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Make Believe Melodies’ Favorite 2018 Japanese Albums: #10 – #01

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#10 Suiyoubi No Campanella (Wednesday Campanella) Galapagos

I shouldn’t be surprised by anything KOM_I of Suiyoubi No Campanella does, yet back in the early days of summer I watched slack-jawed as she left the stage at a quaint venue near Mt. Fuji and wandered into a field that had been set on fire sometime during the preceding two hours. This group has upended expectations for years now and wowed me enough last year en route to them taking the top spot in the 2017 list, but they always find a way to keep things interesting — even if it involves burning swaths of grass — and add to their own sonic world.

Galapagos spent a little time finding the trio revisiting familiar formulas — see the rumbling mythology-gone-dance-pop of “Three Mystic Apes,” as close to boilerplate Suiyoubi No Campanella as one can get — but mostly captured a group poking around and finding their voice (litarlly), all in search of what direction to pivot next. But even these tests proved, by the end of 2018, to be among the year’s finest. The big development is a risky one — KOM_I, whirling dervish incarnate, drops rapping in favor of singing across all 36 minutes here. But it results in highlights such as the refined theatrics of “The Bamboo Princess” and the understated shuffle of “Minakata Kumagusu,” a song seeing how few parts can be used to assemble an emotionally affecting hook. Half-speed dreampop collaborations with French art types rubbed shoulders with mutations on classic rock stomp. Even the two ballads closing out the album, what felt like noble failures at first brush but have grown into interesting detours for a project operating as far away from soaring end-credit J-pop as possible. Part of Galapagos’ appeal lies in how its a document of a group in flux…I doubt Suiyoubi No Campanella will sound like this a year from now, and they might settle on one specific path to go. But this is them moving in eight at once, surrounded by flames and an endless pool of ideas.

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Make Believe Melodies’ Favorite 2018 Japanese Albums: #20 – #11

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#20 Hikaru Utada Hatsukoi

At their best, pop stars turn the personal into the populist — they make songs for everyone, not for themselves, even if the inspiration comes from inside. Hikaru Utada’s 2016 comeback album Fantome stands as one of the 2010s most fascinating album, wrestling with loss and maturity in a way few albums do. Its raw, and kind of a mess — but then again, that sums up becoming an adult too. But it’s unlike anything else in her catalog.

Hatsukoi wrangles those same feelings and turns them into songs built for everyone. Personal pain and loss gets synthesized into something accessible to everyone, whether on skippy numbers such “Play A Love Song” or more baroque meditations such as “Forevermore.” There’s both an old-school feel to how this longplayer has been constructed — it isn’t available on any streaming service, and that might be OK as it’s the rare 2018 offering that works best front to back, rather than deconstructed — but one also featuring “Too Proud,” one of the most experimental numbers you can hope on a proper marquee J-pop release in 2018. And in one final flourish, Hatsukoi interacts with Utada’s own past, playfully building a bridge to her debut First Love and offering an update. Turns out life remains just as tricky 20 years on, but it can all be made a little easier to navigate when someone like Utada gives you the soundtrack for getting through it.

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Make Believe Melodies’ Favorite 2018 Japanese Albums: #30 – #21

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#30 Haruno Filia

Vocalid remains one of the most intriguing instruments available in the world today, and 2018 saw plenty of artists — many of them outside of Japan — use it in thrilling ways (check Kira’s The Introduction for one good example). Domestically, Haruno’s Filia stuck around in our minds the most this year, in large part because of how they used the familiar digi-warble of Hatsune Miku. They don’t do anything radical with the software, opting rather to use her in a traditional vocalist way, but Filia puts her electronic delivery against delicate arrangements and dreamy dance-pop, which proves to be a great match with the technology. Filia is downright understated, but uses all of its parts just right to get the most out of them, and show interesting ways to apply tools still revealing themselves. Get it here, or listen below.

