Six-piece Lucky Kilimanjaro seem like a group poised to breakthrough to a weird level of mainstream notability, where an outfit can get decent placement at Tower Records and have concerts promoted above a convenience store ticket machine, but still be virtually unknown. Spurred by Japan’s massive gulf between top-level acts and legit indie artists, a…
I don’t know much about the dude named Donnis…the video for his song “Gone” opens with the Fool’s Gold logo, a nice little label which currently boasts The Suzan. Wikipedia tells me he used to be in the Air Force and was stationed in Tokyo, which you think would be a nice little hook for…
It’s not uncalled for a musician to show why they are good, why they matter, via a remix. Most of the time, though, the remix serves a purely marketable function – it keeps the wheels of the hype machine rolling while allowing two artists to stay relevant in a media sphere prone to tossing acts…
Up front I’ll be honest with you: there are way too many “throwback” garage-rock bands making fuzzy sounding songs that fail to really do anything of interest. This applies to America, England, Japan and probably every other country on the planet. So yeah…mig definitely could be lumped into this increasingly annoying trend given the group’s…
Credit to KiWi — they gave a deadline to listen to their latest song “Uso,” which turns out to be a great motivating force to write up a blog post you’ve been meaning to get around to for a few days now. “Uso” is scheduled to go away…I think?…tomorrow, so give the latest bit of…
The deeper we get into the decade, the more remarkable Mei Ehara’s discography becomes. The singer/songwriter created some of the most bracing music in recent memory out of Japan under the name May.e, using just an acoustic guitar and her voice. She switched to the name Mei Ehara, and has added bit more to her…
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.
There will come a day where Japan’s electronic music scene will be a little too full. It’s already starting to happen, as with each new FOGPAK compilation…and with it a longer playtime…it becomes clear that, even though there are lots of young producers worth listening to, there are also a lot who just don’t have…
boy from HOTEL MEXICO on Vimeo. Hotel Mexico’s new album Her Decorated Post Love dropped yesterday, and definitely worth your time. The Kyoto group also released a video for that album’s lead-off track, “boy,” yesterday, which you can watch above. This song bares a slight resemblance to Hotel Mexico’s older “Starling, Tiger, Fox,” what with…
Time for two indie-pop acts to take us into the weekend. First up, The Weddings. This duo, who have released several lovely lo-fi shambles in the past, reemerge after some time with “Mixtape For My Friends.” It is a slight track, built off of chimes and tweets and the duo’s far-from-pretty-but-still-intriguing crooning. The lyrics cover…
Mass Of The Fermenting Dregsは９月１日、バンドのホームページにて解散を発表しました。リードシンガーの宮本菜津子によって発表され、彼女のこれからのソロ活動についても言及されています。本文にはMass Of The Fermenting Dregsの未発表曲、“たんたんたん”がプレゼントとして貼り付けてあり、こちらからダウンロード可能です。 “たんたんたん”は、ここ数年のバンドのなかでも良質な音楽を生み出してきたFermenting Dregsらしい結論になっているな、と感じます。あまり勢いのある曲ではないものの、ゆったりとしたメローなテンポは、バンドの今までの曲を思い出させてくれます。色々脳裏に浮かびますが、特に2010年の作品、ゼロコンマ、色とりどりの世界は、その名の通り色あせない名盤です。最後の曲で宮本は声を絞り出すように歌い、攻撃的なギターと絡み合うのですが、決してやりすぎのないように、今までの通り上手く調節されています。
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…
