Omake Club seems poised for a big first half of the year, including a new album from Zombie-Chang in the spring. First, though, comes an album from producer UKR (aka Ukai Ryota), highlighted by “Edelweiss,” a song featuring the ever-versatile MCpero. The music itself is a skippy concoction, UKR needling guitar melodies alongside synths and…
Half of this entry should be relatively self-explanatory — these are albums that, for various reasons, just missed our final cut. All of them are worth your listening time, and them falling just outside of the top 30 really shows just how much good music came out of Japan. The other, though, is a bit…
End of June means a steady stream of “best of the year…so far!” lists, but don’t expect one from me around these parts (because this already exists). Yet one album that has come on strong for me as July looms over the horizon is one I expected to enjoy when it was announced…MCPero’s MCPero No…
#10. Parupunte Primitive Imagine your favorite pop songs, but recorded deep within a cave. That’s Parupunte’s debut album Primitive, a rough but formidable collection that manages to capture the Osaka duo in all of their scratchy glory, playing absorbing pop songs that sound like the were recorded deep inside a national park. Whatever the circumstances,…
This isn’t a new revelation, but one worth restating — I tend to avoid writing about Japanese rap music for several reasons (the key one being I just don’t know enough about it to sound remotely smart). This year, though, I’ve reached a dilemma — I’ve written about a lot of artists who rap, but…