Best of 2017 – More great sounds (3) – What does the rest of the internet say?

This site isn’t the only place on the internet that attempts to rank the best Japanese music of the year, and depending on where you look, you can get a very different picture of the music scene. This is of course very right and proper, because the Japanese music scene is broad and diverse, covering every genre you know and dozens you don’t. I’m not going to include any J-Pop-focused sites here, since I don’t really follow any of them, or even know if any of them made year-end rankings, but here are what a few other writers have come up with.

Beehype (top 20)
Beehype gathers new music releases from all over the globe, but it has a discrete Japanese ranking covering the top 20 Japanese music releases of the year. Beehype is probably the best place to go to get a general sense of the kinds of Japanese music the Japanese music consensus is gathering around, with artists like Satoko Shibata, Oomori Seiko and Tricot all making an appearance, although it deviates into a few interesting oddities of its own, like the recent album by Osaka jazz-skronk trio Oshiripenpenz.

Make Believe Melodies (top 50)
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5
Make Believe Melodies, written by Japan Times writer Patrick St. Michel, tends towards soft-edged dance music and the gentler strains of indiepop and singer-songwriter music, but as the most extensive list among all the Japanese music countdowns here, there’s a fair variety on display around that theme. This list touches on indie-branded idols Maison Book Girl, rapper Zombie-Chang, the manic synth-pop funk of Chai and the pachinko machine noise of Pachinko Machine Music, along with MBM regulars like Taquwami and LLLL.

Muso Japan (best shoegaze and dreampop)
This does exactly what it says on the tin, focusing on shoegaze and dreampop, and while these genres in Japan can encompass slightly different material to what they do in the West, Muso Japan doesn’t stray far from its remit. Having such a narrow focus means that they can dig a little deeper than another site might, singling out material by lo-fi acts like FogPark, and Nurse alongside shoegaze scene veterans like Cruyff in the Bedroom, Shelling and Caucus.

Tokyo Dross (unranked list of 16)
Another list by a Japan Times contributor, this time James Hadfield, whose preferences lean towards more experimental rock and electronic music. There are more crossovers with my list creeping in here, partly because as the Listing Season drew in, we spent some time frantically sharing and picking over each other’s recommendations in private. His decision to include Phew’s Voice Hardcore despite it not being officially released until 2018 is legitimised perhaps by The Wire’s earlier decision to do the same.

Zach Reinhardt
Top 10 EPs & mini-albums

Top 20 albums (20-11)

Top 20 albums (10-1)

Zach’s lists also tend to have a lot of crossover with mine, as I think we both have very similar biases towards skronky art-punk and oddball avant-pop. One key difference is in the appearance of a lot of Call And Response stuff in Zach’s list (P-iPLE, Tropical Death, Looprider and the Throw Away Your CDs… compilation, all of which were disqualified from mine), and perhaps a little more washed-out indiepop/dreampop. Basically, though, if I missed something, it’s highly likely Zach caught it, and vice-versa.

Summary:
For anyone looking for areas of consensus, the crossovers between these various lists throw up a few recurring names. Cornelius’ Mellow Waves appears several times, topping the  Beehype list and getting honourable mentions in a few others, while Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Async, Phew’s Light Sleep, Endon’s Through The Mirror and For Tracy Hyde’s He(r)art were all rated very highly in more than one list. Miu Mau’s Drawing made appearances in most of the lists, while the Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show compilation that I produced made an appearance in every list except my own (disqualified because I made it) and the Muso Japan list (wrong genre), so I feel validated in saying that’s a great record. Elsewhere, She Talks Silence, Crunch, BLONDnewHALF, Hikashu, Tofubeats, Oshiripenpenz, Sapphire Slows, Suiyobi no Campanella, Mondo Grosso, Tricot, Oomori Seiko and Satellite Young all made multiple appearances.

Best of 2017 – More great sounds (2) – Call And Response Records year in review

Among the top releases of 2017, I always avoid writing about anything on my own Call And Response label for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, the music Call And Response puts out is also always among my favourite new music of the year (otherwise why would I go to the trouble of putting it out?) so I’m giving the label a page of its own to run through what was a very busy year in new releases:

Lo-shi – Ninjin

Lo-shi are an instrumental post-rock/electronic duo and Ninjin was the first of two albums they released in 2017 (the second was an equally excellent self-released CD/download called Moro-Q). Lo-shi’s music is characterised by eerie soundscapes and beats that range from skittering electronica to insistent, almost krautrock rhythms, while the melodies and tones combine washes of synth with theremin, Jew’s harp and Durutti Column-esque guitar.
(Buy the CD here)

