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Stuff We Missed Catch-Up Post Final: Kaela Kimura, The Mornings And Her Ghost Friend

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This is the final installment of this feature, mostly as a way to get a few brief comments in about albums that could very well appear on our Top 30 albums of the year list (fast approaching, whoa!). Some of the below could even land pretty high up….

Kaela Kimura 8Eight8

Somehow, Kaela Kimura’s new album ended up flying a bit under our radar, released in early October which was a pretty busy time for new music. Though, in all honesty, that’s a cop out – the reason 8Eight8 didn’t end up a big talking point was because her latest album looked like it wouldn’t be all that exciting to talk about. Despite once listening to nothing but her first best-of album for a week once, Kaela’s latest looked like an excuse to release all her recent singles under a slightly overpriced umbrella. Those singles run from “great” to “great fun” to “pretty OK,” but didn’t inspire much excitement to be honest (this has also made me a bit cautious about the new Perfume, though we will find out really soon how that is). Her albums to this point haven’t been great stand-alone offerings, Kaela to now being a singles artist. I’d buy a copy of “Ring-A-Ding-Dong” but shelling out cash for a CD of the same song buffed out by fluff…no thanks.

Well, I finally spent some time with 8Eight8 and I’m sorta flabbergasted…this is one of the best albums of the year, Kaela Kimura’s finest full length to date and a document announcing her from being a “pop idol” to legit artist. For most of her career, she’s been a J-Pop chameleon, seeing what sells and adding her own touch to a sound she couldn’t call completely hers. Last year’s rolling “You Bet!!” popped out of nowhere and stood as her first fully-formed Kaela song, her J-Rock influences finally mutating into a sound all her own. 8Eight8 sees her mastering that personal sound, the rock-pop hybrids making up the bulk of the album being simply better than what came before. Coupled with the stylistic diversions that add a dash of variety to the CD (“Ring-A-Ding-Dong,” “Lollipop” and head-on-shoulder closer “Chocolate”) it adds up to one of the best releases of 2011, and a snapshot of what J-Pop could be if more artists weren’t afraid to explore new sounds. I’m excited to write the year-end blurb for this one.

Though this is already longer than I expected, I do want to yammer a bit more about the album’s title track, Kaela’s masterpiece. If “You Bet!!” found her stumbling across her own sound, “8Eight8” finds her confident in it enough to fuck around with it – this song’s noisy, the guitars practically turning themselves inside out as everything rushes by. It’s catchy but it’s also unnerving. Kaela also pens her best lyrics to date here, revolving around the metaphor of her being a spider (hence the album art) that somehow stands in for a relationship. The chorus of “I’m gonna be scary/a black spider in the end” repeats a few times before the track’s best moment strikes, the line “I’m gonna be lonely” sneaking in, bluntly delivered and like a shot to the sternum. Again, I’m excited to write the year-end blurb for this.

Tadzio Tadzio

Two Tokyo girls cranking out fuzzy, rock music…Puffyshoes, right? Nope, Tadzio, who might resemble Puffyshoes on a text description but sound from another universe. Whereas Puffyshoes’ songs about boys and fast food coated in feedback owes a debt to Vivian Girls, Tadzio’s manic creations channel the ghost of Osaka’s Afriampo, all tag-team vocals and fist-to-nose aggression. Standout trakc “Beast Master” swings between orgasmic noises and manic shouts of “fuck you!” Elsewhere, Tadzio scream “fuckyoufuckyou” one second before declaring “I love you” the next. Despite having a Puffyshoes-appropriate song about eating birthday cake, they immediately follow it up with “You Gotta Fuckin’ Mail,” featuring such lyric book gems like “SEX DIE SEX BONE OH MY GOD.” This is music of violence, capable of swinging from surf-rock melody to death metal chug on a blood-soaked dime, even the song about capybaras focusing on how they bite. It’s primal stuff…sometimes a bit too messy for its own good, some songs more like boxing therapy than proper tracks…that’s constantly gripping.

