So. New Wave is back, and it’s called electroclash. Analog is, like, cool and so is playing on keyboards with fewer kilobytes of RAM than a hair dryer.
Never mind that archaic is as archaic does.
Nirgilis is not New Wave, and as such, is not even electroclash. And somehow, its combination of quirky chords, heavy programming and shoegazer guitar keys into the punk-meets-disco aesthetic New Wave attempted to forge.
In other words, Nirgilis sounds fun.
The brainchild of keyboardist Moyo Satake, the band formed in 1993 but didn’t release a single recording till seven years later.
When it did, it unleashed a distinctive sound both familiar and new. Listening to the opening track “Thunder” feels like piecing together a puzzle.
A bit of My Bloody Valentine in the guitars? A bit of house and electronica in the drums? A bit of Luminous Orange and Claude Debussy in the harmonies? Maybe all or maybe none.
Whatever the case, Nirgilis can accomodate quite a number of plug-ins.
Hip-hop? The reprise of “Thunder II” with rapper Moyunijumo of Illrime shows Nirgilis is good as any breakbeat record. Big guitars? “Young Halo” finds the band channeling its inner Cure and Sonic Youth. Ethereal slow songs? Gotcha covered on “Juju” and “Kiss”.
Nirgilis sounds best when its combining whimsical melodies with canned beats. It’s all right to make funny contortions while listening to “Koke Tissue” or “Oh, Do Re Mi”.
Singer Iwata Acchu possesses a compelling, airy voice, and while Moyo’s programming is the biggest presence in the band’s sound, the contributions by bassist Kurihara Noboru, drummer Inadera Yuki and guitarist Ito Ko-ki are no less important.
Inadera’s drumming on “Akari” and “Young Halo” is especially crucial, while “Kiss” finds Moyo taking a back seat to his bandmates.
Tennis is a remarkable, confident debut, familiar without employing anachronisms, new without feeling too alien.
If I were to write a subtitle to Buffalo Daughter’s Pshychic in the style of Neil Gaiman, it would sound like so:
In which Buffalo Daughter enters a studio, emerges as Stereolab, believes itself to be Cornelius, and hides its faces accordingly.
Hey, I didn’t say it would be a good Neil Gaiman parody.
But on a simplistic level, that’s what pretty much happens on Buffalo Daughter’s third or fourth — hard to keep count with all those remix EPs — album.
The whole shtick with hiding faces behind circle shapes is taken straight out of the artwork for Cornelius’ 2001 album Point. (Cornelius used a paint blob; Buffalo Daughter, points of light.)
And while Cornelius and Buffalo Daughter have had a prior working relationship, the former’s creative stamp has no bearing on the long-winded approach BD takes on Pshychic.
The album clocks in at 51 minutes and contains only five tracks. That’s an average of 10 minutes per track.
The wanker alarms usually ring at this point, and yeah, there’s seldom ever any point for rock music to exceed five minutes in length. In some circles, three is pushing it.
But Buffalo Daughter makes that long-windedness sound organic where Stereolab — to which Pshychic will inevitably be compared — makes it sound tedious.
The 10-minute first single, “Cyclic”, is little more than a single muted guitar pulse and one rhythmic pattern on the organ. And somehow, Buffalo Daughter manage to squeeze in a chorus in there. They also manage to justify its length.
“Cyclic” pretty much sets the template for the rest of the album. “Pshychic a Go-Go” follows the same criteria — one or two musical ideas set on repeat, but woven to sound organic.
“S.O.I.D.” comes closest to a conventional song, with complete verses and chorus throughout the track’s seven minutes. Everything else on the album is a string of phrases and one-liners.
“Chihuahua Punk” is something of a throw-away track, an instrumental featuring some interesting timbres but little in a sense of structure.
The big challenge of the album, however, is the 20-minute concluding track, “303 Live”. No one should ever have to sit through a 20-minute rock song, and Buffalo Daughter face a daunting task stretching one source of musical material for that entire length.
But after taking it in completely once or twice, it becomes apparant the trio is justified in using that much space.
“303 Live” uses a lot momentum. It slowly builds to a pace, breaks down, builds back up again, then hurtles to a finish. Unlike the rest of the album, which takes a handful of musical ideas and pins them to a steady pulse, “303 Live” starts and stops.
