Constraining though the 3-minute pop song may be, it has its usefulness — especially when you collect about 9 of them together.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pop songs longer than 3 minutes. Mathematically speaking, …
Wait a minute. I’ve said this before, haven’t I? (See, Love Psychedelico, Love Psychedelico III.)
Walrus writes the kind of a dreamy, atmospheric music that inhabits a lot of temporal real estate. That doesn’t mean the groups shouldn’t at least try a hand at conciseness.
During the four years since releasing its last album, 2000’s Hikari no Kakera, Walrus recorded a set of demos, which was later released as 20012002.
Although 20012002 was only six tracks long, the band’s expansive music filled out the disc well. The interpretation of Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” was downright fascinating.
But on the band’s self-titled third album, that expansiveness can get incredibly tiring in a full-length format — especially when there’s little difference between songs.
“Corn Flakes” has a lot activity going on in terms of rhythm and tempo, but the same cannot be said for the rest of the album.
Walrus’ songs do one of two things — start softly and develop slowly; or start at one texture and repeat for long stretches.
“Blind”, “Tears” and “Drab” fit in the former category; “Glide” and “Lastly” in the latter.
Although Walrus’ liberal use of effects produces some beautiful textures, the band’s writing is too locked into traditional song structures to make its sonic excursions anything but long-winded.
Buffalo Daughter could get away with writing a 50-minute, 5-track album (Pshychic) because the band de-emphasized the role of lyrics.
Walrus could learn a valuable lesson from Buffalo Daughter — if you’re going to take up that much time, the structure of your music had better justify it.
Too, singer Akitomo is barely audible in the mix.
Walrus is a beautiful-sounding album, but it also drowns in that beauty.
Long ago, someone posted a question to the pure-japanese-rock mailing list on Yahoo!Groups — did any bands in Japan play shoegazer music?
It was a tough question to answer at first, but eventually, a few names emerged — Walrus, mono, Luminous Orange, downy.
Response is another name to add to the list.
The quartet performed at Japan Nite during SXSW 2004 in Austin, Texas, and Response’s self-titled debut finds the band standing toe-to-toe with the aforementioned groups.
Response, the album, starts off with a dissonant hook that dissolves into a wash of heavily distorted guitar on “Jet Kids”.
From there, the band veers from cryptic to substantial.
“Slip” and “Jaguarnaut” are the two most accessible songs on the album — the former with its four-on-the-floor beat, the latter for its agitated beat.
“Wait to Know” and “Air”, on the other hand, feature free-floating, unanchored vocal melodies against ethereal backgrounds.
Response can get pretty inscrutible as well — half the length of “Revival” is spent on disjointed, random samples, while “Sound Response” has an odd, clumsy riff.
The album concludes with the token, albeit nice, acoustic track, “Superb View”.
Although still a relatively new band, Response’s self-titled album displays a rare maturity. Response has written some strong material for its first time out.
The more crytpic moments deaden the pace of the album a bit, but on the whole, Response is a band with a promising future.
So does the Japanese quartet do anything different on the mouthily-titled Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined that it hadn’t done previously?
The band added a string quartet.
It doesn’t sound like a big development, but it’s a subtle one.
In the beginning, mono was willing to craft melody from a wash of dischord, but not before building it up with tiny blocks of beauty.
On more recent works, the band has shifted its emphasis from the dischord to the beauty. Instead of creating a tonal blur, mono now brings its melodies forward and oftentimes quietly.
Hence, the string quartet — it’s easier to hear the quartet’s contributions so long as a wall of feedback doesn’t get in the way. Not that it actually stops the quartet.
On the dramatic conclusion of “Halcyon (beautiful days)”, the quartet is in the background, offering the contra-melody usually provided by an amplified instrument.
On “mere your pathetique light”, the quartet slowly takes over the piece, until it’s the only thing remaining.
