No stranger to remixing for J-pop acts, England’s bo en remixed Niigata trio Negicco’s song “Let’s Meet At The Festival.” The original version is a solid bit of pop — better than the leak-backing group’s newest songs, but not touching the material on this year’s Rice & Snow, one of the favorites for 2015’s finest…
Time for a catch-up post to kick off the week, here are some good songs from the last few days worth your time! – Itadaqi is a new electro-pop project in Tokyo, and I am pretty sure that Chick of Canopies And Drapes handles the lead vocals on their first song “Taikutsu No Heya.” Well,…
The Sub Account are one of those outfits that seem so prolific that writing about everything they do seems silly. I joke about how much Yunomi has done in 2016, but this duo have probably been busy three times over, with remixes of songs (mainly numbers from anime) and no shortage of live shows (also,…
This is familiar territory so I’ll just give the TLDR version — future funk on its own can often feel a bit lazy and forgettable, at least in the wrong hands. Yet as a base for something else — singing or rapping — the idea behind future funk can work quite well. “Step Into The…
Fantastic Explosion, you make it so easy. The group’s new album is called Sounds In Space and based off the samples up on their label’s MySpace, this stuff could also have been created in an alternate reality where MIR housed a sick dance club. The title track pulses ahead on laser-like synths and a bongo-rockin’…
The glimpses Tokyo artist Metoronori gives into her world through her music is always fascinating — the string of albums she released last year were her finest collections of off-beat pop to date, each feeling like a door into a different dimension. Her latest song (above) is one of her more skeletal composition to date,…
Tokyo’s Ningen OK are a group that demand to be seen live. I lucked my way into seeing them this past weekend, knowing nothing about them, but leaving thinking this duo put on one of the better live sets I’ve seen recently. They play surrounded by what appear to be homemade white pyramids. Guitarist Takurou Yamashita stands in front of a board littered with effects pedals, while Ken-ichi Sakaguchi looms over a drum kit which he soon hammers away at. They play very precise, wordless rock that always seems an inch away from tumbling into chaos, but always manages to hold together. Between songs, Sakaguchi leans towards a Vocoder and creates trippy segues featuring his robo-tized voice. Then they launch off again. It’s captivating stuff.
Their music manages to still sound good away from a live house – “Taion No Yukue” highlights Ningen OK’s precision-centric nature while also introducing elements of chaos (listen to that radio feedback). Listen to that below. It comes off their recently released first album of the same name, which is also probably full of good moments. Still, Ningen OK seem like a live band first, one that you should certainly make time for. Bookmark this page.
I’d like to think this a case where a music scene’s very existence proves itself to be vital, to be responsible for fostering a young artist and helping them improve over time. Gloomy popped up on our radar late last year, when they (I believe they are a duo) appeared on the bill for one…
It’s probably about time to do a “stuff we missed: 2013 edition,” and one album I didn’t write nearly enough about is Kiko by Madegg. He’s still one of the most prolific electronic artists in Japan today, but also one able to backup all the output with talent. Kiko is his best full-length album yet…Kashiyuka…
J-Pop doesn’t need to be torn down and built back up. There are lots of bad projects selling lots of albums – this week, Kanjani8 moved more than 200,000 copies of a song, making it the highest-selling single of 2014 thus far – but plenty of great stuff appears on the charts too…and even just…
It hasn’t even been a week since I went into a tizzy writing about May.e’s album Mattiola, one of the year’s most stunning releases and one rich in FEELINGS. Turns out May.e is a restless soul, and also capable of churning out high-quality music at will – you can hear a new song of bare-bones…
東京のデュオ、LLLLの新しいビデオ”Because Of My Eyes”は、まるで週末に夜遊びしているかのような光景。眩しいライトやビデオエフェクトは酔っぱらっているような気持ちにさせてくれます。全て白黒で撮影されていているこの作品では、街を散歩したりクラブで踊ったり、気づけば女性がこちらを眺めていたり。J-Popからの影響が強いものの、LLLLらしい少しダークな雰囲気で日本のパーティーライフを体験できます。ビデオは上から。
Timothy Work covers a lot of ground in just four songs on their self-titled debut EP that dropped back in the summer. Which actually makes it surprisingly easy to overlook – 2012 saw all sorts of acts treating genre cornerstones as something meant to be thrown around, acts like Moscow Club touching on fragile indie-pop…
