Momoiro Clover Z: 5th Dimension

Last week, The Japan Times published a review I wrote of the new Momoiro Clover Z album. It was a fun album, and on the first listen, there was a very powerful sense of Wow! to it, just for the sheer audacity of trying some of these ideas in an idol record. Neo Stargate opens the album in a nine minute-plus version, the first third of which is just the O Fortuna segment of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burina (yeah, the one from the Old Spice ad) just plonked there, unembellished, for no particular reason other than as testament to its own excess. The song then just explodes into hyperactive synth squiggles a la Skrillex and typically melodramatic vocals straight out of an anime theme. Yes, I did just reference Carl Orff, Skrillex and anime music in one sentence. Listen to it: I wasn’t joking in the review when I said they should do a rock opera.Neo Stargate

The best stuff on the album is still the stuff they did over a year ago, especially Rodo Sanka, which still baffles me how it ever got made — how did anyone ever let a drug-addled British indie-dance producer cum 70s blaxploitation soundtrack enthusiast loose on a top ten idol pop hit? As I say in the review though, it’s interesting how the tracks around it also seem to adopt the tag-team vocal approach of 80s hip hop to varying degrees in how they make the group work as a collection of individuals, not just as a pop unit. The result reminds me a bit of some of the laid-back silliness of Halcali, albeit done with Momoiro Clover Z’s customary polish.Rodo Sanka

I mention Otome Senso, which I don’t really rate as a great song — it’s too much of a watered-down copy of the kind of song Kenichi Maeyamada used to do for them, although it works far better in the context of the album than it did as a standalone single. It’s still way too long though, which is a problem the album has as a whole (my theory of pop song lengths is that once a song goes over 3:45, it’s too long, and this continues until it goes over 8:00, at which point it becomes awesome again). Other stuff on there plays around with different approaches, hunting for a style, and sometimes it works, but it doesn’t quite hang together as a piece. Tsuki to Gingami Hikosen is the better of the two ballads by virtue of its overblown, orchestral, Magical Mystery Tour-era McCartneyisms, while 80s rocker Tomoyasu Hotei’s Saraba, Itoshiki Kanashimitachi-yo sounds a bit like just a Hotei track with the five members of Momoiro Clover Z stuck on top of it, but it just about works. Narasaki’s (of Coaltar of the Deepers) Birth 0 Birth does an interesting job of taking the group in a more electronic direction without leaving their essential identity behind, and he’s probably helped in that by his long association with the group — with such an important songwriter as Maeyamada seemingly on his way out, it might be a good idea to hold onto at least one songwriter with an already established association with the group, if only for continuity’s sake.Saraba, Itoshiki Kanashimitachi-yo

Anyway, in a curious parallel to the 1966 Byrds album of the same title, despite rumours of it being a concept album, it really doesn’t quite hang together, and as I say at the end, I really want Momoiro Clover Z’s next album to be a completely ridiculous, absurdly camp rock opera. Ideally it’ll feature space vampires, robot battles, crossdressing, and be set in a girls’ school in a giant castle on the moon run by a fat, disco dancing German explorer. They’d need to get someone like Kunihiko Ikuhara to write it, and anything less will be a huge disappointment to me.

Hyacca: Uneko

First up, I need to be clear that I’m not going to attempt to review this because I helped make it, but on the other hand, I love this band more than almost anything on Earth, so it’s obviously still an endorsement. Hyacca were one of the first bands I ever released on Call And Response Records and they’re regular features at my events when I’m in Kyushu and whenever I can get them up to Tokyo. I first met them in Fukuoka in July 2006. I’d just been through a rough patch and decided to take a trip for a few days to get away from it. I met up with Shuichi Inoue from the band Folk Enough, who I knew from his shows in Tokyo, and he invited a few of his musician friends along. The next thing I remember was waking up with a tremendous hangover and my pockets full of CDs by local bands. One of the CDs was a plain CD/R with just two Chinese characters written on it, that contained the best music I’d ever heard out of a Japanese band. Later, it turned out that this band was called Hyacca (literally “one hundred mosquitoes”, although there’s a pun on the Japanese word for encyclopaedia in there as well) and I started working with them.

