on the production side, Nakata constructing a catchy Katamari of a song that just rolls over everything, pushed on by one of the better vocal performances the three singers could give. Deep in the mix Nakata sprinkles some 8-bit bloops around (which, to break the central tenant of this review but is needed, brings to mind The Avalanches or even small-scale Timbaland), while he also plays a perfect game of Tetris with the vocals, placing them so they cushion and bounce off of one another just right. He even practically winks at the camera with one sound – the singers in Perfume have long been dubbed “robots,” “Auto-tuned” out of their minds and serving a role any schmuck could (allegedly) do. There are snippets of truth – Nakata is the architect for sure – yet on “Spice” he makes one synth line a particularly high-pitched sample of the group singing, as if freeing them up to not be apps here.

And that is what ultimately makes “Spice” a standout – the singing, one of the best performances from all four members of the group (Nakata swooping in with the tuning when needed and arranging it just right). The best moment comes late, when member Ayaka Nishiwaki’s voice suddenly slips out of Auto-tune and just comes out naturally. Nakata fiddles with this trick at various other points on JPN, and even devoted an entire terrible track to the idea, yet on the final song this moment feels like a legitimate surprise and like a glimpse at the group’s humanness. It doesn’t last long, but it’s a nice detail in a song loaded with them.

So that’s JPN – a handful of amazing singles, a lot of really good albeit par-for-the-course material and a brutal three-song stretch in the middle featuring two of the group’s worst songs. Heading into this I expected a masterpiece and heading out I felt a little letdown, but with time I can see exactly what JPN is – a Perfume album. Obvious, yes, but I’m talking about how this is an album from a singles-oriented outfit whose previous full-lengths highlighted the big hits, threw in some solid filler and also featured some annoying missteps (see the grating taxi-cab techno of Complete Best’s “Perfume” or Triangle’s “Edge,” my personal most hated Perfume song…one of the best aspects of JPN is it doesn’t feature plodding bloghouse dress-up). Like previous efforts, Nakata has created some interesting steps forward for the Perfume sound while mostly delivering mutations of the trio’s established sound to a public that has come to really said sound. JPN is Perfume being Perfume, and that sounds fine to me.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edyARJq9sgM”]

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-fu2jHvrw”]

UPDATE: A few edits were made tonight, mostly just fixing some grammar and spelling errors. The only content change came with a line about the Western media and their perceptions of Japan – I realize I’m not completely sure about my statement so I deleted it. Gonna go eat a burrito now woooooo.

Not-Quite-Japanese Review: Girls’ Generation’s The Boys And KARA’s Super Girl

Posted on by

Girls’ Generation’s cannonball into the Japanese pop scene – starting with the initial crossover singles last year and fully splashing with a record-breaking Japan-only album this year – charmed plenty of people, among them the foreign-born music writers/observers living in this country (guilty!). The shiny new sound of K-Pop gems like “Gee” and “Run Devil Run” towered way above the majority of J-Pop coming out at the same time…helping fuel the love for Girls’ Generation was the release of a new AKB48 album, universally hated (and deservedly so) by the pop culture thinkers occupying my Twitter…and carved out a space in a lot of people’s music-loving hearts.

Now comes the Korean album (but easily obtained in Japan) The Boys, the first major release by Girls’ Generation post their Japanese self-titled. The same folks who proclaimed that LP one of the best pop joints of the year heard The Boys and said…meh. I gathered opinion from a small sample size, but the few folks/places in Japan giving this new release a shot mostly dismissed it. The title track got dismissed as “Pussycat Dolls like” or bearing too much of a resemblance to 2NE1, while the rest of it got hammered for featuring gloopy ballads and other cheesy tracks that had more in common with J-Pop than the sounds coming out of Korea. Some called it a step backwards.

I’m not arguing against the idea that Girls’ Generation sounds way better than The Boys, but I think the group’s latest is getting hammered a little too strongly. I think Girls’ Generation – which, should be noted, repackages five popular singles from Korea, compared to the all new material on The Boys – made Girls’ Generation seem a bit too perfect for a lot of people encountering them for the first time. This might sound obvious, but Girls’ Generation…and K-Pop in general…has a lot of bad songs buried in the closet. My first exposure to this group came with “Oh!,” back in college, and it wasn’t because of the music – rather, the clip popped up on a bunch of college football blogs because of the group’s groping of an Iowa Hawkeyes’ helmet (and, being in a rival Big Ten school, we got an extra kick out of this). Then, it sounded like a really annoying re-imagining of the already-terrible “Numa Numa Song” (now, I just hear a hail mary at trying to recapture the lightness of “Gee”). And don’t forget cheese like “Into The New World” and “Day By Day.” So…I basically think people got a little too excited by not-J-Pop music and weren’t ready for a bumpier release.

