タイムマシーンに乗って２００９年の秋に戻りましょう。私は日本に来てまだ数ヶ月。大阪の郊外に住み、たまに好奇心から、誰が演奏してるのかもわからずライブを観に行っています…退屈なバンドも色々観てきましたが、そんな経験からCubismo Grafico FiveやLove And Hates(後にHNCとMiila And The Geeksを知るきっかけになりました！)等、素晴らしいアーティストを体験する事ができました。そんな中でもWednesdayはかなり早い段階で観る機会に恵まれたのですが、そのギター中心な楽曲と、時折レトロなロックに完全に夢中に。次の年にリリースされたアルバムは凄く堪能していたのですが…それからWednesdayは何処へ？
Let’s step into the way-back machine and travel back to the autumn of 2009. I’ve been living in Japan for only a few months, out in the countryside outside of Osaka. Sometimes, for kicks, I’d just go to shows in the city randomly without knowing anything about the group’s playing. Although this resulted in seeing a fair share of bad outfits, it also resulted in me stumbling across the like of Cubismo Grafico Five, Love And Hates (which led to HNC and Miila And The Geeks) and many more. Wednesday were at one of the first shows I ever saw in person in Osaka, and I was won over by their guitar-centric, sometimes retro-leaning brand of rock. They released an album the next year and I really enjoyed it…and then they sort of just went away.
Turns out they released a new EP at the very end of last year, and the above song is the single from it. “Mr. Free” finds the band exploring the same jaunty territory they were traversing back in 2009, although this one starts slow and then barrels ahead as things progress. Structurally, it’s far more patient than most of their older stuff, which found a catchy idea and ran with it. What’s surprising about Wednesday in 2013 is how they sound like a group who could, conceivably, be lumped into Japan’s indie-pop boom – only their relatively crisp sound quality really makes me think twice. Regardless, nice to see these guys still kicking around. Listen above.
In case you didn’t know, Make Believe Melodies also has a Tumblr, where I write a bit more about J-Pop and non-Japanese music. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Desire, the new album from Los-Angeles-based artist spazzkid. Read that here. For those who aren’t going to click it – Desire has jumped up to…
On the surface level, Canata Records seems like a pretty rigid netlabel sonically. “We believe that freedom is pop,” goes one of the slogans on their Bandcamp page, and a cursory look at the artist names, album and song titles indicate the label deals mostly in twee. Yet what has made them one of the…
This is, as the project’s name implies, a pop song. It just happens to be captured through a very damaged prism, all the catchiness of “I Die In Tomorrow” turned sinister and unsettling, a bad dream rendered into a just-under-two-and-a-half-minute track. The beat is jagged and the vocals are blurred out, the actual words nearly…
Mass Of The Fermenting Dregsは９月１日、バンドのホームページにて解散を発表しました。リードシンガーの宮本菜津子によって発表され、彼女のこれからのソロ活動についても言及されています。本文にはMass Of The Fermenting Dregsの未発表曲、“たんたんたん”がプレゼントとして貼り付けてあり、こちらからダウンロード可能です。 “たんたんたん”は、ここ数年のバンドのなかでも良質な音楽を生み出してきたFermenting Dregsらしい結論になっているな、と感じます。あまり勢いのある曲ではないものの、ゆったりとしたメローなテンポは、バンドの今までの曲を思い出させてくれます。色々脳裏に浮かびますが、特に2010年の作品、ゼロコンマ、色とりどりの世界は、その名の通り色あせない名盤です。最後の曲で宮本は声を絞り出すように歌い、攻撃的なギターと絡み合うのですが、決してやりすぎのないように、今までの通り上手く調節されています。
Rare are the times when you stumble across a SoundCloud or Bandcamp page unironically tagging itself as J-Pop. Even rarer…finding an earnest stab at the outright poppy through these sites that isn’t terrible. There are certainly exceptions – everything on Maltine that goes by that, mostly – but try spending some time with that tag….
Diane Halls is a new project out of Aichi that has released one really nice song, the dreamy “Stolen Kisses.” I wrote about it for New-York-based blog International Tapes, and you can read it over here. Highly recommend you get the song here.