It has been an exceptionally strong week for new Japanese music, and one of our recommendations would be Half Mile Beach Club’s Hasta La Vista, which takes the laid-back funk stylings that I think you could fairly call a contemporary Kanagawa sound (hey, Suchmos get to do NHK’s soccer theme song this year!) and takes it to an alien place, loaded up with Auto-tune dabs and backtracking. It’s a weird and wonderful interpretation of urban chilling, and joins Paellas’ recent body of work in offering a counter to the totally laid back. “Blue Moon” features one of the more outright rock-centric passages on the album, featuring tumbling percussion and electric guitar. But then the strange touches appear, such as the warped vocals or the spoken word bits. Listen above.
