Nobody seems to have told the Brilliant Green the 60s were over more than 30 years ago.
The hippy vibe on the Japanese trio’s self-titled debut comes out pretty strong with the opening strains of “I’m in Heaven,” and for the remaining 40 or so minutes, it doesn’t let up.
It’s as if the Byrds recorded with the Velvet Underground sometime around 1994.
Not like there’s anything wrong with referencing perhaps the most influencial era of modern music. The Brilliant Green’s sharp songwriting keeps listeners firmly planted in the late 1990s while maintaining a distinctly vintage tinge.
On some tracks, such as “Tsumetai Hana”, “I” and “Baby London Star”, BuriGuri (as the band is known in Japan) sound like your typical pre-grunge, second-generation R.E.M.-influenced alternative pop band.
But more frequently, Kawase Tomoko and company keep matters light and bouncy. The doo-doo chorus of “You&I”, the “There She Goes”-like rhythm of “Stand By” and the white soul of “Magic Place” all evoke more flower-power lovin’ than Edie Brickell on holiday.
Lead singer Kawase has developed a reputation for writing her lyrics mostly in English, delivering her words in a thick, accented mumble. Her English isn’t terribly awkward, but her untrained voice feels more natural delivering Japanese than English.
For a debut album, The Brilliant Green is an impressive work, chock full of memorable, expertly-written songs, done in a style that draws as much from the past as the present.
It’s definitely an disc for the very light-hearted — folks who like a bit of darkness in their rock music might find the band’s sunny-ness a bit too much to handle. (The band’s third album, Los Angeles, is a good place to start.)
Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana ranks up with Enya’s “Book of Days” and Patrick Doyle’s score to Henry V as the most overused movie trailer music in the entertainment industry.
Carmina Burana’s simple quarter-note hook is total dramatic fodder. Hence, movie marketing forces have comandeered the powerful choral work to render apparent points absolutely redundant.
Oh my. What drama.
Enigma mastermind Michael Cretu aspires for a loftier aesthetic than most of his music actually achieves. When bits and pieces of Orff’s one-hit wonder leaks its way onto the tracks of The Screen Behind the Mirror, it’s easy to groan at the sheer obviousness of the reference.
Had he used a slightly more obscure reference by pop culture standards — something from Igor Stravinsky, perhaps? Maybe even Gustav Holst’s The Planets? — his cleverness would have been taken more seriously.
But Orff?
That’s perhaps the only blunder in an otherwise relatively cohesive Enigma album — but it’s a big one.
MCMXC a.D., Enigma’s debut, casts a very long shadow over Cretu’s subsequent Enigma albums, but The Screen Behind the Mirror does a fine job of standing on its own two metaphorical feet. Cretu writes for voices on many of The Screen’s tracks, and while he seems to be using the same electronic gear since 1989, the dreaminess of his older works is finally waking up.
Let’s hope next time Cretu digs into his music collection rather than rely on Hollywood.
What if Alanis Morissette sang in Japanese and numbered Stevie Wonder as one of her songwriting influences? Don’t imagine — Shiina Ringo pretty much does that already.
Oh c’mon — Alanis and Stevie? On paper, it looks the musical equivalent of the bride of Frankenstein, but Shiina pulls off the combination without a hitch.
Shiina takes the big, rawking guitars of Jagged Little Pill and filters it through Wonder’s sense of funk. “Marunouchi Sadistic,” the third track on Ringö’s debut Muzai Moratorium, exemplifies the formula. She even preserves Wonder’s harmonica without making it sound as sacchrine as it usually does.
At various points, Shiina departs from this basic rock-funk formula to present more sonically oblique fare. On “Koufukuron(etsurakuhen),” she’s positively punk, and on “Shido to Hakuchuumu,” she even channels Björk.
While it’s not unusual for Japanese vocalists to sing through their nose, Shiina’s technique makes her sound just like Everyone’s Favorite Canadian with a tad more helium. Nowhere is the comparrison more aparent than on “Kokode Kiss Shite.”
What results is a strangely enjoyable album of funky Japanese rock music that doesn’t take its funkiness too gravely.
Confession: I don’t mind R&B music. Really, I don’t.