Like “mopish morning, halation wiper” before it, “The sky remains the same as ever” imagines the quartet as an ages-old phonograph record, this time submerged in the deep sea.
Maybe it was budget constraints that didn’t allow use of an entire string orchestra — ‘cos that would have been, well, cool — but the lean tone of quartet offers a constrast to mono’s thick sound.
For all the fuzzy and ethereal pedal effects, it’s nice to hear clear tones cut through it all.
Unlike mono’s previous album One Step More and You Die, the pacing of Walking Cloud feels much more organic.
Both ends of the album are anchored by its longest tracks — the 11-minute “16.12” at the start; the 15-minute “Lost snow” at the end — with shorter tracks breaking the average 7-minute pieces.
It’s hard to tell different tracks from each with the way the album effortless flows, which is distracting in a home environment. Performed live, though, the contrast between loud and soft highlights the distinctiveness of each piece.
If you’re neighbors don’t mind, crank this album up to get the true effect.
mono pretty much delivers the same kind of music it has been delivering for the last few years, but the added instruments provide a terrific flourish.
Japan is the second largest music market in the world, and there isn’t a single genre musicians from the country haven’t mastered and made their own. Except one.
Country.
More specifically, twang.
Annoying though the habit of finding “Japan’s answer” to Björk or Courtney Love or Radiohead may be — something other Japanophile sites have accused Musicwhore.org of doing too often — it’s pretty much not an issue where country is concerned.
Because really — who qualifies as Japan’s answer to Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash?
Shinohara Rika isn’t the most striking songwriter in Japan, and the fact she lists Sheryl Crow as a reference point in her English-language press material isn’t much of a selling point.
But she is incredibly brave for one reason — she’s not afraid of the twang.
“Stay on the line”, from 2002’s Daylight, is up front and unabashed about it. “Waste Beer” starts off with the kind of folk guitar strumming you’d find on murder ballads. “Short Song” barely disguises its 2/2 country beat.
Even when Shinohara offers more straight-forward singer-songwriter fare, the sound of the proverbial lost highway isn’t too far away.
“Vegas 66”, one of Daylight‘s overtly rock tracks, gives just a hint of country during the song’s bridge. And the only thing separating “Rest of the Night” from its southern rock origins is Shinohara herself — ‘cos this song would sound very different with Gretchen Wilson or Sara Evans singing it.
The idea of a Japanese singer-songwriting penning country-influenced music sounds, well, wrong, and sometimes, some things do get lost in translation. (Witness: visual kei.)
But Shinohara manages to pull it off. She’s assimilated the writing style of Crow and Suzanne Vega, and her folk-ready voice doesn’t sound entirely out of place.
Personally, I’m no fan of singer-songwriter folk-rock, but Shinohara doesn’t strike me as bland, unlike a lot of the genre in which works.
Factor in the fact she sings in her own language, and what emerges is a picture of musician with a strong creative identity.
It’s the driving force behind both academia and the Japanese music industry. (How strange such a connection can be made between the two.)
Following the creative success of 2003’s Present, Bonnie Pink returns a year later with Even So.
The pressure to produce continually can result in spotty work. For Bonnie Pink, the clarity of 2000’s Let go collapsed on 2001’s Just a Girl.
Would Even So fall under the same fate?
The album does have one obvious weak moment. Who thought it was a good idea to rip off Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” for the opening riff of “1 2 3”?
But for the most part, Even So and Present are actually two sides of the same coin.
There’s not much different about Pink’s writing on Even So — it’s the same kind of earnest singer-songwriter material that’s been the basis of her career.
But where Present was mostly introspective, Even So is quite extroverted.
The chorus of “5 More Minutes” bursts into some uncharacteristic rock guitars. “Private Laughter” starts off sounding slightly robotic, but its chorus also unleashes a storm.
“The answer ~Hitostu ni Naru Toki~” has a dark, dramatic quality that edges Pink closer to Cocco’s terrain, while “Shinsei Game” finds her delivering one of her fastest songs yet.