LEF!!! CREW!!! Mixtape Number 5

“Huh, what,” I can see you mouthing, “a mixtape featuring no Japanese songs save for the intro track?” Yep, but I felt it necessary to give this mix a shout-out because it turned me onto some really good tracks…and to tell you if you have the chance to see these dudes DJ, go check them out because they put on a good show. This electronic-leaning mix features floor-fillers courtesy Africa Hitech, Star Slinger and Instra:Mental among others, and remains pretty grooveable for its entire run. The best moment comes late, though, when LEF!!! CREW!!! bust out two sped-up wonders from 2011 back-to-back…Machinedrum’s slippery “GBYE” transitions into the lightspeed R&B blasts of Rustie’s “Ultra Thizz.”

The Mornings Save The Mornings

Winner of the 2011’s “worst album art in comparison to how good the music within sounds,” The Mornings’ long-coming debut album flails around all over the place – lead-off track “Opening Act” flirts with punk nihilism before suddenly switching into something slower and more pretty for a few seconds, before they return to the mosh-pit, this time with saxophone blurts in tow. The rest of Save The Mornings dashes off in similar compass-shattering directions – “Amazon Surf” melds fried Donkey Kong keyboards to the band’s best Zazen Boys vocal interpretation…before they jump into a register Zazen Boys rarely attempt and the song spirals into pure insanity. The rest of the album features plenty of other mish-mashes…plus a Dead Kennedy’s cover…that strike just the right balance between punk/hardcore and art rock, neither side of The Mornings making a mockery of the other, instead everything turning into one excellent head-fuck of an album.

Sebastian X Futures

Sebastian X are one of those bands that routinely put out good music and are a loveable underdog story in the world of Japanese music – but they also aren’t a group bound to release a “classic” album anytime soon. They have a very specific style that’s engaging…piano-heavy pop and ballads prone to flights of manic joy, all led by a singer who doesn’t sing as much as she yelps…but only goes so far. Futures is their first full-length after several good mini-albums, and somehow a band fronted by someone who at times sounds a lot like Joanna Newsom has become relatively successful, grabbing decent real estate at Tower Records and landing in a few Japanese publications. Futures finds Sebastian X being perfectly Sebastian X-ey, jumping between rollicking pop numbers like “Rose Garden, Baby Blue” and “F.U.T.U.R.E.”, and slower ballads which get an extra pinch of spice thanks to those vocals, the band’s main weapon in grabbing attention. Futures is a good album and the latest chapter in a nice story, but also nothing threatening to make you do a double take at the speakers. Which isn’t a bad thing! Sebastian X seemingly belong in the category of “consistently good, sometimes great” bands like The Clientele and Shonen Knife. Just be glad this stuff appears in karaoke booths.

Her Ghost Friend Her Ghost Friend

DJ Obake has been making dance music and…slightly weirder dance music for awhile now, but his project with singer/illustrator Shinobu Ono dubbed Her Ghost Friend has forced him to change his style a bit and make something more pop friendly. In the same way teaming with Perfume forced Yasutaka Nakata to hone his production, Her Ghost Friend results in DJ Obake’s prettiest soundscapes to date, lush electronic creations at times sounding like (!) Animal Collective peppered with video game noises and even strings. Ono, meanwhile, handles vocal duties well, swinging between nasally singing and spoken-word interludes. One of the the sneakier pop albums in Japan this year.

N’Shukugawa Boys Planet Magic

Seeing N’Shukugawa Boys, it’s tough to take this trio seriously. It seems like they are playing rock ‘n’ roll dress-up at first glance, two of them mimicking a David Bowie and the third summoning Elvis from Saturn. Not a particularly fair way of judging them…which is why their album Planet Magic works wonder. Not having to see their goofy get-up leaves space for only the music and…swerve!…it’s really good! Taking cues from 70’s rock, Boys craft these catchy rock songs boasting great choruses, uncomplex creations that seek out ear space and make room. Planet Magic works best when Marya Love handles vocal duties, while the songs featuring dude Rindadada aren’t quite as up to snuff (except for “Try Again,” which rivals the title track for best song on the album). It’s a short album, but surprisingly strong. And with no distractions to take away from the music.