Still, Pshychic may have a hard time convincing listeners its not a bloated, precocious album, because on some level, it is. Given the pitfalls into which the band could have fallen, it’s nice to know Buffalo Daughter has a steady handle on its own eccentricities.
bloodthirsty butchers were around before Number Girl was a twinkle in Mukai Shuutoku’s eye, and it’s around even after Number Girl ran its course.
And yet, no two bands seemed so suited for each other. Both groups laid catchy melodies over thick, dischordant harmonies and pushed their amplifiers to Spinal Tap-ian levels. The butchers still do.
So it was a welcome surprise when Number Girl’s master axegrinder, Tabuchi Hisako, became the butchers’ only new member in 15 years. Hisako-chan’s disregard for a tonal center fits nicely with bloodthirsty butchers’ liberal harmonies.
The chemistry between the band members impressed them so much, they decided to start taping their live performances. The results can be heard on the butchers’ first live album, green on red.
Tabuchi integrates herself incredibly well with the band. Whether she’s working with Shiina Ringo or Odani Misako, Hisako-chan stands out. But with bloodthirsty butchers, she sounds like she’s been with them for years.
When the full band kicks in on the opening “Faust”, Tabuchi stamps the track with her trademark fuzz. And when she noodles on the intro to “Soredake”, you’re glad guitarist/vocalist Yoshimura Hideki isn’t. (Yoshimura isn’t what anyone would call a shredder.)
But don’t think for a minute Tabuchi’s presence does anything to clean up the butchers’ sound. Unlike Number Girl, whose rhythmic precision called to mind early Helmet, bloodthirsty butchers haven’t quite channeled the concept of unison playing, which of course gives them their charm.
In fact, bassist Imoriya Takeshi and drummer Komatsu Masahiro seem intent on spreading themselves thin, Komatsu supplying the bass rhythm while Imoriya supplements the harmony. Throughout green on red, Komatsu is more likely to follow Yoshimura’s lead than to fortify Komatsu’s rhythms.
Unlike other live albums by Japanese artists, the butchers culled together green on red from a number of performances. Recent live albums by pop acts Do As Infinity and Bonnie Pink reveal the risk of capturing only one set of performances.
That said, the sound quality between tracks can vary widely. On “8gatsu”, the band sounds front and center, whereas on “Saraba Sekai Kunshu”, they sound like they’re playing in a fish bowl.
It’s still a better approach than committing to tape (or ones and zeroes) a performance that’s brilliant one moment, excruciating the next. The performances on green on red are consistently solid. (And consistently loud, but what else is new?)
Still, don’t expect green on red to resemble anything like Number Girl’s Sapporo Omoide in My Head Jootai or Kiroku Series. bloodthirsty butchers are long-winded while Number Girl was concise, and the 13 tracks on the album clock in at nearly 69 minutes.
After a while, green on red demands stamina from listeners, but with that level of intensity and passion, it’s a welcome request.
When she puts on a show, she milks her songs for everything they have to offer — and makes her band work for every penny she’s paying them.
Sora no Koya, UA’s second live album, follows a period of exponential creative growth for the artist. In 2001, she rocked out with ex-Blankey Jet City guitarist Asai Kenichi on their side project AJICO. The following year, she crafted her most minimal and haunting album, Doroboo.
Sora no Koya is steeped in Doroboo’s aesthetic — even when UA performs her earlier songs, they’re imbued with that album’s sparse darkness.
And length.
Although consisting of only eight songs, Doroboo clocked in at 51 minutes, its songs stretching six to eight minutes. The average song on Sora no Koya is about seven minutes long — which means UA has taken a lot of liberties with her set list.
On “Sekai”, she gives violinist Katsui Yuuji and Little Creatures bassist Suzuki Masato free reign to add another three minutes to the song’s original six minute length.
“Aoi Tori wa Itsu mo Human-ge” receives a total transformation, turning from slow guitar ballad to an eerie landscape of long drones and quiet pulses.
For her supporting band, UA brought together an impressive line-up from some of Japan’s most experimental bands, including percussionist Asa-Chang, and Oono Yumiko from avant-rockers Buffalo Daughter.
The mostly acoustic band suits UA’s quiet, smokey delivery, but when they’re called on to improvise, they fire things up. Witness Suzuki’s and Oono’s energetic solos on “Toro”.