Looprider – Umi

The second post-rock album Call And Response released in 2017 was this single 25-minute-long rock monster of a track by Looprider. Following on from the hardcore and noise-influenced Ascension and their pop/metal/shoegaze debut My Electric Fantasy, an instrumental prog rock epic may have seemed like another hard swerve in another direction, but it’s really a refinement of the same combination of sweet and heavy that the band have been exploring from the start.
(Buy the CD here)

P-iPLE – Do Do Do A Silly Travel By Bicycle Bicycle

This clumsily titled mini-album is a short-sharp-shock of scuzzy hardcore and no wave delivered with a playful and nonsensical sense of humour. The guitar sounds are tortured and glorious, the rhythms are breakneck, and vocalist Madca Kitabeppu (also of synth-punk trio Jebiotto) is a natural born rock star.
(Buy the CD here)

V/A – Throw Away Your CDs Go Out To A Show

I don’t include Call And Response releases in my year-end rundowns, partly because no one would trust the lists if I did, and partly because I find it hard to assess music I’m this personally invested in against music I simply enjoy as a fan. This compilation, however, would definitely have been No.1 if I’d been including everything. It’s everything I love — skronky art-punk and noise-rock that channels the ragged creativity of the postpunk era while rarely resorting to direct pastiche. It also includes fantastic songs by most of my favourite bands in Japan, like Panicsmile, Melt-Banana, Hyacca, otori and more, so I’m not going to be ashamed in any way of saying that this is a fucking awesome album.
(Buy the CD here)

Sharkk – Be That Way

Sharkk is another way of saying Sean McGee, drummer from Looprider and Tropical Death. It’s also a convenient shorthand round these parts for a kind of sweetly sentimental, emo-tinged indie rock with gnarly, 90s alt-rock guitars. One of the few unashamedly melodic bands on the label at the moment, McGee deploys his tunesmithery in the service of a faintly self-effacing, rather ambivalent nostalgia for teen angst.
(Buy the cassette here)

Tropical Death – Modern Maze

Like Sharkk, there’s a sense of harking back to ‘90s indie rock in Tropical Death, although they take a more angular approach to their arrangements and a far more cynical approach to their lyrics. From the melodic title track to the post-hardcore rhythm workout Tribal, Tropical Death load their songs with hooks and little moments of invention that ensure every track takes you somewhere unexpected.
(Buy the cassette here)

Looprider – Ascension (cassette re-release)

Originally released as a limited edition CD in 2016, Ascension is Looprider’s take on hardcore and noise, a twenty-minute nuclear explosion of a record that starts and ends in squalls of pure noise but on the way takes you on a whirlwind tour of scratchy hardcore and the scuzzier fringes of Looprider’s more familiar metal-adjacent territory.
(Buy the cassette here)

illMilliliter – New Standard

The debut album by a Tokyo post-hardcore band featuring ex-members of Tacobonds and Imamon, dealing in frenetic, twisted guitars and tight, focussed, aggressive rhythms. illMilliliter are clearly influenced by bands like Shellac (Bob Weston worked on the album as mastering engineer), Slint and Fugazi, as well as Japanese acts like Panicsmile and possibly Number Girl/Zazen Boys, but there’s also an appreciation for sparseness and the spaces between sounds, which lifts New Standard above most Japanese punk and post-hardcore and makes them something worth playing special attention to.
(Buy the CD here)

Best of 2017 – More great sounds (1)

Every year when I write my top 20 Japanese music releases, there’s always a lot of good stuff that I leave out either because I didn’t hear it in time or because I just decided not to in the particular moment of compiling everything. And as always, I didn’t include any of my own Call And Response label’s releases, even though they were all excellent.

As well as my own releases and the other favourites that slipped through the net, there are a handful of other dedicated people out there cataloguing the best indie music Japan has to offer from their own particular perspectives Obviously their perspectives are all to varying degrees wrong (except where they agree with me, obviously), but if you’re wrong in the same way as them, you might find their 2017 rundowns of value.

In this first of three posts, I’ll be running quickly through some of the releases that missed out on my own top 20 but which might easily on another day have found their way in:

Born Shit Stirrers – I Hate Your Fucking Band

Based in Fukuoka and apparently on a sort of Wowbaggerian mission to slag off, one by one, everyone in the city, Born Shit Stirrers put out two albums in 2017, with Richard and Judy following in the summer. I’m singling out I Hate Your Fucking Band here mainly because of the title, but both albums are packed with fast, profane, utterly squalid, Anti-Nowhere League-esque punk rock smacks to the gob, featuring nothing in the way of subtlety, refinement or artistry.