Live Review: The Brixton Academy, Canopies And Drapes And Faron Square At Nagoya Tight Rope, Saturday, November 12

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After a few months of forcing one of my friends to travel all the way out to Osaka to do various activities…which, all tended to end in playing Angry Birds…I decided to save him (some) train fare and visit Nagoya for one Saturday night. Having avoided Aichi’s biggest city for a while now, my night out in Nagoya reminded me of what a strange place it was. Osaka…and Kyoto and Nara and Tokyo and anywhere in the world really…isn’t a shining example of human transcendence, but Nagoya seemed particularly dodgy, at least on this November night. We witnessed a man urinating almost proudly along a busy street, his back turned but with no pause as groups of people strolled by. We might have seen a drug deal. Whereas the street stalkers in Osaka play it cool and ask if you’d like a “massage,” the ones in Nagoya practically sprinted up to us to inquire if “you want some sex?” We played a lot of Angry Birds.

Thankfully, this trip centered around a show by three of Tokyo’s most interesting acts at the moment – The Brixton Academy, Canopies And Drapes, and CUZ ME PAIN’s Faron Square. The trio of artists played at Nagoya’s Tight Rope, a place that seemed to fit in well with the general air of Nagoya strangeness. Tight Rope rested on the third floor of a building, sandwiched between a soul bar and a hip-hop club. This placement led to a lot of people peeking into Tight Rope, hearing Toro Y Moi instead of Rick Ross and immediately darting upstairs. Yet once inside, Tight Rope proved a nice venue – a bit narrow, but great sound and a generally good vibe.

Faron Square started, playing what was according to their Twitter account their first band show in a year. The rust sometimes showed, as they experienced a few false starts, but overall the four-piece sounded OK. Faron Square stand out on the CUZ ME PAIN roster quite a bit, and their Tight Rope set reinforced that idea – though they still boast the slightly ghostly glow defining the rest of the roster’s music, Faron Square are the most “pop” act on that bedroom-centric label. The group’s song are less concerned about making you look over your shoulder and more about getting you to dance, at least a little. The keyboard-focused tracks even approach something like bizarro-world yacht rock (this is a compliment, I swear), the music sounding smooth but taking on a stranger bent than “What A Fool Believes.” Considering the individual members of the band make more CUZ ME PAIN-ish tracks on their own, Faron Square serve as a nice splash of variety for the still-young label. Live, the groups vocals sounded a bit too high-pitched, the masking they get on record not present, thrown naked in front of everyone. Faron Square ultimately seem like the type of group better heard at home, though downtime between performances could have been a factor.

Canopies And Drapes played a short set next, running through the entirety of her lovely debut EP. Violet, Lilly, Rose, Daisy was the product of just one person, but for the Tight Rope show CaD’s Chick called upon members of The Brixton Academy to help her bring what are self-contained dreams to life live. This full-band approach resulted in all four songs taking new shapes, the characters from one’s dreams materializing in real life but as, like, dogs or something. Set opener “Stars In Bloom” became an eyes-on-the-floor shoegaze number, while “Perfect Step” was blessed with an extra snap in its back, turning into a legit leg shuffler. One of the EP’s biggest highlights, “Living In The Snowglobe,” suffered from these live additions, that track shining as an example of Canopies And Drapes lyrical smarts, blotted out a bit live. The other EP highlight “Sleeping Under The Bed,” though, killed it. The twinkling frostiness of the recorded version was swapped out in favor of…gasp!…funkiness. It was stupidly danceable, blessed with an energy that made it one of the night’s biggest highlights.

Headliners The Brixton Academy provided plenty of highlights as well. I had been told TBA sounded even better live than they did on record, and the show at Tight Rope confirmed that. Prior to this Nagoya trip, TBA’s appeal could be boiled down to two major points:

1. Their songs exude emotional sincerity.
2. They are fun to dance to.

Live, point one fades into the deep background because point two consumes everything else. To put it crudely, the crowd at Tight Rope went batshit for everything the band played. Even something like “Two Shadows United,” which unfolds at a pace better reserved for bedroom dancing, had people nearly moshing. A plentiful amount of alcohol consumed by their 3 A.M. start helped…and TBA helped by popping open a bottle of champagne, passing it into the audience so we could all suckle on it…but really the music made it all come naturally out. The songs from Vivid predictably killed it oh so hard – the delirious “In My Arms,” and ending everything with an encore of “So Shy” you can imagine how that one went (great) – but more surprising were how good tunes from this year’s Bright As Diamonds sounded. “Neons Bright” and “One Time, One Night” carried extra oomph at this setting, TBA executing them perfectly and working everyone into a tizzy. Best of all was “Youth,” a song that on the album comes off as a good number that wants to be bigger than it actually is. Live though, it sounded capital-H Huge, the guitars blasting out like engine turbines and becoming all consuming. It was a might fine performance.