The most recent thing they’ve done for me is the song Uneko, which they contributed to Call And Response’s Dancing After 1AM compilation album, released last October. Given the rather, um, easygoing pace at which the band work, this first new recording in three years wasn’t that unusual a time lapse, but I was determined that at least one song from the compilation would have a video made for it (actually She Talks Silence had already made a video for their song Long Ways, although the version on the video is slightly different to the album version). Since we had no budget, no time (just a couple of hours in the afternoon before their gig with Bo Ningen in Fukuoka), and no equipment apart from my wife’s small digital camera, this was never going to be a slick or professional looking shoot, so instead, I tried to go the other way entirely and make the footage exaggeratedly wobbly and unfocused. The key thing for me was that it should just look as if everyone was having fun and that it should show the band members naturally as the sort of people they actually are.

Most of it was shot in a karaoke box opposite the venue where they were due to play later, with some shots filmed later, at the izakaya next door (featuring cameos from a few other members of the Fukuoka indie scene and probably the backs of the heads of some of Bo Ningen, although honestly I can’t really tell). I want to point out at this juncture that as shitty and chaotic as the footage looks, I did have a pretty clear idea of how it was going to cut together as I shot it, and it’s to the great credit of Matt Schley, who did the tough job of editing it all together (and who also put together the video for Zibanchinka’s Nagisa no Hors D’oeuvres based on a similarly minimalist, no-budget concept), that he instantly saw what I was trying to do when he looked at the footage.

As far as the song goes, I don’t want to go on about it because you already know I love it, but I think it’s a great example of everything I love about Hyacca. They way they make music that’s structurally complex, almost math-rock, but play it with such energy and never forget to make it fun, always making sure there are neat little pop hooks or goofy ideas embedded in the arrangement.

As a postscript to this, you can see from the video that we got through quite a lot of beer in the karaoke box, and that may have taken its toll on the band, who went on to put in one of the most bizarre and chaotic live performances I’ve seen from them in years. Yeah, my fault.

Live: Sutekiss

Idol music is now so deeply embedded in indie and alternative culture in Japan that it’s not really making any kind of statement by combining the two worlds. Whatever alternative music could have learned from idol music in terms of not taking itself too seriously has now either been learned or not learned, and the novelty is played out. Where Sutekiss are interesting is in how they’re the first band I’ve seen who take the whole concept and performance style of idol music but the progressive, alternative and funk musicians in the band approach it from an entirely serious musical perspective. The result is music that integrates alternative and idol styles in a way I haven’t seen anyone else manage, and it certainly shows up the faux-alternative pose of groups like BiS as the gimmick that it is.

There’s something jarring about the front line of three extremely young female singers and the six extremely technically adept alternative musicians backing them, and yet it’s also strangely appropriate, recalling the classic era of the 70s, where groups like the Candies would routinely appear on TV backed by ultra-professional session musicians, and honestly, the more idol music makes use of proper musicians, the better it will be for pop music. The question with Sutekiss is whether they really are an idol group or whether they’re an alternative band masquerading as one. As it stands now, they exist predominantly in the live house scene, playing with punk and alternative groups, where their pop sensibility makes them stand out from their peers.

It’s really in their behaviour that their idol-ish tendencies come across most strongly. Talking between songs at the show headlined by postpunk/dub merchants Bossston Cruizing Mania, drummer Harie (formerly of prog rock crazies Mahiruno) repeatedly refers to his “sempai” Esuhiro Kashima, ladling respect onto the older musician. There’s an edge of irony to it, as if he’s somehow playing the part of a member of an idol group, where exaggerated gestures of respect to all and sundry are par for the course, but again, there’s some truth to it and despite the element of performance, it reveals something about the way these social dynamics between younger and older musicians are still embedded in alternative music culture.

If there’s a problem with Sutekiss, I think it’s that they don’t go far enough. The melodies are solid 90s-style J-pop, but they tend to rely a little too much on the arms-in-the-air “live your dreams” schtick. Really good idol pop like Aya Matsuura, on-form Kyary Pamyupamyu, or Momoiro Clover Z is far more aggressively pop, although it’s hard to see how something that bubblegum would integrate into the mid-paced funk and latin-influenced back line. They’ve found a way to integrate the stylistic elements of idol music with a greater level of artistic proficiency in the music, and there are moments in the performance where it’s quite thrilling, but if they’re going to take the concept to the next level though, I’d say the pop aspects are the areas they now need to concentrate on.

