This year, Kansai rock group NOKIES! released their debut full-length album Between The Blinks through Flake Records and Tower Records. Prior to 2012, the band had mostly played jittery indie-pop in the mold of Los Campesinos!, but with Blinks they laid off the caffeine and stuck to their prescription – probably owing to its placement…
20. The Brixton Academy “Two Shadows United” The Brixton Academy have always played the role of overly earnest nightclub crawlers, guys who love evenings out on the town but also aren’t good at bottling up all those icky emotions, prone to letting them shoot out like just-uncorked champagne. Whereas Kido Yoji distracts from his ennui…
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7eiFlwEHr0″] Weird to think that, at the beginning of the year, Osaka’s precocious NOKIES! released their debut EP 7 Songs. That brief release, a seven-song (duh) collection of mostly head-snapping pop brimming with shouts and yells and youthful energy, got lost in what has been a great year for Japanese music. Yet now, as list-making…
Well this opening paragraph sounds cliche – band known for manic, shouty indie-pop munches on some Ritalin and gets all wistful. Said group records a slightly more reeled in song, featuring piano and clearly melancholic lyrics and other signs of “maturation.” Features black and white cover art. Osaka’s NOKIES! are the latest to follow this…
If NOKIES! can learn only one lesson from their debut release, I really hope that it’s they are a group that should release solely EPs. The type of energetic, soft-to-loud rock the Osaka group favors works well in the relatively short confines of an extended play, but could easily turn to exhausting fake enthusiasm if…