Pink makes room for some moments of introspection, notably “Ocean” and “I Just Want to Make You Happy”, but even a ballad such as “Last Kiss” makes room for some power chords.
Even So isn’t a totally different album from Present — or any of her other work, for that matter — but the way Pink is willing to rock out is quite distinctive.
It would have been nice if her label backed off a bit and spaced out her release schedule. Who knows how much more powerful the album would have been with just a few more months to write?
Constraining though the 3-minute pop song may be, it has its usefulness — especially when you collect about 12 of them together.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pop songs longer than 3 minutes. Mathematically speaking, 12 x 3 = 36 minutes worth of music, whereas 12 x 5 = 60 minutes worth of music.
The latter offers much bang for the buck — if the songs are worth all five minutes.
And hence the problem with Love Psychedelico’s third album, Love Psychedelico III. The album drags under the weight of its length.
Three of the 13 tracks on the album clock in at less than 5 minutes, but another three clock in a few seconds more than 6 minutes, which cancels each other out.
Length wouldn’t be much of a problem if the album contained really compelling songs, which it doesn’t.
The writing on Love Psychedelico III is just a few degrees shy of Sheryl Crow, despite the fact the band’s unique blend of ’60s rock and ’90s technology remains in tact.
In fact, the chorus of “I am waiting for you” and most of “fleeing star” sound like Crow.
The band’s reliance on drum machines has also locked it into a rhythmically rigid feel. As a result, Love Psychedelico’s songs start blending into each other.
How many more times are we going to listen to Kumi deliver one monotone melody after another?
The longer lengths plus the homogenous writing makes Love Psychedlico III tiring 3/4 of the way through.
Other writers wrote the band off after the second album, but I’m not sure Love Psychedelico’s creative well has totally run dry.
There’s a more overtly southern influence the band hasn’t fully explored, and it may well inject some unpredictability to the duo’s sound.
But Love Psychedelico III finds the pair stuck. And belaboring the point, too.
If the Go-Go’s taught us anything, it’s that punk can be dressed up in bubblegum pop.
It’s a lesson noodles have inverted — the Yokohama-based band dresses bubblegum pop to be punk.
Or rather, post-punk — noodles is a bit more polished than its like-minded countryfolk in Shonen Knife and Mummy the Peepshow.
On 2003’s God Cable, any number of tracks could have been recast in the mold of a Phil Spector production and lose little of its character. (Although it would be kind of neat to hear Ronnie Spector singing in Japanese.)
Perhaps the most likely candidate is “Culture” — the chorus alone has “girl group” written all over it. “Come Here” comes in at a close second — replace the entire band with one of Spector’s mini symphonies, and it becomes a time warp.
The past has a strong influence on God Cable.
“Sweeper” could almost be mistaken for knock-off Beatles, while “Classic Chord Book” might sound familiar to Brian Wilson.
But noodles aren’t beholden to it.
“Hikari no Cho” starts off with a dissonant riff that would make listeners in the ’60s squeamish. And “She, her” soaks in the sludgey guitars of the early ’90s. (Yeah, I could have used the word “grunge”.)
The band’s fuzzy sound balances playfulness with strength, and God Cable collects a set of very serviceable tunes.
But after a while, the album becomes homogenous. The chugging power chords appear track after track, and the songs get indistinguishable toward the end.
“Silent Apple” attempts to break up the flow with a different rhythm and feel, but it’s not quite enough.
noodles does a fine job of bridging past and present, and on the whole, God Cable demonstrates that ability well.
If Bugy Craxone harbored any desire to be Garbage (the band, not the refuse), it’s long in the past.
On its previous album, Northern Hymns, Bugy Craxone ditched the ’90s alt-rock smorgasborg of its first two albums for straight-ahead garage rock.
Despite being a fashionable move at the time — Northern Hymns was released in the same year the White Stripes crossed over — the creative direction suited the band.