Perfume: Magic of Love

After the collective “meh” that engulfed observers of the Japanese pop scene upon the release of Perfume’s sweet but out of character last single Mirai no Museum, Magic of Love has been greeted by a massive sigh of relief that the producer who has almost singlehandedly held up Japan’s tattered reputation for modern, forward-thinking pop culture over the last few years hasn’t completely lost his mojo in the warm sludge of the anime theme song mangroves. As a few people around me correctly noted, it’s massively refreshing to know that in Magic of Love, there is still someone making mainstream Japanese pop that’s musically clever, subtle, and recognisably contemporary even outside the atrophying cultural Galapagos of these islands.

That said, Yasutaka Nakata has been pulling a similar trick of technopop bleeps over slippery electro-funk for so long now that I have to wonder if “clever” and “subtle” aren’t in danger of becoming gloss over music that’s really just “busy”. For me, the best Perfume single of the last few years is still Laser Beam, which is a busy as, I don’t know, a collaborative industrial development area in the demilitarized zone between the Republic of Beavers and the Democratic People’s Republic of Bees, but its catchy, vaguely nostalgic melody and killer chorus made it a perfect marriage of simplicity and complexity and one of the best Japanese pop songs in recent memory. Magic of Love is strong enough (if utterly predictable) in the chorus, but like nearly all of Nakata’s songs, the melody in the verses is basically the sound of someone in a karaoke box going “hum-de-hum-de-hum, nah-nah-nah” to fill in time when they realise too late that the only bit of the song they know the tune to is the chorus. Nakata seems to recognise his weakness in this area and as he has with so many recent songs, he jumps in straight away with the catchiest part, buries the flabby verse between the chorus and the funky, intelligently arranged electro of the instrumental break, and then wipes the second verse out of our memory by repeating the chorus again and again in the outro, like a boot stamping on an unimaginative chord progression for eternity.

It does seem though, that while his melody writing skills seem to have stagnated rather, his ability as a producer and arranger is going from strength to strength, and the similarities with capsule’s (admittedly better) Step on the Floor give further evidence that the flow of musical ideas between capsule and Perfume has been re-established after diplomatic relations between the two groups were temporarily severed in about 2010. There’s also what seems like a growing confidence in Kashiyuka, Nocchi and A-chan’s abilities to carry a song with something like their own natural voices. Perhaps this is merely a reaction to the growing ubiquity of Vocaloid voice synthesiser characters like Hatsune Miku in contemporary Japanese electronic pop, but Magic of Love sees each member’s voice now pretty much recognisable as itself, which while a small point in the overall tapestry of sounds in the song, nevertheless adds depth and texture to the music and as long as it doesn’t become an excuse for more dreary five-minute-plus ballads, it could become a useful tool in the producer’s box in the future.

Ykiki Beat: Garden

Sharing some of the same members as the wonderful, uplifting guitar pop upstarts DYGL, Ykiki Beat obviously share some of the same melodic tics, with taste that obviously runs along similar 80s indie lines, a similar sort of guitar jangle slipping through every now and then, and in particular a similar kind of angelic yet slightly cracked vocal delivery. Ykiki Beat are way funkier though, with the beat of new song Garden kicking in like Orange Juice’s Rip it Up. The greater prominence given to backing vocals helps give Ykiki Beat more of a sense of being a multifaceted band who might develop in new and interesting ways, where you suspect that DYGL’s path of development is going to lie in further refinement of their craftsmanship rather than in radical changes in style. The main thing both bands share, however, is the thing that’s on clearest display in Garden, namely the boundless sense of energetic sunshine they bring to their simple, affecting melodies.

Atlanta Girl: Atlanta Girl EP

CD, self-released, 2013

I get a lot of CD/Rs handed to me by bands when I’m out around town, and usually it only takes a few seconds to place the kind of thing they’re doing. Sometimes though, a young band shows up doing something completely off the wall, as if even they themselves haven’t got a clue what they’re doing. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work, but it’s nearly always interesting, giving the listener the sense of the band groping their way towards their own sound in real time rather than emerging fully-formed and familiar. Jesus Weekend, who I reviewed last week, are a bit like that, and so are Atlanta Girl.

This EP starts out sounding like fairly straightforward indiepop, albeit at the fuzzier, more lo-fi end, but then the vocals come in like a drunkard awakening from slumber, perhaps on a park bench or railway platform somewhere, fending off the attentions of strangers with a mixture of self pity and half-hearted flapping limbs. In the background all sorts of weird noises start coming through.Atlanta Girl are only getting started though, and second track South Carolina comes in from another angle entirely, all drum machine, discordant synths, and sudden squalls of noise. It’s fascinating and, like the odder moments of Mummer-era XTC, at its core still fundamentally pop.

