New group Lucky Tapes – fronted by Kai Takahashi – have their debut EP out now, and here’s another taste of the laid-back group’s sound. “In Paris” is an especially Sunday-morning-in-bed-ready song, a slow groover of a number that adds sweet vocal dollops behind Takahashi’s love talk. Listen below.
“Only You” is Gloomy at her most despondent. It’s a tar-pit of a song, all slowly sinking synths and a drum pattern moving like slime, except when it’s bursting into something resembling Portishead’s “Machine Gun.” It’s a slow burn into oblivion, capped off by Gloomy’s singing, which matches the bleakness of the music — to…
Today, Seiho’s new album Collapse comes out globally via LA label Leaving Records. It’s a big moment for an artist who, five years ago, was playing sets in small underground clubs in Osaka and launching his own record imprint. Yet Collapse isn’t a stab at crowd pleasing dance, but rather an album jumping from energetic…
It’s easy to forget in a world where information buzzes about at the same rate lolcats spill out of the Internet’s tubes, but sometimes turning away from the rush of now can be a swell idea. This seems especially true for those who breathe music blogs – and, of course, those who write them. New…
Dear Japanese bands, I love you guys a lot, but why you gotta go and post new tracks at 1:00 A.M.? I realize that by being up I should actually consider myself fortunate but I literally was setting my alarm for tomorrow when I saw this new track from CUZ ME PAIN bro :visited. The…
Is everything just going to be a loop backwards from now on? This isn’t about Upusen’s Signal specifically, though it does factor into the larger trend. Maybe it’s just Japan’s current obsession with all things ’90s — this movie is literally “do you remember gyaru fashion and Tamagothchi?” — or the Western world’s love of…
“Brostep,” a bass-heavy style of dance music often just called “dubstep” in America to the annoyance of many, has turned into a powerful commercial music force in the West. Magazines like SPIN and Rolling Stone have written about this new wave of electronic-dance music, while festivals like The Electric Daisy Carnival pull in thousands of…