It has been awhile since we’ve heard anything new from Tokyo’s Merpeoples…last time was last June with the song “Silent Sleep,” a good tune albeit one that faded quickly. Looks the group are ready to give it another whirl, and they’ve got this blog’s full attention with the hopping “Tinkle.” Merpeople have always been good…
Wow, has it really been two years since this? That was the moment Merpeoples – an up-to-that point good band who had a few solid tracks but seemed like a perpetual “pretty good” outfit – jumped to a new level, showing they were capable of not only turning a lame-as-hell ‘80s cut into something wonderful,…
10. The Mornings Save The Mornings The past year saw a lot of Japanese bands trying to fill one of two molds – some groups tried to capture youthful exuberance via a lot of yelping in an effort to be like early Los Campesinos!, while another batch tried fast-talking over math-ey guitar patterns like they…
10. Avec Avec “Kuzuha No Sunday” I’ve been told the Kansai region of Japan has always had an electronic music scene. Yet 2011 felt like a beginning, or at the very least a boom, for forward-thinking electronic sounds. Gravitating around several labels and events, artists like Madegg, Seiho and And Vice Versa started flooding SoundClound…
The other week I paid a visit to Osaka to do some music shopping. This excursion via the Kintetsu railway used to be a common part of my life, the sort of thing I’d mentally pencil into my weekend plans if nothing else of interest materialized. Which, turned out, happened a lot. Yet my forays…