Yet said live show also revealed another truth – Bright As Diamonds would be one of Japan’s best EPs in 2011 if it weren’t one of the year’s more just-above-average albums. TBA played the first five tracks from Diamonds live, ignoring the slog of a second half. It is a front-loaded LP and even the band seems to know it, avoiding the aimless instrumental numbers and less-thrilling late tracks and instead focusing on the really good opening run. Live the band remains a must-see, but Diamonds is merely OK and was easily bested by Dorian’s Studio Vacation in this year’s race for “best imitation of the 80s by people who probably didn’t live in them very long.”

And so the night ended, crowd inebriated to a giddy level, some choosing to continue pounding shots, others slouching over on Tight Rope’s benches, still others probably wandering upstairs to scream “I THINK I’M BIG MEECH.” My friend and I, an hour away from first train, sat content on the stage, happy with how the night turned out. We closed the night out the only way we knew how – by chucking exploding poultry at green pigs.

Review: She Talks Silence’s Some Small Gifts

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Some Small Gifts came out back in the early days of summer, when temperatures rest at their most comfortable and ice cream seemed like a wise daily purchase post work. Now my walk home features leaves caught between yellow and red, and stops at convenience stores where they’ve already set up Christmas aisles next to ones full of heavy-duty gloves. During this stretch, Some Small Gifts hasn’t so much as soundtracked my life as it has haunted the back corners of my mind.

Which is a drawn out way of saying…this mini-album dropped four months ago and I still haven’t gotten around to writing a review of it. I certainly meant to, as few releases in 2011 had me as excited as Gifts. It is She Talks Silence’s follow-up to last year’s Noise & Novels, my favorite Japanese album of 2010 and one holding up well all these months on. That debut showed the young Tokyo artist’s knack for writing catchy indie-pop and then having the guts to turn it vaguely creepy…not “creepy” in a “that guy has been pacing outside of the Stater Brother’s for two hours now” but rather like the hours before a typhoon hits, the calm temperament and grey sky hinting at something not fun on the horizon.

So I eagerly awaited Gifts, but then life intervened. A month before She Talks Silence’s (STS from here on out) newest dropped, I had a nice kindergarten teaching job lined up in the lovely little city I called home for two years. When the CD actually showed up to my apartment in its brown Amazon coat, I was frantically searching for jobs in nearby Osaka, my plans torn up like oh so many failed MegaBucks scratchers. I listened to Gifts for sure, but couldn’t immerse myself in it or be excited by it the way I wanted. I didn’t have time to be excited by anything, save sleep.

Job hunting turned to apartment hunting turned to moving turned to settling in turned to a strange state of being confused by my new settings to finally normalcy. Gifts creeped in the corners during this time, battling it out with countless other records…and books and alcoholic beverages…for my time. It felt wrong to write a half-assed review of this back then, so now, with winter crispness materializing in the air and year-end lists dancing in my mind, I decided to pen this review.

Yet here’s the twist – the music on Some Small Gifts is pretty good, but very unsurprising. It isn’t quite the typical stop-gap EP a band puts out following an artistic breakthrough, but it’s also the sort of release that could probably summed up with the sentence “did you like the last album You’ll like this!” There are a few developments – STS has grown into a duo (trio live) and Gifts sounds clearer than the bedroom-hush of Noise & Novels. Opener “Not Hearing” is a four-minute instrumental with drums ripped straight from a pagan sacrifice. “Bedflower” teases hip-hop-inspired percussion, but uses them for the softest song STS has ever written. Then, a three-song stretch of STS being STS, the album ending with “Some Small Gift” which…well, we will get to that. Initial verdict – good! But nothing that special.

This revelation made writing anything even harder – had I sat down and forced myself to churn something up in August it would have said practically the same as the above paragraph but with more drawn-out language. I decided instead to let Gifts gestate, see what new thoughts crept into my mind.