I love those slinky beats, those jazzy, sexy harmonies and that overly slick production. It takes no less craft to make a Janet Jackson or TLC album than it does to polish the rough edges around a Nine Inch Nails or Rage Against the Machine album.
It’s the lyrics that get on my nerve.
Utada Hikaru is the perfect solution for a person who loves R&B music but hates most of the inane couplets that accompany it. “Hikki” sings mostly in Japanese, and for non-speakers, it’s the best way to enjoy her seductive diva pop.
With a language barrier in tact, Hikki must depend on her music to convey her theme, and while it’s a good guess she may be singing about the same topics as some teen band based in Orlando, it’s packaged in a mature, adult contemporary sound more akin to Des’ree than to Britney Spears.
Utada also writes her songs solo. First Love contains not a single collaboration, although she does enlist a team of arrangers to flesh out her music. On such tracks as “Automatic” and “Movin’ on Without You,” the beats are all familiar, but there’s nary a recycled riff.
Even when she quotes Sting on “Never Let Go” or the Rolling Stones on “Amaiwana ~ Paint It Black,” it doesn’t come across as commercially crass.
Dare I say it, but a 17-year-old Japanese teen has the Orlando pop machine beat. Take that Britney Aguilera.
At the beginning of ray, L’arc~en~Ciel sound like a grungier Rolling Stones. By the end of ray, the group sounds like latter day U2.
Along the way, this Japanese rock group makes nods to the Smiths, the Alarm, the Fall, Unforgettable Fire-era U2 (again), Pearl Jam, Soundgarden (with a little Nine Inch Nails), and maybe even a sliver of James Brown.
In short, L’arc~en~Ciel does what you’d expect from a Japanese megacorporation — improve on a bunch of Western innovations.
A good number of Japanese rock bands make a slavish devotion to sounding like their idols. L’arc~en~Ciel does as well, but the distinctive musicianship of its members turns that imitation into something clearly unique.
Singer Hyde (pronounced “hai-do”) whines through his nose like the Japanese cousin of ex-Faith No More’s Mike Patton, but when he hits those falsetto notes, he transforms totally into Bono.
Guitarist Ken can transform himself into his guitar idols with a drop of a hat. From Keith Richards on one track, to Johnny Marrs on another, to Kim Thayill and Robin Finck on the next, Ken becomes a guitar diety his-bad-self.
The result is a strangely cohesive yet wonderfully divergent sound in which rock music’s vast legacy becomes a definitive, personal statement.
Listeners would be hard-pressed to find even an American group that does what L’arc~en~Ciel accomplishes so well on ray.
What makes a good album “good”? Well, if a buyer can pick it up years and years and years after it was made and still go “Wow,” most likely it’s a pretty good album.
The liner notes of Sonic Youth’s final album on independent label, Daydream Nation, are pretty self-congratulatory. Those kind of notes usually serve as a warning: Alert! Preciousness ahead!
No such luck.
Daydream Nation lives up to its well-deserved reputation, and for an album that’s more than a decade old, it still sounds a years ahead of its time. Makes me almost wonder just how mind-blowing this record — and the Youth did release this long-player on two of those black discs — would have sounded in the musical netherworld of the late 1980s.
My own introduction to Sonic Youth started (and ended) with 1990’s Goo, an album in which critics back then gasped over the “tunes” found therein. Don’t know what the fuss was about — Daydream Nation has its share of tunes, albeit buried under long stretches of glorious, mountainous geetar noise.
If I remember correctly, everybody (read: critics) was tripping over themselves to put this album on a pedestal.
No matter.
Daydream Nation is a masterpiece, and years from now, some young, unsuspecting would-be rocker will plug this album into whatever audio appliances exist in the future and say the same word I said when I first heard it.
Taboo and Exile would have made for a really nice “greatest hits” collection for John Zorn.
Of course, Zorn doesn’t write hits, and Taboo and Exile consists entirely of new works.
The album still serves as a perfect introduction to Zorn. Each track somehow includes everything that’s marked Zorn’s repetoire.
There’s some guitar-heavy, punk-influenced, improvisatory work that harkens to Zorn’s Naked City/Painkiller days (“Shaalapalassi,” “Sacrifist”, “Bull’s Eye,” the latter of which features ex-Faith No More singer Mike Patton.)