The band also put a distinctive stamp on UA’s repertoire. “Kazoetaranai Yoru no Ashi Oto”, originally suited for airplay in dance clubs, retains its beat-friendly pace but sounds all together new with its unplugged arrangement.
UA’s set list concentrates mainly on songs from Ametora onward. “Kumo ga Chigireru Toki” and “Joonetsu” are nowhere to be found. Still, that leaves three albums from which UA can draw, tying together a myriad of styles into a seamless, two-hour performance.
At times, Sora no Koya feels exhausting, but as a document of a performer’s creative peak, this album would be hard to top.
Sound quality may go sour. Technical problems can go awry. Performances may miss the mark.
But the problem with live albums also highlight the problem of studio albums. Recording studios can process out every imperfection, resulting in works that give an impression not borne out on stage.
In the studio, Bonnie Pink possesses a sweet flower of a voice, at times fragile, at times emotive. It’s not a voice suited to the theatre-size capacity of Akasaka Blitz, as evidenced on the singer-songwriter’s first live album, Pink in Red.
Right from the start, Pink sings like she’s trying to hear herself over her band, her voice straining to project. And her tender falsetto? Positively drowned out. In fact, it’s downright painful to hear her flub a note at the beginning of “Over the Brown Bridge”.
Pink works best when the band backs off. “Rope Dancer”, on which she’s accompanied by nothing but piano, allows her voice to inhabit the song more comfortably. “Need You” scales back the busyness of the opening “Your Butterfly”, and Pink sounds like she own the song.
Does that mean Pink should be exiled to little more than intimate club gigs? Not necessarily.
It does mean, however, that in translating her songs to stage, she could perhaps stray from the studio arrangement a lot more, especially if it means highlighting her voice.
Another flaw of Pink in Red is its concentration on one performance at one venue. It’s not uncommon for a live album to be collect different performances from various venues. Concentrating on one performance risks catching a performer on an off-night. (See Do As Infinity’s Do the Live.)
If Pink in Red demonstrates nothing else, it shows the studio album for which this live performance supported, Present, is one of her strongest ever.
Most of the CD portion of Pink in Red — it also includes a DVD — focuses on tracks from that album, and it’s tough to get “Rope Dancer”, “Present”, “April Shower” and “Need You” out of your head hours after the album has played.
The album ends with a new song, “Soldiers”, which only highlights further the fallibility of the live recording. Pink sounds gorgeous as usual on the track.
As my brother suggested when he listened to Pink in Red, maybe it’s time to give Bonnie Pink her own Unplugged special.
It’s tough not to be lured by the premise behind Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, even if you’re not a big fan of hip-hop (which I’m not).
A two-member band. Each does a solo album. Both packaged under the band’s moniker. Didn’t the late-Lisa Lopez challenge her bandmates in TLC to do something similar?
Of course, Outkast has been hearlded as one of hip-hop’s boundary-pushing forces, which, to a rap philistine’s ears, means the pair doesn’t sound like Dr. Dre’s latest protogeés.
And thank [insert diety name here] for that.
(Between gangsta rap and rap-rock, hip-hop as a genre doesn’t seem to be evolving much, does it?)
Of the two solo works, Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx is closer to the hip-hop mainstream but not by much. The tempo-shifting antics of “Ghetto Musick” establish the expectations for the rest of the album — that is, pretty damn high.
“Bowtie” evokes Prince at his funkiest, while the electric guitars on “Bust” give it a very faintly industrial feel.
“Bamboo” provides a shocking laugh and cautionary tale about how quickly children manipulate language, while “The Rooster” and “Church” offer some imaginative sonic backdrops.
“The Way You Move”, of course, sounds every bit of the single that it is.
Too, the “Speakerboxxx” bumper that pops up throughout the album is an ear worm of magnum proportions.
Although Big Boi does an incredible job giving listeners a workout, it does little to prepare anyone for the joyride his co-hort Andre 3000 takes on The Love Below.
When the lush “Intro” reminiscent of 101 Strings gives way to the ruptured guitar work of “Love Hater”, it’s obvious Dre isn’t afraid to get just a little bizarre.
Among the themes Dre tackles through his myriad of skits and songs: St. Valentine’s taking on the other holidays on the calendar; a riff on “who’s on first?”; a prayer to God, in which oral sex isn’t considered cheating.
