#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…
What happens when you set a movement in motion, but end up not getting the most of it? Tokyo’s cero ushered in the current wave of laid-back, city-centric rock music thanks to “Summer Soul,” a song so potent it got them on SMAP X SMAP. But a bunch of other bands have passed them in…
40. Nanba Shiho’s “Kodona No Kaidan” Because Sakanaction needed even more praise this year – that group’s lead singer Ichiro Yamaguchi helped produce this single, which explains why this sounds so exciting and different from most whizzing-and-whirring idol pap in 2011. The opening synths icicles bring to mind “Rookie,” and the dance-centric beat was all…
Not a lot happens over the course of “大停電の夜に’s” six minutes. The members of cero show no signs of being in rush, sprawling out and letting the waves of guitar simply hover along save for a few light solo stretches late in the song. This isn’t the musical equivalent of wasting a Saturday afternoon burning…