There’s some nice, Jewish-influenced works that was probably borne from Masada (“Mayim,” “Seraim.”)
There’s some moody stuff that recalls Zorn’s Film Works series (“A Tiki for Blue,” “Oracle”), and one track sounds like a distant cousin to Zorn’s earlier work, New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands (“Koryojang,” which also harkens to Zorn’s aborted score to the film Latin Playboys Go to Hell.)
All the best bits that make John Zorn such an appealing musician — in spite his efforts to create some of the most disturbing music on the planet — are contained on this one disc.
See? Maybe it is a greatest hits collection in disguise.
The first track of Mr. Bungle’s latest long-player might make casual listeners of the group — i.e., anyone who owns only the group’s self-titled debut — think they’ve toned down.
Not fucking likely.
By the end of the 50-minute, 10-track California, Mr. Bungle covers much of the same ground cleared by the group’s aforementioned debut. In other words, everything.
(Disclosure: I missed out on the group’s second disc, Disco Volante, so there are holes in my Mr. Bungle knowledge.)
I did, however, whip out Mr. Bungle while I wandering through my cassette collection — how did anyone ever use those things? — and yes, California is far more polished, far more crafted and far less chaotic than the group’s eponymous outing.
If anything, there’s something rather sophisticated about the album. The mood certainly seems a lot less — how to put this tactfully? — “high school.” How many other rock albums out there include Indonesian kecak chanting?
Like every Mr. Bungle recording — at least the ones I own — California takes numerous listens to grasp the overall arc of the music, emphasis on the word numerous.
When I say I have an open mind, I really want to back that up. I really want to demonstrate that, yes, I’m really not an elitist.
That means I can’t categorically dis such obvious commercial fair as Mousketeer pop — the Britney Spears and Christina Aguileras and Backstreet Boys and N’Syncs of the world (or rather Orlando.) Not without really giving these gangbuster moneymakers an even shake.
But where to start? How to ease myself into such terrifyingly alien territory that my comfort zone can’t fathom?
I can listen to the Kronos Quartet and John Zorn make instruments do things they were never designed to do, but can I really stomach five pretty boys — or girls — melismatically waxing shallow about (ugh) love? In the interest of fairness, it is my duty.
So I go where my hormones take me — the Lyte Funky Ones, a.k.a. LFO. Out of all the boy bands out there, this trio seems to have the most queer appeal. (What’s with the dreads on that one Backstreet Boy?)
And yet, it’s probably one of the most poorly executed acts musically. Quick impressions at an in-store listening booth dictated LFO was the sonic equivalent of a car wreck happening in slow motion. Further detailed listening indicates the car wreck involves an 18-wheeler and a early 80s economy car.
These white boys can’t rap. One of them can’t sing, and he’s given the most vocal time on the album. And the recycled bits — Yvonne Elliman’s “Can’t Have You” and the Human League’s “Human” — would have probably worked better as straight covers.
And don’t be surprised if many of these tunes sound too familiar. The minor hit “Summer Girls” uses the chord arrangement of Extreme’s one-hit wonder “More Than Words” verbatim. “Cross My Heart”? It was probably on some NKOTB album somewhere, sometime.
And yet. And yet. And yet.
I do have a weakness for this kind of slick pop. Musically, it’s not that bad. Lyrically, it’s pure dreck. If only some clever songwriter could only marry this smarmy, urban pop with Michael Stipe-an poetry, we could have, oh I don’t know — Beck!
And my faith keeps going on the closet belief that slick pop and nonsensical lyrics can really save this crap from being deemed “unartistic.”
So they get their single-name-for-all-members shtick from the Ramones. So they get endlessly compared to Joan Jett’s early band, the Runaways. So members of the band sport Ratt t-shirts in the CD booklet photos.
The Donnas bring rock ‘n’ roll back to its roots. The Donnas take the chuga-chuga sturm und drang of post-1980s youth — channel Square Pegs for a moment or two — and channel the spirit of the 1950s, id est teen rebellion.
This band is all about the microcosmic world of the bored, suburban teen, and it’s not lofty nor artistic nor spiritually enriching. It’s big, dumb testosterone fun comandeered by a bunch of girls.
Until Stephin Merritt came along and compared pretty girls to violent crimes, the Donnas sported the catchiest couplets of 1999.