So I went on with my life – and STS’ latest hovered around me like a cartoon cloud. From a critical perspective, I thought I had a closed case. Yet soon this album turned into a strange beast – it’s ended up one of the records in 2011 to really stick with me personally.

Now, beloved reader who stuck around 600 words, I reveal the sticky center of this post – this is review powered by emotion, a particularly dangerous zone for music writing to go, yet one I think is important for this record. On the actual music, you might as well just read this. But STS summons a very different atmosphere from their debut – Noise & Novels felt lonely, isolated but ultimately hopeful. Gifts feels like that stray thought in your head that, even when in stupid bliss, whispers “things are going to get bad again.” It’s ominous, paranoid stuff perfectly capable of rolling out of bed but concealing shaky feelings.

I’ve been listening to Gifts on loop recently because I get that feeling, I feel that feeling more and more. All the scene-setting stuff at the top was standard melodrama, emotions that felt like apocalypse at the time but like all hysterics faded with time. Gifts couldn’t connect with me during that period because it sounds reserved, rarely letting emotion overpower the songs. This isn’t what someone who comes seconds away from irrationally buying a one-way plane ticket home wants to hear – they want to hear something raw, dripping with vulnerable feelings, preferably with shouting. I listened to a lot of Future Islands.

Yet those sudden trips to Expedia soon stopped, and all my bad feeling receded and life returned to normal, albeit in a new place with a new job and new people surrounding me. And that’s when Gifts sunk into me and resonated personally more than most albums released in 2011. “Not Hearing” sets the tone, DIY war-drum pounding sweeping over as guitar…guitar sometimes settling into a groove reminiscent of the Space Ghost Coast To Coast theme…blows around like debris. It says something wicked this way comes, the sound of bad weather or just ominous omens fast approaching. It’s the feeling I get when I get lost in Facebook stalking old college friends or get an e-mail from my mom about a job – it’s far off, but visible, and getting bigger each second.

(Seeing as this is lines away from turning into a chronological review, let’s get “Bedflower” out of the way and slap it with the “only misfire of the album” sticker. The beats and general languid atmosphere are new for STS, but ultimately a bit too comfortable for the group. If most of their songs remind me of having trouble sleeping and noticing the dots on your ceiling look like faces, “Bedflower” is being comfortably spread out on a king-size bed reading the New Yorker.)

Then we come to Gifts innards, the three-song stretch where STS sounds like STS albeit in a slightly more unsettling way. One fact easy to forget about this duo is they make indie-pop, one of the most common genres around, especially in the Internet age. They played at a recent Creation Record’s event in Tokyo, and the bulk of songs like “Vanished Vacances” and “Dead Romance” follow a relatively uncomplicated road and sound pretty catchy. Yet, like Black Tambourine before them, STS invert a style often labeled “twee” and associated with cardigans, and turns a often-though-of-innocent genre into something a bit more sinister. See how the otherwise happy, wood-block-clanking “Vanished Vacances” suddeny goes out of focus near the end and turns into a trip. Or how guitar freakouts just rip through “Dead Romance.” The sparse “Fragment” comes closest to being a just-regular indie-pop song, but even that one feels dangerously close to teetering off into a pit at times.

STS taps into the same something-here-isn’t-right vibe mastered by director David Lynch, a fact apparent all across Noise & Novels and just as clear here. Lynch’s works have impacted the band members in a pretty clear way, seeing as lead singer Minami Yamaguchi fancies herself similar to Agent Cooper and keyboardist Ami Kawai scrawled “firewalk with me” on her equipment. Being a “Lynchian” musician at the moment seems pretty trendy – hell, DAVID LYNCH just released a Lynchian album – but STS, and especially Gifts, nails it in a way a lot of other acts don’t. Those groups sound like they belong in one of his movies – STS gets his creepy aesthetic down right.

After spending 15-some minutes hinting at some obscured crisis, STS let those creeping feelings engulf them on closer “Some Small Gift,” the best song they’ve written to date. Whereas Noise & Novels capped off a rather agoraphobic LP with dashes of sunlight, Gifts ends with being submerged by, what to me, sounds like insecurities. The “chorus” of this song is a sudden burst of energy and unintelligible moans caught in the blast. STS sounds defeated and tired on the verses, and so they let the bad thoughts swarm over, at least for one song.

