Another 12 months down, and that means it is time to have some fun and go extra-long for year-end content. Japanese music generally felt either too focused on celebrating the fading days of the Heisei era or on crowning new J-pop superstars for the next generation — or giving us truly left-field viral hits like…
1. January isn’t even over, and Yasutaka Nakata has been involved with four noteworthy singles, each one offering a different view of where he’s at in 2017. If he can sneak a Capsule number in, we’d have a total round-up. “Harajuku Iyahoi” came first, followed soon after by Perfume’s “Tokyo Girl” and Natsume Mito’s “Puzzle.”…
80:05 reflects a simplification of sorts for the electro duo 80Kidz. They’ve never exactly been a particularly straightforward unit, having come up during the heyday of blown-out bloghouse. And their music has always been a very hit or miss undertaking (again, bloghouse), but the moments of brilliance always used to balance out the cringe-ier exercises…
Cuteness can be as overpowering as any other feeling around, and few Japanese electronic producers understand that like Yoshino Yoshikawa. His sugar-blasted work takes cuddliness to its logical endpoint, without a hint of irony, resulting in music dripping with sweetness but never tipping over to sickliness. “Inventions And Cuties” is a relatively simple number —…
Chelmico recently released their first full-length major label album Power, and it’s a solid shift towards bigger places for the duo. Most importantly, not much has changed now that they are on unBorde from recent EPs and a self-titled 2016 debut album. They still create upbeat genre-skipping exercises anchored in hip-hop, channeling Rip Slyme, Halcali…
More of a Soundcloud-centric rapper round robin than a song proper, “nap” highlights four very promising artists taking their own perspective on the hazy, often-gloomy sounds of a wave coming from America. We’ve highlighted two of them before — Sleet Mage, whose Astral Body Boi tape makes our top 50 of 2017 if we redid…
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’m not silly enough to think indie-pop music will ever go away completely. As long as there are romantic boys and girls with guitars and access to twee.net (so, a lot of people), this stuff will always be around, all over the world (see the great Fear Of Men album that came out this year)….
Kobe-based producer Tofubeats says he’s working on a new album, which is very good news for us. While he’s finishing the final touches on that full-length, he’s given the world a preview from it in the form of “Time Thieves,” a fast-paced track from one of the best music makers going in Japan right now….
Slow Beach are a Japanese indie-pop supergroup of sorts – they feature Kai Takahashi and Twangy Twagny (a.k.a. Dai Ogasawara), but find both of them making surf-leaning music (see – the name). They’ve released their first album, called Lover Lover and you can get it for free here. Go do that! I’ll write more on…
The blockbuster comes later, but let’s start from the beginning. What hooked our ears to meeshiieee was actually a song the self-described “slovenely” songwriter labelled as a discarded track. “Umi E” is an incredibly simple song – a strummed acoustic guitar, singing, a few backup vocals – yet the delivery of this song is absolutely…
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…