Peeling back the layers, you get the impression that Atlanta Girl are basically an indiepop band in that Beach Boys/C86/Flipper’s Guitar tradition, and the melodies could probably be polished up into some quite delightful, shimmering guitar pop, but then again, why waste something so wonderfully, thrillingly strange by filing off all its weird, knobbly edges like that? If anything, it would be more interesting to see them exploring the Zappa-esque fringes of avant-pop in the other direction.

Strange Boutique (April 2013)

My Japan Times column last month talked about the collapse of the Tokyo Rocks festival that was due to take place this coming weekend. Rather than examine the specific reasons for its failure, which seem to have been internal management issues, I focused instead on the reactions of fans, because I think they revealed something different about the festival and what it might have done wrong. I gather from some comments people made to me afterwards that the point I was making in the article wasn’t very clear, so I’m just going to re-state here, I wasn’t really interested in the internal gossip of the event organisers, I’m more interested in what they actually did, how they presented and promoted the event, and what impression that approach gave. Because really, when the cancellation announcement came, no one was in the least bit surprised. In fact, for some people I spoke to, the cancellation announcement was the first they’d even heard of the event.

In addition to what I said in the article, there are some spurious and unsubstantiated comments I’d like to make here. Firstly, the rumours going around that despite being booked to take place in a 60,000 capacity stadium, Tokyo Rocks only sold a few hundred tickets, and secondly that the event producer Takashi Yano had come into a lot of money and was just playing at being a rock promoter so that he could hang out with bands and feel like a rock star. Like I said, no idea of the truth in these things or where the information would have come from if they were true, but they play into a narrative among fans of the event as being small-time, underpromoted in the Japanese media (as opposed to the UK/US media, where it received a lot of coverage) and the fanboyish way Yano came across in his Facebook comments. Ragardless of any truth that these rumours might have, they’re exactly the kind of rumours that were always going to come out of an event that was promoted and presented the way Tokyo Rocks was.

So while in my Japan Times piece, I tried to explain as well as I could in the space I had what fan reactions revealed about how fans think and how the music scene is structured, here I want to go into a bit more detail and use personal examples relating to a couple of my own musical activities that would be inappropriate to discuss in my column (I sometimes talk about bands I’ve worked with in the Japan Times, but I don’t think it’s right for me to talk about my own projects directly). I don’t want to slag off Yano because that would be kicking a man when he’s down. It would also be hypocritical of me, because the problems he and the Tokyo Rocks team had are like a massive-scale, catastrophic condensation of all the problems I’ve experienced as an indie event organiser in Japan over the past eight or nine years. In fact, a lot of the things he did would have been precisely the right thing to do in an indie environment, and it was only the transference of those ideas onto a bigger scale that made them wrong.

Firstly, the Japanese music press and music media in general is shit. No one reads it, they won’t write about you unless you pay them for the column inches, which means no readers trust anything they say anyway. The kind of promotion major producers do is coordinated across all sorts of media and simply bludgeons fans into submission. It requires a lot of money, but also experienced staff who have personal relationships with all the relevant press, TV and record store staff.

When I released the Dancing After 1AM compilation album on my own Call And Response label last year, rather like Tokyo Rocks, it got much better coverage in the English language media. This was I think partly because I knew more people in English language media, partly because it tends to be more open to submissions from people they don’t know, and partly because Japanese indie music doesn’t have the network of well-read and respected blogs running beneath the level of the professional music press that are always on the lookout for new things. No Japanese media even replied to my mails introducing the album, and the only place I got any serious column inches was Kyushu local free music magazine Time Market — tellingly the one media outlet where I was reasonably well known as already. Tokyo Rocks was a relatively small event trying to jump up to the big leagues and they weren’t able to bring the media with them on the scale they needed.

There’s also the fans. In an indie event, social media is the most useful kind of promotion you can do. Twitter is the main one, but Facebook is growing among Japanese users. In this sense, Tokyo Rocks weren’t so far off base. Nurturing a group of fans via social media works for events up toa few hundred in size. Even so, a homepage is still the primary port of call for music fans, where updates can be clearly presented and linked to. The Tokyo Rocks homepage was sparse, with ugly, navigation-unfriendly Facebook carrying all sorts of important stuff. More importantly though, music fans, even indie and underground fans, get gooey at the knees at slick, professional stuff. My own label and events are as cheap, amateurish and chaotic as anything and then some, but this is why other people waste so much money printing expensive, colour flyers for their tiny gigs in shitty 100-capacity venues — they may not have much direct impact, but they do a lot for the “brand”, telling the audience the organiser is serious and that they care. Now magnify that to stadium-level, and imagine the kind of expectations for professionalism fans have? They want to be bludgeoned into submission, and will feel insulted if you don’t do it.

