Let’s keep this short as I’m sleepy and you can expect nearly 2000 words on this blog tomorrow – I’ve been digging Boyfriend Material’s “Taiyō No Kisetsu” for a little bit, so I’m going to post the SoundCloud player for it below. Listen and enjoy. [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/23736855″] Simple enough, yeah?
Less of a sequel and rather more of the same thing shot at a different angle and on more blockbuster-friendly film, Moscow Club’s “Daisy Miller Pt. 2” emerges from the ether of “Pt. 1” no longer in a dream state but ready to get stuff done. The tempo quickens, the guitars get the haze scraped…
And here’s the first output from Perfume on Universal Japan…which sounds a lot like old Perfume. Which, if you have read this blog for a long period of time, know is an absolutely great thing. “Spring Of Life” wastes no time digging its teeth into the Cadbury Egg that is the chorus, a chirpy-and-bright thing….
A relatively grim thought I had recently was — are there just not that many collectives of artists in Japan, hungry young creators simply out to prove how good they are? My initial cynical reaction was to say “they are all YouTube dorks now, talking about new soda offerings down at Family Mart and what…
Long-time readers might remember the garage-rock duo Puffyshoes, an outfit I wrote about quite a bit back in the day. The pair made lo-fi, catchy numbers about simple subjects — birthday parties, backstage passes, love — delivered in a high energy style that put that at the forefront of a developing garage scene. Eventually the…
TOYOMU got all the attention for his imagined take on Kanye, but the young producer also co-runs a party / label out of his hometown of Kyoto called Qauntizer Kyoto, giving space for similarly cosmic-tripping producers in the Kansai region. Quantizer Sampler 2 is, fittingly, a great gateway to a collective taking the Brainfeeder-inspired deep-space…
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.
“This album is the 2nd of a series of compilation albums introducing young Japanese artists, this time with a focus on noise pop. However, this focus does not mean confinement to a single style.” Canata Records isn’t kidding. The What About Tokyo? comp finds five bands with five very different styles…some more noisy than others…and…
Call And Response Recordsの新しいコンピレーションアルバム、”Dancing After 1 AM”は、我々の友達、イアン・マーティンのレーベルのものなので…探す手間が省けました。１８曲も収録されているこのアルバムには、日本屈指のロック・アーティスト達も参加しています。She Talks Silenceが陰のような美しいギターを奏でる一方で、The Morningsの”Fuji”は去年にリリースされた”Save The Mornings”に引き続き、彼ららしい作品。POP-OFFICE、New HouseやTacobondsなども参加していて、さすがだな、と言わざるを得ません。今まで紹介してこなかったExtrudersによる“Collapsing New Buildings”はミニマルで、呟くようなボーカルとギターの鋭いストロークが良い味を出しています。Puffyshoesも１分程参加しています。 “Dancing After 1 AM”が持つフックといえば、ニューウェーブ・デュオのMIRがこのアルバムでカムバックし、新曲を１曲提供しているという所。これからの活動も期待しているのですが、“Dance”は、このグループの過去のハイライトを５分でまとめたような曲になっています。シンセとビートが良いグルーブ感を出しているのですが、それだけで終わらないのがこのグループの強み。決してアップビートではない、ナイーブなボーカルが、この曲を独特にしています。このような悲しげな、かつアップテンポなダンスミュージックは中々探しても出てこないですし、巧みにひねりを加えた独特な楽曲が多いので、Dancing After 1 AM、オススメです。 List of where to buy the album here.
Indie-pop in Japan has, without a doubt, reached a bit of a bubble phase at this point. In late 2013, there are just so many outfits leaning towards the twee side of the indie-rock spectrum…and new ones pop up all the time online. The question now is, “what are they aiming for?” There have been…
The music Jesse Ruins – and, to some extent, every act associated with Tokyo’s CUZ ME PAIN label – has always been vaguely unsettling, but that trio’s songs also always added a glimpse of light to the shadowy sounds, whether it just be a dance beat or a particularly pretty vocal. Jesse Ruins’ head Nobuyuki…
This is not the first time Turntable Films have been infatuated with the Rainbow State. On their 10 Days Plus One album from 2011, the then-quartet wrote a song called “Hawaii” that was a lazy appreciation of beach-bum rock. It was slow, full of whistling and could have been a Jack Johnson jam in another…
Starting today, Make Believe Melodies will join pretty much every other music website and blog in wrapping up 2012. It has been a fantastic year for Japanese music – the past 12 months have seen a boom in quality indie-pop music, continued experimentation within the world of electronic music and a bunch of quality J-Pop…