And it’s one that works for them again on Sorry, I will scream here.
This time working on an indie budget after leaving major label Victor Entertainment, the band offers up a less polished, grittier sound. The mastering may sound a bit less powerful, but the performances are much harder.
“Why not?” is a steady three-minute barrage of power chords. The snarl that vocalist Suzuki Yukiko introduced the last time returns on “I’m sorry”, while on the concluding track, “I scream”, she does exactly that.
Some garage rock gestures are more apparent.
“Lucky” starts with the same kind of hesitant pulse as Television’s “Marquee Moon”. “Big mouth” shows off a swagger that’s pure rock ‘n’ roll — simple and deadpan.
Bugy Craxone doesn’t turn its back completly on the alt-rock anthems that powered the first half of its career.
With slightly different production, “11gatsu” and “Toosaku no Mori” could sound like they came off of the band’s second album, Yuganda Ao to Tsukenai Kanjoo no Soko.
The creative shift to a garage sound has had another effect on Bugy Craxone’s songs — brevity.
Sorry, I will scream here flies by at a brisk 32 minutes. The 9-minute “Furanii to Zoe” occupies nearly a third of the album’s length — the remaining two-thirds are spread out over 8 tracks.
That means an average of 3 minutes per song — the textbook length for a pop song. It also means songs with tighter structures and clearer ideas.
“Oto mo Hikari mo Nai Basho de Ugoku Koto wo Yameta Shin” was a great single for Bugy Craxone in 2000, but that title was a mouthful. And its 6 1/2-minute length is a far cry from the 2’44” of “I’m sorry” — both in content and length.
Bugy Craxone does a good job pursuing its extreme makeover on Sorry, I will scream here. It’s an album title that delivers on its promise.
Higurashi Aiha’s work with Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her can be described with a number of similar-sounding adjectives.
Gritty, rough, deadpan, punk.
“Tender” isn’t one of them.
So perhaps that’s why Higurashi opted to collect her most introspective writing for her debut solo album, Born Beautiful.
The cover of the album is somewhat sarcastic — Higurashi’s lifeless expression on a magazine cover obscured by a paperweight. But the title of the album makes for a good description of its contents.
Higurashi still dashes off a fair amount of swagger — “Cherry (Sakura no Saku Koro)” finds the songwriter giving a breathy performance over a classic rock-styled riff. And with a few more guitars, “Koibito” could have been a serviceable Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her song.
But the majority of the album is definitely scaled back from the ambition of her main project. The shades of rock ‘n’ roll history cast a shadow over most of the songs.
There’s almost a bubblegum pop quality to the pre-release singles, “New Life” and “Fantasy”, but it’s a quality imbued with the world weariness intrinsic to Higurashi’s voice.
On “I’m your girl”, her performance falls somewhere between rock ‘n’ roll bad girl and blues storyteller.
Other tracks find Higurashi exploring a more confessional tone. “A rhythm like my heart beat” is already a telling title — the lyrics, in English, follow suite.
“Sin” finishes the album with a series of guitar overtones and sparse lyrics — nothing more.
With Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Higurashi asserted herself as a rocker, a guitar-slinging woman who could play as loud as the best of them.
Born Beautiful pretty much dashes those expectations. Here, she asserts herself as a songwriter, one with enough nuance to rock when she has to but whisper when it’s suitable.
Rounder Records has put up audio excerpts of Minnie Driver’s debut album, Everything I’ve Got In My Pocket. I’vebeentracking the development of this album since hearing about it earlier in the year. And the anticipation I feel for this debut hasn’t waned (much), despite all indications it’s going to suck harder than a vacuum cleaner. Perhaps that’s part of the spectacle. I’m sure, though, I’ll balk when it actually comes time to approach the cash register with Minnie’s album in hand.
Equally exciting news is the release of Hem’s second album, Eveningland. The group’s debut album, Rabbit Songs, was my favorite of 2002.