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Fogpak #7 Is Massive, Features Kai Takahashi, PARKGOLF, Mioriyuri And 45 Other Artists
The Fogpak compilations, albums collecting songs from independent electronic artists all across Japan, have been getting a lot longer with each new installment in the series. The sixth edition featured 33 tracks, and that already felt like a challenge to get through. Now comes the seventh in the series which ups the ante with 48…
Sounds So Right: Hearsays Prep New Album, Preview With New Song “When I’m Wrong”
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,”…
Music Alliance Pact January 2013
New year, same great feature. Here’s the first Music Alliance Pact post of 2013, and representing Japan this month is Tokyo’s OKLobby and their mesmerizing track “Fireworks.” Listen to it…and a whole bunch of other great songs from around the globe (Dragon Inn 3, nice!) below. Click the play button icon to listen to individual…
Check The Credits: Izumi Makuro’s “Tokyo Kinkou Rosenzu” (Produced By Sugar’s Campaign)
Look, I don’t want to take anything away from Izumi Makuro. She sounds just fine here, rapping in a relaxed way that sounds effortless and certainly isn’t as, shall we say, acquired as other pop-rap outfits in Japan. If anything, it is easily compared to Her Ghost Friend, except with a more hip-hop bend. It’s…
New May.e: “Bowling”
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…
New The Flickers: “Love Destruction”
J-Rock, ugggggggggh. Save for the brain-and-feet-pleasing Sakanaction…miles ahead of everyone else in Japan tagged “rock” it’s almost ridiculous…rock music in Japan seems to be trending towards some pretty shit places. One OK Rock’s boneheaded menace has proven to be a chart-topper, so brace for them to be a permanent fixture. Sekai No Owari have a…
New Elen Never Sleeps: “Slow (Neu)”
“Slow” originally appeared on Moscow Club’s C86 compilation back in the spring, but has now been touched up a bit (hence the “Neu” in the title) and sounds a lot crisper than Elen Never Sleeps’ original version. Well, it sounds as crisp as something so hazy can sound – the song title is almost an understatement, because “Slow” practically crawls, the guitars and drums sounding glacial. It’s all intentional, though, a decision meant to match up with Elen Never Sleeps repeated cries of “but you slow down/slow down/slow down,” delivered in a dejected-but-pretty voice that this project has gotten so good at utilizing. The original version was good, but this slightly fleshed-out version shows what can happen when an artist spends time perfecting their creations. Listen below.
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Texture Time: MimiCof’s “Foil” And “Tunnel”
Usually when someone talks about how a song “feels,” they focus on the emotional side of the music and really how they feel listening to it. MimiCof, the project of Berlin-based Midori Hirano, makes music you feel in an almost-tactile way, like she tells you to shut your eyes and touch a mysterious object that…
Welcome Back Million Pavilions Records: Fortune-Tenkei-Vol.1
Thanks to good timing, 2015 thus far has featured a lot of exiting returns in the Japanese music scene. Some of the dudes from Ghost will be debuting a new project soon, Tokyo duo Puffyshoes emerged from retirement and now Kobe-based imprint Million Pavilions Records is back with a new compilation album. The label emerged…
Polyphonic Parachute: “Smile”
This sounds like how a six-year-old kid imagines Christmas morning to be. It whizzes around, hopped up on innocent wonder and the marshmallow bits from Lucky Charms. It would be even better if the kid in question was a young Cornelius or Shugo Tokumaru. Yet they aren’t the ones responsible for this sugar high –…
One Day Diary
Let’s get technical for a second – “indie pop” should refer to a very specific type of sound. It’s the sub-genre overflowing with “jangly” guitars and a general “sunny” theme. It’s still pretty vague, but not nearly as “twee.” Twee is a state of being, almost a choice…indie pop doesn’t necessarily need to be twee,…
Ano(t)raks Presents Die In Pop, Featuring I Saw You Yesterday, Youthmemory And More
No label does compilations quite like Ano(t)raks. This decade, their stuffed-tight collections have highlighted artists who have gone on too much bigger things in the Japanese market…and also highlighted some of the more interesting artists to stay in the indie world, too. Die In Pop is the label’s latest, and like previous efforts offers a…
New Moscow Club: “Fahrenheit 451”
Tokyo’s Moscow Club are literary buffs. They originally caught our attention with a song called “Daisy Miller Pt. 1,” (followed up with a “Pt. 2,” both on this lovely album) named after the Henry James’ story of the same name and nailing a similar emotional vibe as the novella. Now they’ve released what their SoundCloud…
