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.
A few months after releasing a cassette tape, Tokyo’s Wooman have a proper album out soon on Her Heads Record called Lost Love. It includes a lot of the group’s initial numbers, but also adds new cuts such as “Faint Dream,” a chugging number featuring the same unnerving, muffled vocals that defined earlier releases (and…
It takes a lot to elevate a beat tape from Bandcamp loosie to something absorbing on its own, but Kotetsu from Picnic Disco pulls it off the rare feet with the disorienting MAVTAPE 1. Based on how they describe it — “chill&vapot-trap beats” — I was bracing for something like one of those YouTube mixes…
The past always offers an attractive source of inspiration, but singer/songwriter Rima Kato travels back to an unlikely destination for her forthcoming album Sing-Song. She became fascinated with the works of Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, and her latest finds her offering her take on her work. “A Ring Upon Her Finger” captures a pleasant, charming…
The versatility Puni Puni Denki brings to songs continues to surprise, and her latest number reveals her at her most tender yet. Here she teams up with the duo Mikeneko Homeless once again, as they also were involved in this year’s “Kimi Wa Queen,” but whereas as that number paired springy music with more melancholy…
Time to invoke the guidelines for getting a Vocaloid song on this blog — an artist either has to get really experimental and possibly weird with it, or just make some really bubbly pop using synthesized voices. Pedestrian leans mainly towards the latter on the skippy “Funny Dancer,” though shades of the prior sneak in….
Video game-derived sounds appeared in the swirl that would eventually be called Shibuya-kei — while lots of attention (rightfully) goes to the style’s focus on the dustier corners of the record store, not-so-faded 8-bit sounds also popped up frequently, giving the style a nice splash of computer-age energy. Shibuya-Kei Chiptune Cover Compilation, then, isn’t a…