V/A – Rhyming Slang Covers

The second Rhyming Slang compilation after 2016’s Rhyming Slang Tour Van compilation, this covers compilation sees some of the same bands, like DYGL, Yüksen Buyers House and Half Mile Beach Club, plus a host of new ones like the increasingly popular Luby Sparks and up-and-comers Tawings. With the exception of Nengu’s math rock take on Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, most of the tracks are pretty straightforward covers of vaguely hip classics from bands like The Jesus & Mary Chain, New Order, Lou Reed and so on, but there’s a particular sort of value that can be gained from the peek they offer into the influences underscoring the younger end of the Tokyo indie scene.

Kuunatic – Kuurandia

Dropping right at the end of the year, this EP by Tokyo-based psychedelic trio Kuunatic is the ethnic transcendental music of a minimalist alien space tribe who worship Charles Hayward as a god.

The Routes – In This Perfect Hell

This site doesn’t cover a lot of garage rock because it’s a genre so rooted in the past and in its own retro revivalist scene that the usual tools I use to assess new music (what’s fresh about it? how does it stand out from its contemporaries?) would miss the point. It’s music that lives by its ability to sound the same as something else, to ape the past, to avoid challenging its contemporaries. So how can a garage rock band in 2017 Japan stand out? Basically by doing what The Routes did: writing a tonne of really good songs and playing them really well.

DYGL – Say Goodbye to Memory Den

The real superstars of the Tokyo indiepop scene, DYGL had a fantastic 2017, making it to one of the big stages at Fuji Rock, selling out a show at the Liquid Room, and releasing this fun, energetic full-length debut. The band are clearly deeply indebted to bands like The Libertines and The Strokes (Albert Hammond Jr. produced this album) but in the context of the Japanese music scene, the raucous, punkish energy that comes with those influences sets them apart from the soft-focus dreaminess of many of their peers.

In The Sun – El Energy

Coming out just at the end of 2016, this ferociously intense noise-rock album missed out on last year’s list simply because I didn’t get my hands on a copy until way too late. Like early Nisennenmondai performing from behind a battery of modular synths and effectors, In The Sun have all the krautrock and This Heat you could want, with all the sparseness replaced by a relentless barrage of joyous, angry noise.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.1 – Miu Mau – Drawing

CD/download, VYBE Records, 2017

A full-length collection from Kyushu indie supergroup Miu Mau to follow up 2008’s Design was always going to be a contender for album of the year, and Drawing really is excellent, exceeding its now long-distant predecessor in both the range and depth of its songwriting.

Followers of the band will quickly recognise most of the material on Drawing, with the core of the album made up of a trio of singles and EPs that the band have put out over the past few years. The only brand new material comes in the form of new songs Ryuukou-iro no Pallette and Mishiranai no Basho de, while Monochrome appears in a new, mostly Japanese language version as well as a new remix at the end of the album. All that is to say that if you have been following Miu Mau over the past few years, you’ll already know that basically everything on this album is beautiful, sparse, sophisticated, melancholy, synth-led new wave pop.

Of the new material, Ryuukou-iro no Pallette is the most immediately striking, with the stabs of noise that interrupt the song’s sparse, piano-led melody and harmonies, making explicit the note of dissonance that subtly underscores much of the material on Drawing. The source of that dissonance is most usually Hiromi Kajiwara’s guitar, which is delivered with a harsh, metallic reverb that contrasts with Masami Takashima’s lush washes of synth and pristeen vocals. On the new wave Asiatica of Future Classic / Mirai no Classic and the minimalistic dance-pop News, Kajiwara’s guitar cuts throught he songs, the strokes of her plectrum scratching percussively against the sweet melodies, while on songs like Iro wo Matou the guitar adding texture to the music like an additional voice wandering through the background of the song.

There’s a sparseness to Miu Mau’s music that it would have been tempting to try to fill out in pursuit of a more commercially pleasing sound. Similar bands like the now departed Merpeoples have tried something like that and lost something of their own identity in the process, so it’s to Miu Mau’s credit that over the years they have always kept the spindly, dissonant aspects of their music in play, all recognisably within what the three members can comfortably reproduce live together.

Of the Monochrome remix, it’s a decent take on the song, but unnecessary and largely out of step with the atmosphere of the album, but it also feels unnecessarily querulous to complain about being given too much. The remix is there if you want it, but if you don’t, you can be more than satisfied with the collection of nine immaculate avant-pop songs that remains. Album of the year without a doubt.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.2 – Phew – Light Sleep

Phew has already staked a claim for one of 2018’s best with her latest release, Voice Hardcore, an album formed entirely of her own distorted vocalisations, but it was within a very different set of restrictions that she composed one of 2017’s finest albums, the analogue synthesiser-based Light Sleep.