Musically, Dre is all over the map. “Hey Ya” has drawn comparrisons to Prince but, as a member of Metafilter points out, feels more like New Order. “She Lives in My Lap” layers electric guitars, ethereal synthesizers and a reedy Central Asian melody quite comfortably.
Chiming guitars gives “Prototype” its soft hue, while the frantic “Spread” uses a jittery beat that sounds almost drum ‘n’ bass in origin.
Dre seems to lose a little steam as The Love Below progresses, and by the time Norah Jones joins him on the deep blues of “Take Off Your Cool”, listeners may find themselves at a point of exhaustion.
Dre and Big Boi made the right move by not pushing Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as a double album — each work is too distinctive to be considered part of a whole.
Pit against each other, and it’s no contest — Dre is way too far out for Big Boi to catch up. But that shouldn’t diminish Big Boi’ accomplishments.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is a win-win endeavor. Two great albums in one convenient package — what could be better?
Most every other music pundit on the planet has already weighed in on Cody ChesnuTT’s expansive The Headphone Masterpiece.
By now, you’ve probably read about how Mr. ChesnuTT has managed to craft a stripped-down epic, an R&B answer to indie rock.
Over the course of 35 songs and 99 minutes, ChesnuTT surveys a wide spectrum of music — R&B, hip-hop, soul, pop. This list is fucking long. And he does so from the comfort of his bedroom, not a glossy, polished studio.
But with that much music, it’s tough to qualify the title of this album — does ambition substitute for quality? How much of a masterpiece is The Headphone Masterpiece?
ChesnuTT has already been compared to Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices, and it’s an easy to see why. The brief songs on The Headphone Masterpiece often start and stop abruptly, many as if they’re just rough drafts.
Of course, there’s one word on which Pollard should meditate: edit. It’s the same lesson ChesnuTT ought to heed now before his output drowns under its own weight.
And while The Headphone Masterpiece may share a lot with Guided By Voices, the album actually shares more spiritually with another ambitious project from the last decade — 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields.
With 69 Love Songs, Magnetic Fields leader Stephin Merritt recorded a three-volume songbook not beholden to the idea of an “album”. The only thread between the discs was the theme; beyond that, everything else was fair game.
The Headphone Masterpiece possesses a similar feel, but it’s not beholden to any theme whatsoever.
ChesnuTT excoriates the materialistic protagonist of “Bitch, I’m Broke”, but later adopts the persona of smooth operator in “The Seed”, covered by The Roots on 2002’s Phrenology.
He calls himself a mama’s boy on “Boylife in America”, then struts his bad self on the vaguely Motown-esque “Look Good in Leather”.
“If We Don’t Disagree” feels like a classic rock throwback, while “War Between the Sexes” sounds like a rough blueprint for every gangsta rap track in existence.
The album is all over the place, and that’s both its charm and liability.
If ChesnuTT took pinking shears to his album’s track listing, The Headphone Masterpiece could be described as modest, but because of its quantity — in both content and execution — it’s larger than that. Much, much larger.
To get the pushing-40 demographic of American listeners interested in anything remotely international, managers and labels seem to see the need to “modernzie” traditional music with synthesizers and orchestral arrangements.
New age dreck, to put it less mildly.
Such dreck, however, doesn’t put much of a crimp on the Yoshida Brothers’ self-titled American debut on Domo Records, the label to which new age heavyweight Kitaro is signed.
Skip past the over-produced tracks on Yoshida Brothers, and you’ll instead find why the brothers’ virtuosic performing got a younger generation of Japanese listeners interested in their parents’ (or grandparents’) music.
“Hyakka Ryooran” is just the brothers picking frantically on their shamisens, and yet it sounds fuller than any of the contemporary tracks on the album. “Storm,” although catchy, seems thin by comparrison. (And the remix by T.M. Revolution doesn’t give the track much more depth.)
If anything, the modern tracks only serve to underscore how incredible the more traditional tracks are. “Moyuru” finds the brothers accompanied by taiko and shakuhachi — a more traditional setting that doesn’t blunt the pair’s fiery performances.
“Tsugaru Jongara Bushi” is an amazing display of technique, while “Labyrinth” demonstrates how eeriely precise the brothers work as a unit.