And then there’s booking. People in the Tokyo music scene always complain about the booking at indie shows focusing on such a narrow range of artists for each event. Musicians say they enjoy playing shows with different kinds of people, fans tend to agree that a range of music is more interesting. Don’t believe them. Everyone says they want variety, but they won’t back it up with their time or ticket money. Tokyo gigs are ¥2000 a throw, and most fans won’t go to a gig unless they already know and like at least three of the bands, which means organisers who want to book interesting shows have to make sacrifices as they navigate the delicate balancing act between booking good shows and getting enough audience to pay for the venue they’ve booked. For example, you don’t book mod/garage bands for postpunk/alternative gigs, no matter how logical it might seem for two individual bands to play together. Mod/garage fans are the most narrow-minded little clique in the Japanese music world and will not go to an event unless every single band sounds exactly the same. Part of the reason Ozzfest the same weekend seems to have worked was because it was a metal-only event with solid, internationally famous bands running quite deep into the lineup. Fuji Rock books a lot of Japanese bands, but again, the core of the headliners as well as most of the bands on the main stages tend to be foreign.

With international bands, they’re usually a wasted booking at an underground event unless they’re already well known. What happens usually is that bands will play with them out of genuine interest and maybe the hope of some help if they themselves try to play abroad, and venues will put them on for the prestige, hoping to recover any money they lose on the night in the long term as their status in the local scene rises, allowing them to attract better local bands in the future. Tokyo venues will almost never pay touring bands, and some will even charge them the same standard pay-to-play “noruma” as a Japanese act (Koenji Roots, to name and shame but one).

With well known overseas bands, the situation’s different. They can get an audience, but it’s a different one to the local bands. International and Japanese music are marketed separately and occupy different sections of record shops regardless of the music’s similarity, and the fans are different crowds of people. Japanese underground/alternative fans may well like overseas bands, but fans of overseas bands don’t necessarily like similar-sounding Japanese bands — in fact, they’re often inclined to look down their noses at them as embarrassing imitations. Not only that, but overseas bands are expensive to bring over. A ticket to see a local band costs ¥2000, but a foreign band will cost ¥6000 or more. A Japanese band supporting a touring foreign band will not bring significant numbers of their own supporters to a show when those fans can see them three times elsewhere for the same cost.

The biggest financial loss I’ve ever experienced off a single event was when I put together a last-minute booking for Bristol powerpop/new wave trio The Stingrays in Tokyo a couple of years ago. When I booked Dutch/German band Anatopia in Tokyo last year, I had to get six local bands to support them in order to bring in the crowd I needed to pay them even the small guarantee I’d offered. When I DJed with Bo Ningen in Tokyo and Kagoshima earlier this year, the organisers needed similarly bloated local band and/or DJ lineups to support the cost of the tour. In all these cases, we had to keep the ticket prices down as low as we could, so that fans from the local indie scene would be able to support the show. When the excellent You Got A Radio supported Gang Of Four earlier this year, I took one look at the ¥7000 ticket price and laughed my arse off. Many others did the same.

So what Tokyo Rocks did with getting a couple of big foreign headliners like Blur and My Bloody Valentine and then populating most of the rest of the lineup with Rockin’ On-ready local bands was doomed to fail to satisfy on two counts. Too expensive for the people who might have liked Andymori etc. it also offended the Blur and MBV fans by booking them with a load of local bands they were either disdainful of, uninterested in or had never heard of.

So while I think Takashi Yano and co. made mistakes, and I find his “stay young” sign-offs as cringeworthy and annoying as anyone, I have to feel sympathy with him because some of his mistakes were actually just cases of doing the right thing to the wrong people, while some were really just actions that reveal prejudices and habits of Japanese music fans and the music scene here that I also find infuriating. In the end, I think he might have just got too full of the success of his earlier, smaller one-day festivals and overreached. This is a temptation that every organiser is sometimes subjected to, myself included. With each success, like a gambler you think “I’m on a winning streak, lets raise the stakes!” and you have to step back, look at the reality of the music scene, assess the danger, and hedge your risks.