The analogue electronic sounds inevitably draw comparisons with acts like Suicide, Laisons Dangereuses and the more electronic extremes of krautrock, as well (of course) with Phew’s own early ’80s work with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Conny Plank and members of Can. It’s also clear that she has a more sophisticated relationship with the technology now, manipulating waves and pulses with subtlety and assurance as she chants her eerie mantras over the chuntering rhythms of antique drum machines.

There is a kind of mirror structure to the album, with the opening New World and the closing Antenna both featuring drums that kick and splutter intermittently over a drone that gradually builds and fills out. In the former, it is accompanied by a pulsating synth bass that propels it forward, while the latter takes the form of a more ambient coda. The second and penultimate tracks, CQ Tokyo and Echo, also mirror each other, with insistent, Suicide-like rhythms underscoring Phew’s vocal incantations, hysterical and panicked on the former, dry and emotionless on the latter.

There’s an intimate sense of the bedroom recording to Light Sleep, but at the same time, it’s an undeniably expansive record. Throughout the record, Phew crafts a series of unforgiving yet entrancing alien landscapes from what seems to be a mountain of synthesisers, drum machines and effects. The emphasis on analogue equipment gives the otherwise icy music a kind of warmth, while the range of sonic textures she coaxes from her boxes of magical tricks is hypnotic and full of wonder.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.3 – Endon – Through the Mirror

One of the difficulties of producing a list like this of my top releases of the year is that nineteen other albums and EPs have to share space with something as brutal, powerful and beautiful as Endon’s Through the Mirror. Placed next to this roaring monstrosity of an album, anything else is doomed to look weak, finicky and ineffectual.

The opening Nerve Rain wastes now time with a buildup, exploding out of the speakers from the first moment in a storm of thundering dums and high-intensity, multilayered drone. Nerve Rain’s minor-key guitar soundscape incorporates increasingly frequent stop-starts as it progresses, which enables a transition into the even more explosive Your Ghost is Dead, where vocalist Taichi Nagura finally unleashes his guttural grindcore growl, giving a suitably satanic voice finally to the sonic hellscape. There’s more going on in Through the Mirror than simply blistering noise-metal intensity though. The vocals in Born in Limbo and Postsex are a frenetic cacophony of voices, and the riffs, while undoubtedly heavy, are buried in a tornado of violently swirling effects. Meanwhile the sonic textures are as rich as any dedicated noise act and the guitars are as capable of building shoegazey, post-rock cathedrals as they are at burning them down in black metal flames and crushing the stones to fine powder with crunching, colossal riffs. The ten-minute Perversion Til Death embodies all this and more, and while the title track occasionally taunts you that it might turn into My Bloody Valentine, it never seriously has any intention other than to kick you repeatedly in the eyeballs and scream at you. With the nine-minute closing Torch Your House, Endon finally make good on their promise to make a big old epic rock song, or at least as close to one as their constitution will allow them – like screamo being played by a thousand gargantuan and impossibly ancient robots as enemy armies flee in mindless terror. Writing this now, the idea that there could be two albums above it in this list feels insane or at least contrarian: Through the Mirror is exhausting and utterly extraordinary.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.4 – Ryuichi Sakamoto – async

CD/LP/download, Milan, 2017

Like the towering building that you never notice from the narrow streets of your neighbourhood or the vast mountain that seems to become part of the sky itself, Ryuichi Sakamoto is an artist so legendary that it’s sometimes easy to forget he exists, so far removed is he from the daily to-and-fro of the music scene and pop landscape. He remains as active and creatively ambitious as ever though, and Async is an extraordinary record.

Broadly within the category of ambient music, I found myself listening to Async in the context of another master of the form, Brian Eno’s 2017 album Reflection, and the differences felt revealing. Where Reflection saw Eno stepping back from the nitty gritty of composition and performance, the album instead taking the form of a single, minimalist track excerpted from an endlessly generating iOS app, Async exists at the other end of the spectrum. Its fourteen tracks feature multiple collaborators and field recordings, each with a distinct identity, each revealing the hands of the composer and performers down to the last detail, from the lush synth washes of Solari to the atonal orchestral jitters of the album’s title track.

