Perfume: Level3

This isn’t going to be a review in the traditional sense because with two long features on Capsule recently written and currently going through the proofing process at The Japan Times and Time Out Tokyo, I’m feeling quite Nakata’d out. Instead, I’d like to draw your attention to a couple of pieces other people have written about Perfume and hopefully add remarks of my own where relevant.

First up, there’s m’colleague Daniel Robson’s interview in this week’s Japan Times. The definition of the term “J-pop” is vague enough that he can get away with saying Level3 isn’t a J-pop album, although I think you have to take a pretty strict, 90s purist attitude to really hold that view. What Daniel means, I think, is that Level3 isn’t a normal J-pop album, which it isn’t. More so than any Perfume album before, it’s a dance record, bringing in lots of the ideas that Capsule took to self-parodic extremes on World of Fantasy and then started to refine into something more acceptably pop on Stereo Worxxx. With Capsule now pushing in a radically different tack (seriously, wait for their new album, it’s… well, it’s interesting), these electro-house elements seen quite at home with Perfume now.

The songwriting isn’t radically different from what we’re used to, but unlike 2011’s solid but still a little disappointing JPN, Level3 is full of little moments that jump out at you and make you go, “How the fuck did Nakata get away with that?” The dirty synths of opening track Enter the Sphere are just the first in a long line of these moments, and one of a number of places where the album reminds you of when you first heard Game. Daniel goes overboard a bit, I think, when he describes the new album mixes of Spring of Life and Magic of Love as “practically new songs altogether”, but the new mixes do work a lot better here than they did on JPN, with Spending All My Time perhaps a highlight, albeit hacked down extensively from the epic live version.Perfume: Spending All My Time (live mix)

Kashiyuka’s comment that she didn’t know about the new versions of the songs until she heard them says a lot about the girls’ role in relation to the production process, but then we already knew about that, right? Nakata pays attention to the people who will be performing the music he makes, but the end result is basically an interpretation by him of whatever the pre-stated requirements of the ad agencies and management companies are. All of which, of course, makes his achievement on Level3 that much more striking.

I’d also like to point you towards comrade Ryotaro Aoki’s detailed album review, which provides a more cool headed assessment of the album’s strengths and flaws, although basically I think he, Daniel and I are all more or less in agreement that it’s a fine record.Perfume: 1mm

Ryotaro singles out Mirai no Museum as a weak point, an unwelcome intrusion in a run of tracks that rips a chasm open between the rather fine single 1mm (which Ryotaro wrote about on this blog earlier in the week) and the delightfully over-the-top electro-house meltdown Party Maker. Like Ryotaro, I don’t have such a problem with Mirai no Museum, partly because everyone already hates it and I’m a contrary son of a bitch, but it’s a very so-what? sort of song, and there is absolutely nowhere on this album where it would fit in comfortably.

Personally, I think another weak moment is the horrendously misguided drum’n’bass track Point. I may have grown up in Bristol in the 90s, but I don’t think I’m a purist about that sort of thing (I was willing to allow My Bloody Valentine their weird, rockist take on the genre earlier this year), but Point just sounds wrong, wrong, wrong. Seriously, experiment, mix forms, genre is fluid, but some things are just in crappy taste. With the album reaching 65 minutes in length, these tracks would be ideal places to start trimming off the extra fat.

And it is too long. One of the commenters under Daniel’s Japan Times piece points out that it doesn’t feel like 65 minutes, and they’re right: it feels like 55 minutes, which is still about ten minutes too long. The forthcoming Capsule album, Caps Lock, is only 35 minutes and the pacing is perfectly pitched, but then Capsule operate under a very different set of restrictions (basically none on the new album) and Nakata was rather freer there to make an album to be listened to in just the way he wanted it to be and that was the exact length it needed to be.

So yes, Level3 is better than JPN, doing (with one or two rare exceptions) a much better job of integrating the singles into the overall context of the album. It also reaches closest to the shock and awe many of us felt upon first hearing Game, although in the end, I think it’s more or less on the same level as Triangle in the group’s canon. It’s still a J-pop album with all the commercial baggage that entails, but it’s also among the very best J-pop albums of the year.