Similar Posts
Rest Cycle: Miche’s Sound Sleep
This dropped a couple weeks ago, but it has finally floated into my ears at a deeply appropriate. This is a concept album about sleeping – the song titles feature specific times of the night and what’s going on as the central character sleeps. Like last year’s Sleepy Tokyo album…a concept record about lack of…
Laid-Back Whimsy: Nohtenkigengo’s OOO
Whimsy might not actually be the right word for what Nohtenkigengo does. Sure, the bulk of the music this solo project creates involves the sort of instruments that make one’s twee radar go off like mad, including xylophone, accordion and all sorts of other cutesy sounds. This sonic choice…along with the voice singing all the…
Music Alliance Pact December 2013
Time for the Music Alliance Pact! This is 2013’s last installment of MAP, where more than 30 blogs from all over the world share one song with everyone else. This month, Make Believe Melodies highlights Coffee And TV’s Prefab-Sprout-sample-boasting “Guess What? Summer’s Arrived.” Listen to it and a lot more below! Click the play button…
Shokuhin Maturi A.K.A Foodman: “Tantei Kun”
日本のジューク/フットワークって聞くと少し取っ付きづらいイメージがありますが、”Japanese Juke & Footwork Compilation“というそのまんまのタイトルのコンピは、シーンの入門にはうってつけ。様々なプロデューサーが、多彩なアプローチでこのシカゴのジャンルに挑戦しています。でも45曲も収録されているので、もっと手軽にジャンルを知りたい場合は、食品祭り A.K.A. Foodmanの新曲、”Tantei Kun”がオススメ。切り刻まれたサンプルはジャンルの特徴を上手くとらえているのですが、テンポは比較的ゆったりぎみ(的確なのが聴きたい場合はPicnic Womenとか、アメリカのTraxmanをチェックして下さい)。でも、ソフトロック調の心地よさは素晴らしいです。視聴は以下から、もし気に入ったら、45曲のコンピにも挑戦してみて下さい。
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…
Not Lethargic: Head On The Sofa
I went to the recently renovated Tower Records in Shibuya the other day – looks good, even with a goofy cafe occupying the entire second floor! – and saw a bunch of new CDs that looked interested. After giving them a few preview spins, I was ready to load up on fresh music…until I looked…
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.
Similar Posts
Long Time Coming: Parupunte’s Primitive
The behind-the-scenes stuff at Make Believe Melodies is incredibly boring. Despite a bad habit of using the royal “we,” it is just me, usually sitting at home while a baseball game or variety show plays on TV, my headphones on. The actual inner workings of this WordPress account are hyper disorganized, a list of “to-dos”…
New Yunomi Featuring Toriena: “Wakusei Rabbit”
But seriously, regardless of how much this dates me…Yunomi really should put out an album, this project has a lot of great, maxed-out electro-pop songs by now, and “Wakusei Rabbit” just keeps the streak going. Once again featuring Toriena, this song is zippier from the get-go than “Oedo Controller,” and only launches even further up…
Squeeeee: Pavement Officially Coming To Japan
Talk about welcoming timing – I started my day reading this horribly bleak interview at Eye Weekly. It’s the type of article that makes a music writer depressed enough to wonder “what’s the point” as they stare blankly at their WordPress dashboard. Minutes later though, I clicked on a Pitchfork story about Pavement adding reunion…
New Seira Kariya: “Zawa Make It”
Seira Kariya comes through almost every summer with big, bright electro-pop numbers perfect for the arrival of sunnier days. She took a little bit of a break over the last couple of years, but returned in June, first with the peppy “Cover” Girl” and its persistent bounce, and now with the even more outright optimistic…
Pounding: Fellsius’ “Boss House”
I won’t dwell on my workload anymore, but…this extremely busy and active cut from producer Fellsius, released via Trekkie Trax, is welcome at a time when I could use all the energy I can get. The 18-year-old producer based in Tokyo loads up his take on house with as much detail as he can, from…
Give It Away: Maltine Records And 三毛猫ホームレス’s “KANEKURE”
The music industry’s decade-long struggle to make money has led to all sorts of artists trying out new ways of packaging product so people shell out real currency instead of just typing “album title .rar” into Google. Sometimes you can “pay what you want,” other times you can get an MP3 download by buying a…