The Boys, though, has some really great moments! “Trick” speeds up the flirtatious slurs of “Genie” and ends up stronger because of it, while “Telepathy” bangs forward courtesy strobe-light synths and big ol’ drum hits. “Vitamin” melds flashing synth blasts with a lite-disco bob, complimented by string sections. The title track – which also serves as the group’s first foray into Western markets which explains why this – has received the most criticism, accused of aping the Pussycat Dolls. Which is kind of true…see, the chorus…but did we forget “Run Devil Run,” which was just as blatant about it? “The Boys” hits way harder than that number, capped off by some great cheerleader-esque (have we forgotten how great “Hollaback Girl” was, for shame!) chanting. It’s a good, bone-breaking single that, truthfully, probably won’t be a huge hit in America (that’s a whole different article) but isn’t as bad or lazy as some places claim.

The rest of The Boys finds Girls’ Generation trying on different sonic hats. Some of these choices do end up being inexcusably bad – the two ballads included on this album fail to go anywhere interesting, “How Great Is Your Love” hoping a ho-hum Mariah Carey impersonation will fool you into thinking it’s good while “Sunflower” is just looking for an ending credits sequence to latch itself onto. Yet elsewhere, they flirt with disaster only to come up charming – “Say Yes” opens with a wince-inducing spoken word gigglefest, but leads into this sunny chirp of a pop song that is simple and sweet. “Lazy Girl” embraces the K-Pop trend of 60’s imagery/sound (see Wonder Girls’ “Be My Baby“), imitating girl group bop and merging it with modern-day synth burbles, all leading to the album’s best chorus. There is also “My J,” which I’ll cop to liking simply because it’s so cheesy and goofy it ends up being sort of sweet despite sounding like a Keisuke Kawata Christmas song. The Boys, though far from perfect, shows how diverse Girls’ Generation can be in style and personality – yeah, there is no “Gee” or “Mr. Taxi” (errrrr, except for the Korean version of “Mr. Taxi”) but enough to make this a pretty above-average release.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pA_Tou-DPI”]

Much more deserving of eye daggers is KARA’s new Japanese album Super Girl, which really does suck BUT managed to break the record set by Girls’ Generation’s Japanese debut for most units moved in its first week by a foreign group. Super Girl finds KARA’s sound J-Pop-ified, all the worst contemporary touches of mainstream Japanese pop grafted onto KARA as a challenge to see if this would still sell. And hey…it did! We all lose.

Super Girl isn’t a total bust – most of the tracks here have at least one good idea or sound floating around (like the bass on otherwise turgid seasonal ballad “Winter Magic,” or the rapid-fire techno intro of “Go Go Summer!” which promptly settles for a slightly-advanced AKB chug), and there are good songs present! A lot of people point to it as the beginning of the end, but I hold that “Jet Coaster Love” is bouncy and bright enough to rise above subsequent singles, while “Whisper” is kinda cool.

But man, overall this is just not good. The ballads are, unsurprisingly, the worst offenders, forced into the same rectangular cookie cutter that makes 90 percent of the ballads in Japan. “Ima Okuritai Arigatou” and “Missing” paddle around too long without building up to anything resembling a payoff…credit to Girls’ Generation, the ballads on The Boys at least hold interest unlike these slow roasters. “Dreamin’ Girl” features the line “I want to rock you” despite lacking anything one would constitute as rockin’, while closer “Girls Be Ambitious!” sounds as clumsy as the title hints at while existing solely to serve as the next viral wedding dance soundtrack. I’m all for female empowerment songs, but they should also sound good!

Let’s focus on the positive…KARA still have the Korean single “Step,” which remains one of the best K-Pop songs of the year. And Super Girl does feature “Only For You,” which is the fucking jam. KARA imitate the dated-but-oh-so-catchy sound that combined late disco with R&B, and K-Pop it into something that sounds simultaneously like a record you would find in your cool Aunt’s basement and a nostalgia-glazed number that could easily exist in 2011. Heck, this style of music has seen a resurgence this year – see Toro Y Moi’s cover of “Saturday Love,” originally by Cherrelle, and “Only For You” sounds like at least three tracks on her High Priority album. It’s not enough to redeem a very lame album, but geez “Only For You” almost makes it worth it. Almost.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eMZWEjxlVs”]

Review: Cokiyu’s Your Thorn

Posted on by

My original concept for this review of Cokiyu’s Your Thorn was to have my brain and my heart analyze the album from different perspective – my mind would tackle the literal description of the music in a scholarly style, while my heart tried to make sense of the emotions conjured up by this release. Despite a few good notes I scribbled down and some really good zingers for the two characters to throw at one another, I decided to abandon this concept because 1. I’ve waited long enough to talk about this excellent release from the Tokyo artist somewhat responsible for this blog existing at all and 2. this album shouldn’t be saddled with a gimmick review. That would distract from the simple beauty and warmth Your Thorn exudes, an album that wraps around you like a blanket and whispers in your ear like a mother.