Part of the reason I think Gifts didn’t instantly click was its release time – this isn’t a summer album, but rather one more suitable for the late fall. As I attempt to figure out these last paragraphs, a minor chill has graced the air and the sky has taken on a grey hue, a color STS loves to use in their album art. To me, this sort of weather indicates SOMETHING is coming – the head-slapping answer being “winter,” yes, but also some weird chill in my bones that seems irrational enough it should be brushed away…yet stays tucked just out of sight anyways. Gifts strikes me as the sonic equivalent of that feeling.

I’m not letting emotions allow me to overrate this album…this isn’t a top 10 release of the year, more of a 19 or low-20s for the list obsessed…yet Gifts sticks with me, which is why I think personal details go a long way in explaining why. In Japanese music this year, a lot of artists have been making (intentional or not, I don’t know) music that reflects the scrambled world we live in – Miila And The Geeks captured complete confusion, HNC hit upon some dreamy fear on her “I Dream I Dead” while Canopies And Drapes escaped from it all into a gleaming fantasyland. STS caught the weird feeling of nagging gloom, and even if I can’t say exactly why I think they caught it perfectly.

This post was partially inspired by recent gorgeous music writing by Yvynl and Chet Betz, as well as David Greenwald’s post about what music blogs should be doing today.

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96nlV8fpHfs”]

Self-Promotion Plus: Reviewing Canopies And Drapes’ EP In The Japan Times

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Wrote a review for Canopies And Drapes’ debut EP Violet, Lilly, Rose, Daisy for the Japan Times. Check it out here. I’ve been hinting at how much I like this four-song collection for a while on, but now here is a summary of my thoughts on it. As mentioned in the review, CaD’s went and made two of the most gorgeous songs I’ve heard all year in the already blabbed about “Sleeping Under The Bed” and the super-pretty opener “Live In The Snowglobe.” Both of those are must hear songs of 2011.

Oh, in other news…Pitchfork wrote something up about K-Pop. Maybe “Gee” can now be included in a Girl Talk set?

Stuff We Missed Catch-Up Post #3: Cubismo Grafico Five, Misato Kinoshita And Vanilla Beans

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Cubismo Grafico Five Half Dozen

Not the actual artwork, but a filler photo.

A lot of artists behind great albums in 2010 came back with impressive EPs in 2011, highlighted by She Talks Silence and Puffyshoes (well, I guess that was a mini album). Half Dozen isn’t quite in the same league, more of an obvious stopgap following Cubismo Grafico Five’s triumphant Double Dozen than any hint of what is to come, the titular-ly accurate six songs here feeling like leftovers for the most part. Lead track “Shoelace” stands as this EP’s strongest moment, a blistering rock number that could have easily slid somewhere on Cubismo’s best album to date and not feel out of place. “Blue On Pink” comes off as a more appropriate castaway, OK here but probably a momentum killer on Double Dozen. The other two new songs are unremarkable, and the two remixes of Double Dozen songs seem unnecessary when the originals are so good. This box is for devotees only. Yet Cubismo had something a bit more interesting to offer too….

Chabe Me

GET IT HERE

Here, Cubismo’s lead singer Chabe sets out on his own to make a seemingly personal album, blessed with the title Me as if dude just has to get some stuff off his chest…and wants the world to know about it. Funny thing is, for an album sorta billing itself as “personal,” Chabe has a lot of ink spelling “featuring” on the tracklisting here, as if he’s using a wide range of guests to serve as mental actors on this album, some Being John Malkovich shit going on. Still, he makes it work – this is an album where the reckless energy of Cubismo gets replaced by the wistful knowledge of Chabe.