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Make Believe Melodies’ Favorite 2018 Japanese Albums: #40 – #31

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#40 Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Japamyu

The world finally caught up to Yasutaka Nakata, and then Nakata himself tried to catch up with all the kids weaned on Capsule downloads. Looking at the J-pop producer’s year could lead someone down multiple paths, but the one I keep coming back to is how Nakata — always chasing trends, even when he gets out in front of them like he did in the mid Aughts — is now imitating a sound he was already doing better a decade ago. It defines his first solo release / grab at Ultra main stage cred Virtual Native and pops up all over Perfume’s Future Pop, an album I’d say is half intriguing and half shaky (but probably not deserving of heavy scorn or praise…Perfume are locked in at this point). Recently, he’s done alright work with Daoko and he has a song dropping with Virtual YouTuber Kizuna AI soon, which says more about where music falls in Japan’s digital culture than anything else.

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, though, has a certain way of prompting Nakata to freshen up, and the fact he sounds motivated on her fourth full-length Japamyu makes it the Nakata-verse highlight of 2018. While the multi-year wait for this full-length resulted in Kyary’s actual pop star power diminishing significantly, Japamyu finds her at her most exciting since Nanda Collection, busting out a rap-passing flow on “Kimi No Mikata” and having to flex her own vocal prowess on the understated “Chami Chami Charming.” For Nakata, Japamyu basically comes off as a modern update of Capsule’s debut High Collar Girl, with him just going all in on his love of traditional Japanese music to the point this sometimes sounds like Cool Japan propaganda. But I don’t think the government would greenlight “Enka Natrium,” which finds Kyary rapping and singing in an enka style about the periodic table, like Kero Kero Bonito ghostwrote. Japamyu showed Nakata and co. have a few tricks left for those still willing to give it a listen.

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Make Believe Melodies’ Favorite 2018 Japanese Albums: #50 – #41

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Another 12 months down, and that means it is time to have some fun and go extra-long for year-end content. Japanese music generally felt either too focused on celebrating the fading days of the Heisei era or on crowning new J-pop superstars for the next generation — or giving us truly left-field viral hits like Da Pump’s “U.S.A.,” a shining beacon of Internet unpredictability in a time of Web fakery. But both mainstream and underground ecosystems produced a lot of really good music this year, to the point where getting this list down to 50 proved surprisingly difficult. But the ones here deserve shine as ears turn to 2019.

As always, this list is compiled by just me (despite occasional dips into “we,” this operation remains me and whoever I can get to make sure WordPress doesn’t explode) and represents my favorite releases from Japan over the past 12 months. While I still go for a classic numerical ranking, I also think it’s important to note the whole goal with this isn’t so much canon-building or flexing my taste, but rather to offer a different perspective on the year usually (read: always) overlooked by English-language media. So really…follow along, listen and see if you find something you love that normally wouldn’t hit your radar.

Honorable Mentions: Secret Songs released one new Taquwami song a day back in October, and boy was I tempted to lump all those together and count it as a release. But I’ve resisted, though I urge you to listen to all that material from a producer always ten steps ahead of everyone else (pop music today sounds closer to Taquwami circa 2013…it’s crazy!). IZ*ONE’s COLOR*IZ album features one of my favorite singles of the year and a few nifty album cuts, but has been absorbed by K-pop. Last, Moe Shop’s Moe Moe features a boatload of Japanese guests and is basically the best Yasutaka Nakata release of the year, despite not coming from Yasutaka Nakata. It’s what happens when “kawaii bass” or whatever you want to call it goes through a French Touch filter, and it’s fantastic. But it falls into that weird space where the artist behind it was based in France when creating it (although they live in Japan now), and it’s more of an internet creation anyway. So…keeping it off, though it gets high marks from me all the same.

#50 Upusen Signal

Heisei daydreaming, “Plastic Love,” retreats into imagined versions of the past to escape the nightmare of modern times — nostalgia hung over pop culture throughout 2018, especially in Japan. That’s a theme popping up constantly in the country’s musical output too, and no label did yesteryear-gazing better than Local Visions over the last 12 months. Producer Upusen’s Signal offered one of the more straightforward memory washes from the upstart label, providing eight synth-driven tracks begging to be paired with .gif files of anime women. But Upusen does it so well here, adding a persistent thump throughout elevating vaporous numbers like “Float” and “Underwater” well beyond “Resonance” imitation. And lurking throughout, from the 8-bit chimes of “No Contact” to the hazy cruise of “Daydream Drive,” are those little touches pulling ennui strings, but never feeling cheap about it. Get it here, or listen below.

 

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