The reason I almost went with the heart-vs-head dialog was because of the fear of having to separate the feelings this album churns in me from the straight ahead musical review component, afraid of having one overshadow the other. Personally, Your Thorn exists as the emotional Yin to She Talks Silence’s Some Small Gifts yang – whereas that latter record fills me with trepidation about the world of today, Cokiyu offers a warm embrace saying everything will be OK. If STS recalls Lynch-ian unease, Cokiyu summons up the same feeling Terrence Malick does when he leaves a shot on very tall trees…of feeling small, but somehow comforted by this fact.

I’m not just writing about Your Thorn because it somehow resembled my personal journal – the album’s sonic merits alone deserve heaps of praise. Cokiyu’s 2007 debut Mirror Flake established her sound – electronic minimalism obtained mostly through keyboards, nature samples and her delicate vocals – and Your Thorn doesn’t so much change them as find Cokiyu tightening up. Mirror Flake, though definitely a minimal-sounding album, felt more outward with songs like “Roadz” and the title track sounding very open and accessible. Four years later, she’s turned a bit more inward, the songs on this album a little more wispy, more solitary but also more focused. The title track here finds Cokiyu wandering through the woods, bird noises and foggy synth her only companions, until more defined strings sneak up behind her. The setting grows cloudier, but never fades out of view, just adding additional beauty to the view.

Cokiyu’s voice remains the string keeping this compositions together, as it did on Mirror Flake, but the compositions gain extra layers that strengthen everything. See the dreamy “Recall,” where her hammock-in-a-light-wind singing, which she bolsters with some deeper-in-the-mix cooing that brings to mind Julianna Barwick’s undecipherable touches. “Round In Fog” finds her voice soft as spider string over raindrop electronics, but she adds muscle to the song as a whole via military drum marching. The album’s best moment comes when Cokiyu strips her sonics down to especially bare levels, on centerpiece “Drag The Beast.” Skittering electronics dapple over keyboard, with a few other noises slicing through, but ultimately Cokiyu’s singing wielding the most power, starting soft but eventually consuming the song.

She’s also gotten better at crafting instrumental numbers, highlighted on Your Thorn by “Gloomy,” which doesn’t as much describe one’s mood but rather particularly dire weather. Electronic clouds churn for a bit, but by the end of the song they’ve opened up into a brief storm. Closer “Little Waves” ends the album on a soft note, carrying the listener away on weightless synth work, a relaxing conclusion to an album potentially boasting a vague “journey” concept (check the song titles, and piece it together). And if up to this point I’ve made this album sound sort of introverted, Cokiyu’s also got the whimsical “With My Umbrella,” which employs Cornelius-esque production touches to create a Ghibli-like wonderland.

At this point, I’ve been trying to only let my brain do the talking, and if I may let my virtual guard down, I think I’ve failed a bit in capturing how inclusive, how alive this album feels. Now, though, I come to the part in the script where the heart starts yacking. Even at it’s bleakest points (the run of “Drag The Beast” and “Gloomy”) Your Thorn sounds peaceful, alone but at ease. Plenty of albums capture the feeling of childhood – see Lullatone, or The Boy Least Likely To – but Cokiyu hits on the wonder of it, how mysterious and enveloping nature can be and how small (but, in a way, beautiful) that makes one feel. This album brims with wonder, and it’s far from reverting back to a past self, but rather rediscovering beauty in things that seemingly slipped away long ago.

The other reason Your Thorn stands out? Japanese music in 2011 has mostly dwelled on themes of confusion (Miila And The Geeks), identity (Sakanaction) and dread (She Talks Silence, HNC’s “I Dream I Dead”) along with the sound of metropolitan shadowy-ness (CUZ ME PAIN). All those records deserve praise…and, in an unfortunate truth, really do capture what it is like to be alive in 2011…but Cokiyu stands as one of the few albums this year to feel full of warmth and safety. Cokiyu sees storm clouds on the horizon and says “lets go in the forest, this is the best time to explore!” One of the best of the year.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0LBpscgdg”]