The music skews towards electric ambient albeit with a little more kick, moments like “Song For Claes” and the tropically tinged “Rewind (Holiday 91)” practically glowing. Most of Me unfolds slowly, as if Chabe is mentally tumbling the mix of ideas in his head as the music goes on. He makes time for one legitimate pop gem – the fuzzy island bounce of “White Cube,” blessed with one of the sweetest choruses he’s ever conjured up – and tackles The Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” among a few other covers. And yeah…lotta guests. Harka lends a touch of vocal beauty to “Song For Claes,” while Love And Hates show up to cover a Brigitte Bardot tune. Not all of Chabe’s pals come through…the rapper on “Soumatou” needs to be erased Eternal Sunshine-like fast…but I’d take it just to hear Sayaka Kushibiki’s silky voice on the pulsing cover of The Sunday’s “Here’s Where The Story Ends.”

What really pushes Me up, though, is how much Chabe opens up. No dark secrets get confessed, but considering that his Cubismo lyrics lean towards subject matter like french fries and beer, the places he goes on his solo effort are surprising. “Rewind (Holiday 91)” finds him making a case for nostalgia as he turns the past over in his mind, while “White Cube” serves as his mental escape. The best moment comes through the most simple sentiment – on “And Me,” Chabe simply rattles off a list of words that link to his life. “Love, beer, happy?” eventually leads to “Pub, music, girl” and so on. It’s an easy mental checklist of things he (presumably likes), set into a song so these simple joys aren’t lost. This album ends with him sitting around with his “kaleidoscopic memories” and it was nice of him to let us tag along.

Alfred Beach Sandal One Day Calypso

In which “weirdness” doesn’t instantly translate into a great album. One Day Calypso has good moments – the herky-jerk pace of “Camping Car Is Dead” stands as a highlight, and it’s nice to hear beach-evoking music that isn’t what a Moog imagines a tidal wave to look like – but dude’s overall approach to this album gets grating quickly. To sum it up – Alfred Beach Sandal doesn’t sing as much as he talks fast, and oftentimes the music surrounding his quickfire voice either sounds out of time with everything else or like a child’s music practice. It’s a noble idea, taking what would have been straightforward folk songs and turning them into dizzying compositions, except an entire album of it gets tiring quickly. Even the stripped-down moments like “Chinese Shampoo” manage to sound like a guy mostly just dicking around. A bit too gimmicky.

Misato Kinoshita それからの子供

A sneaky good J-Pop album here – at her absolute best, Misato Kinoshita strips J-Pop of its usual hyperness and breaks it down like one of those photos of food shown by only ingredients. “彼方からの手紙” and “Sailor” find her working over bare, chilly synths, pop dissected into something as simple as IKEA furniture but still being catchy. Late cut “とんだボール” turns the electronics towards “bumping,” using buzzing sounds to construct a surprisingly hip-moving number. The rest of this album ends up all over the place – Kinoshita indulges in a few jazzy experiments (read: a lot of horns) that sound fine, but she also gives herself over to ho-hum balladry a couple times, hurting her momentum. Still, one of the more interesting pop albums in Japan this year.

Vanilla Beans Vanilla Beans II

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs7DR0PT5bc”]

Vanilla Beans subversive “alternative idol” gimmick works wonders visually, the duo’s silly videos and goofy promotional pushes (sitting in a see-through bus in downtown Tokyo, just reading magazines and playing video games) poking fun at the zany idol culture oh-so-prominent in Japan. Yet what happens when they lose the visual component, and just have the music? Well, as 2011 album Vanilla Beans II demonstrates, they can get by just fine. The album artwork hints at weirdness (since I can’t find any good shots, go here to see it) but the music never really approaches Weird Al territory of parody. The language barrier should be taken into account, as the lyrics could be saying all sorts of zany thing…and with a song just titled “Breasts,” that’s a safe bet…but the lyric book also features plenty of straight-faced “love me nows” and odes to Summer.

Vanilla Beans II, then, confirms something great past singles like “Nicola” laid out – they might be having fun with the idol thing, but Vanilla Beans are also setting out to make catchy pop. This album ends up a plenty enjoyable listen, the duo mimicking various incarnations of J-Pop through the ages. The above “älskar dig”is a slightly slower but still enjoyable number from them, while “Musunde Hiraite” one of the bounciest things they’ve ever put together. The few times they try to be more “rock” stand out as the album’s weaker moments, but there are plenty of pop-centric moments to offset those.

Oh, and in case you think they aren’t still messing with you, they end the album with a cover of “Stairway To Heaven.” Vanilla Beans, never change.