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.
City pop, a genre of music that saw its heyday during the high times of Japan’s bubble economy, has had a bit of a resurgence over the past year. The Japan Times covered this trend towards the retro recently, focusing on the likes of Greeen Linez whose recent album Things That Fade is an excellent…
Lake Michigan used to be a solid indie-pop band, an outfit making skippy numbers glazed with plenty of melancholy, which is to say it was standard but quality stuff in a genre never lacking in artists within Japan. Well, the group has certainly changed in some ways, boasting a new name — Michiganized — and…
This month for the Music Alliance Pact – a feature where blogs from all over the world share one song with one another, with Make Believe Melodies repping for Japan – we highlighted a bit of a different sounding artist. The spotlight falls on Toyohirakumin, who often gets lumped into the world of vaporwave, but…
Forgive me for the ol’ “talk about an appropriate name!” fallback — but Kobe’s Cosmoman’s music has, for the most part, tended to deliver on the name, sounding spacey, or at least worthy of being studied in a NASA laboratory. “Seaside Promenade” brings things back below the atmosphere, ignoring “futuristic” for something more laid back….
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,…
I won’t dwell on the negative, as I have made it my summer project to be slightly more positive. That said and with the official start to the season still a few weeks away, the two bands I’m going to write about in this blurb appeared in a feature about foreign musicians in Japan littered…