The excitement surrounding the new album by the genre-hopping metal outfit Boris focuses on the new wrinkles the sludgy trio add to their sound. Titled Attention Please, this full-length marks the first time the group’s guitarist Wata will sing lead vocals. Early song “Hope” showcased a very different vibe, one I described as “the closest…
This weekend is Fuji Rock Festival 2018, and I’m heading up to the mountains today! So this is more of a housekeeping post that updates might be sparse over the next few days. To tide you over, this new release from Maltine Records should hold you over, as it brings together two good producers (plus…
Leading off with a Bandcamp description isn’t going to win me a Pulitzer, but Inktrans’ profile simply saying “nostalgic!” is too good to pass up on. The four-song At Last. release offers some sweet melancholy via straightforward songs backed by far more fidgety electronic sounds. Opener “hjmr” sways back and forth, but it is the…
The words in questions…”indie” and “pop,” joined together by a hyphen. Though I love the jangly sound immensely – click the “twee as fuck” tag to see just how much – attempting to write about it can be a challenge because a lot of “twee” songs sounds alike. The Caraway’s “Bedroom Suburb” features all the…
Despite being a staple in the INNIT scene, Magical Mistakes (the project of Erik Luebs) doesn’t live in urban Osaka, but rather a tiny forested village in Miyazaki Prefecture. When I talked to him a few months ago, he said how his remote home gave him ample time to record material, and that the natural…
It has been a long, strange trip for HNC. She started her career as Hazel Nuts Chocolate in 2000, appearing in songs by Plus-Tech Squeeze Box and Yasutaka Nakata’s Capsule project, which at the time was more focused on globe-hopping Shibuya kei than dance beats. Her earliest collaborations and original work was hyperactive pop, all…
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.
Fukuoka’s Hearsays first blipped-up on our radar courtesy of Dead Funny Record’s latest compilation album, and now that label will be releasing their new A Little Bird Told Me on March 10. To give us a tease of what to expect, imprint and band have shared a new recording of the song “When I’m Wrong,”…
“Parade” is a perfectly pleasant pop song, young singer YeYe handling her vocals well over the peppy music, the sort of thing that could be easily rejiggered into the backing sounds of a Broadway musical. It’s good…but what makes it interesting (and, disclosure, gets it a post here) is the backing vocals. Few songs this…
In case you didn’t know, Make Believe Melodies also has a Tumblr, where I write a bit more about J-Pop and non-Japanese music. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Desire, the new album from Los-Angeles-based artist spazzkid. Read that here. For those who aren’t going to click it – Desire has jumped up to…
New month, new MAP! Go on to see who we chose this month, and to hear a bunch of other great tunes from all over the globe. Click the play button icon to listen to individual songs, right-click on the song title to download an mp3, or grab a zip file of the full 29-track…
I do not profess to being a guy who knows much about Japanese hip-hop. I have about as basic an understanding of the scene one can get, but that’s it – I don’t know the intricacies or the regional differences or even, like, the fashions (I think Yankees’ caps are popular?). What I do know,…
