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New Half Mile Beach Club: “Blue Moon”

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.