At the same time, Yoshida Brothers works well with a mix of contemporary and traditional material. To go exclusively with the former would have diluted the brothers’ talents; to go exclusively with the latter would have turned them academic.
The light jazz beats of “Madrugada” are tolerable, while the understated arrangement of “Namonaki Oka” is inoffensive in a latter-day Clannad sense.
Still, Yoshida Brothers is an amazing display of technique, and the tracks which feature the brothers doing their thing more than make up for any attempts to make them sound modern.
Back when Bulgarian women’s choirs were the it thing in world music crossovers, Tuvan throat singing became the hype machine’s heir apparent.
Huun-Huur Tu served as ambassadors of Tuvan throat singing, and if such performances as “Kongerei” on Kronos Quartet’s Night Prayers were any indication, the trio deserved its international reputation.
Albert Kuvezin of Yat-Kha could never be mistaken for a member of Huun-Huur Tu. The bizzare overtones produced from throat singing is imperceptible in Kuvezin’s technique. (Except in one instance, but more on that later.)
That’s not what makes Yat-Kha interesting.
Influenced by the likes of Sonic Youth and Deep Purple, Yat-Kha leader Kuvezin has instead injected an expansive creative freedom into the music indigenous to his region.
Yat-Kha’s music isn’t Eric’s trip, nor is it smoke on the water. Rather, it’s the long drones, the reedy accompaniment and the rumbling chants of Central Asia with electric guitars weaving in and out of the texture.
In other words, it’s rock music in attitude, not sound.
Yenisei Punk became something of a hit in the U.K. a few years back, and Yat-Kha has since become a fixture on the European tour circuit.
Listeners not previously introduced to Tuvan throat singing will find Kuvezin’s vocals difficult to digest. When Yenisei Punk was played over the Waterloo Records in-store system, customer reaction was, charitably put, quizzically hostile.
But there’s something hypnotic in the way Kuvezin integrates electric guitars with the indigenous instruments of Tuva. If anything, the electric guitar loses its identity as a Western instrument altogether.
British writers have already evoked Velvet Underground comparrisons, and nowhere is that more apparent on Yenisei Punk than on “Karangailyg kara hovva (Dyngyldai)”. The guitar solo in the middle amidst all that drone could have come straight off of Velvet Underground & Nico.
Yenisei Punk concludes — not counting the bonus tracks — with “Kargyram”, an a capella showcase of Kuvezin’s throat singing abilities. It’s tough to sit through all 11 minutes of it at first, but it’s worth the effort. Kuvezin may not have Huun-Huur Tu’s finesse, but he’s still a compelling performer.
Yerba Buena doesn’t care if you can’t dance. It doesn’t much matter anyway.
Because to hear the Latin collective’s debut album, President Alien, is to heed the call of the dance floor.
Taking a page from the Ozomatli playbook, Yerba Buena go for a kitchen sink aesthetic, combining African-influenced Latin music with hip-hop, soul and Afrobeat. It’s all blended seamlessly and shows just how much all these different musics have in common.
Which is a pussyfooted way of saying hell if I can pick apart which style is which.
But that kind of analysis is rendered moot. Music this rhythmic has only one message: “Shut up and dance.”
From the catchy opening of “Guajira (I Love You 2 Much)” all the way through to the children’s song quote concluding “Solar”, President Alien is relentless.
African rhythms and chanting vocals propel “Wassamatta Baby” and “Bote Bote Va”, while an arsenal of percussion drives the excessively busy “Definition of a Warrior”.
“Fire” layers a strange Middle Eastern section over a drum ‘n’ bass-styled beat, and “La Gringa” serves as a historical lesson on the origin of disco.
If anything, listening to President Alien can get pretty exhausting. Yerba Buena doesn’t have time to slow down.
Band leader and producer Andres Levin has cultivated a playground atmosphere on this album. He’s also gathered some of the most magnetic talents ever collected.
Xiomara Laugart’s smokey vocals are difficult to ignore. And the rhythm section of bassist Sebastian Steinberg, percussionist Pedro Martinez and session drummers Horacio Hernandez and Terreon Gully cram each song with an avalance of beats.
It can’t get any simpler — Yerba Buena’s President Alien is the perfect party record. It can make anyone get up and move.