What both Async and Reflection share in common is an atmosphere of contemplation and retrospection, implied by the title Eno gave to his album and made explicit in some of the spoken word intrusions into Async – particularly in the multilingual babel of Full Moon. The vocal elements of the album recall other recent Eno projects, with the spoken word Arseny Tarkovsky poem of Life, Life recalling Eno’s The Ship (the line “wave after wave” is a probably coincidental but nonetheless key image in both pieces) and Eno’s work with poet Rick Holland on Drums Between The Bells.

The way Async maintains this atmosphere consistently throughout its diverse sonic explorations pays powerful testament to Sakamoto’s indefatigable creative imagination.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.5 – Sapphire Slows – Time

This sort of gauzy, ethereal electronic pop doesn’t get much play on this site, and one of the main reasons for that is that despite the vast amounts of it being made, it so rarely amounts to anything more than eminently tasteful elevator music – triumphs of atmosphere over imagination. For a long time, I held the deep suspicion that Sapphire Slows was one of those artists and could therefore be safely ignored, but Time tells a different story.

Time is richly textured but never excessively-layered, with the distorted pulses and wispy vocals of Reach Out Your Hand To Me demonstrating Sapphire Slows’ ability to create powerful effects from just a few well chosen elements. On The Edge of My Land the atmospheric effects go hand in hand with disarmingly chirpy, almost technopop synth loops, and this lightness of touch gives the music a lively internal dynamic.

It also help a lot that songs like Piece of You work on a very basic level simply as dance music – although it definitely helps if your idea of dancing is that writhing silhouette thing people do outside on the balconies of rich people’s parties in movies when a disaffected main character is having an existential crisis. What makes it such a lovely record, though, is the way you can concentrate on each simple-yet-intricately-arranged moving part and see it has a role to play, with nothing extraneous. The sum of those parts is atmospheric, melodic, dreamlike and affecting, but there’s a different and equal pleasure to be taken from dissecting them and luxuriating in the machinery.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.6 – TG.Atlas – Lost in Puzzle City

CD, Impulse Records, 2017

Hailing from the city of Asahikawa in Hokkaido, TG.Atlas are an interesting example of a phenomenon of a certain kind of environment that seems common to smaller cities in the northeast of Japan. Cities of around 300,000 people, with only perhaps three or four live venues, are unable to support a self-sustaining indie rock or art-punk scene, with the result that the punk scene (every town has one) ends up hosting a surprisingly diverse range of musical ideas.

If you had any illusions that TG.Atlas are a conventional punk or hardcore band, the opening track Broken Flower makes the contrary clear, with its electronic beats and mournful, pastoral guitar line. Maze of Acid, meanwhile, is a minimalistic exercise in synth drone and effects. The heart of what the band do, however, lies in their ability to deliver expansive, Slint-like walls of noise, harsh, ragged metal slashes of no wave guitars, and discordant, repetitive loops in a way that never becomes too fussy or loses the anarchic spirit that ignites their performance.

Unbound by the scene and genre structures that tend to channel Tokyo bands into ever more refined and narrow iterations of themselves, Lost in Puzzle City throws up oddities like the unexpectedly poppy, new wavey closing Different Universe, which dissolves around half way through its six-minute running time into frantic, scratching guitar discord, or the expansive post-shoegaze wall of sound of Gone Red. Holding it all together, though, is a powerful core of relentlessly propulsive, thoroughly unhinged punk rock. That it never lets you get comfortable is at the heart of the fun.

Top 20 Releases of 2017: No.7 – NOISECONCRETEx3CHI5 – Shisou no Transit

CD, sssm, 2017

With its unique fusion of industrial, noise and trip hop, Noiseconrete x 3chi5’s debut album Sandglass/Suna-Ji-Kei was my album of the year for 2016. Just a year later Shisou no Transit stakes a strong claim for itself among 2017’s best, picking up where its predecessor left off with twelve more tracks of eerie melodies, stomach-rattling beats and explosions of noise.

It covers more sonic ground this time round though, as evidenced by the run of tracks that takes you through the delicate piano of Ruten Orgel and the sinister clockwork atmospherics of Regulation into the more familiarly earsplitting harsh noise of Mephisto no Hai and the freeform melody of Magic Mirror Room. 3chi5’s voice shifts more frequently between background and foreground too, reciting her poetry along meandering melodic lines right up close on Tokunai Kouri, echoing from a distance on Jack O’Frost, and through a wall of distortion on Strange Prosperity.

Like a lot of second albums, it’s really a refinement of the original rather than a radical leap in a new direction, but it’s nevertheless a refinement that sees the duo mapping out more territory with confidence and to powerful effect.