Connect And Receive – Summer 2022 Japan underground picks

With the year just passed its halfway point, here’s a mix sampling of some of the Japanese releases that have caught my attention thus far in 2022. Rock still feels like it’s in a slump here, which might partly be down to the ongoing impact of the pandemic but which is probably part of a broader trend in which no one under 40 really listens to rock music anymore. It means there are a lot of familiar faces in this playlist, although that’s also a simple feature of my attempts to keep up with the output of artists who’ve impressed me over the years (as long as former_airline keeps putting out good music, I’m going to keep including him in these things). Tracklist and brief descriptions are below. I’ve tried to add Bandcamp links where they exist, but where they don’t, you might be able to find them on one of the streaming services — otherwise, they may only exist on a CD-R sold to you by the band directly.

in the sun – Nostalgia
Compared to the noise-rock leanings of their first album, 2016’s El Energy, the Metaphor cassette album from the label arm of Tokyo’s Discipline event team takes some similarly kraut-adjacent progressive soundscapery further away from rock and into more industrial territory. Some of the results are caustic and others, like this track, point a direction towards the epic.

A.P.O.S. – 人糞 / Zinpun
The band name stands for “a piece of shit” and this Hiroshima duo’s self-titled EP strips away explicitly musical sounds and luxuriates in the textures of the remaining sonic effluence. The results are more subtle than the band name evokes though, as the quiet, ambient hum of this track demonstrates.

BD1982 – Chapter Zero
Swiftly following up his 2021 CD album Distance Vision with the new Initiation Insight, a cassette of gnostic electronic hybrid industrial/dreampop, BD1982 is on a creative run at the moment.

re:lapse – Hello
This second EP by Tokyo shoegazers re:lapse follows up their debut with similarly slight J-Pop melodies drenched in washes of gentle distortion.

Forbear – Numb
They might explain the mismatch between the title of this EP (4songs) and the number of songs on it (5) as being because one of them is a cover, but I have a suspicion the real reason is that they’ve already released an EP called 5songs and didn’t want to change the tracklist. Either way, it’s another strong release, covering distorted 1990s indie rock territory loosely around bands like Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., proto-emo and, in the case of Numb, maybe even some of the scuzzier forgotten ends of Britpop like The Longpigs.

Boris – Beyond Good and Evil
Perhaps the most completely representative track from the fantastic album W, which in some ways functions as a gentler counterpoint to the heavier No from 2020, leaning a bit more on the shoegaze end of the same general toolbox of sounds.

The Earth Earth – Just Like You
This self-titled album by Aomori shoegazers The Earth Earth has been a long time coming, and its release from KiliKiliVilla, one of the hotter labels in the Japanese alternative scene at the moment (who also released the Boris album) means it will probably send some much deserved attention up to the often forgotten expanses of northern Japan.

jailbird Y – PIX-ME
The first of two tracks from releases this site’s partner label Call And Response has put out so far this year, this noise-punk band from Hiroshima (vocalist Anndoe is also part of A.P.O.S.) released Duality, their first album in over ten years and their first ever with what’s more or less the current lineup in March and, with all caveats for bias, it’s a riot.

おとぼけビ～バ～ / Otoboke Beaver – 携帯みてしまいました / I checked your cellphone
At a time when rock is increasingly dead as a genre and words like indie and alternative are meaningless, Otoboke Beaver are the Japanese band who, maybe more than anyone outside the major label circus, seem to come up in conversations with people overseas. Part of that must surely come down to what a good job UK label Damnably have done giving a platform for them to impress with their raucous punk nonsense (the band describe themselves as genreless but they’re absolutely a punk band in its broad sense), and it’s interesting seeing overseas labels hooking noisy Japanese bands up with audiences that are in sparse supply in the insipid citypop-medicated Japanese music scene, but their new album Super Champon shows that fundamentally the band are just devastatingly effective at wringing something weird and memorable out of something as simple and minimal as punk rock.

oops – ヌートリア / Nutria
These Osaka punks kicked off the new year with a new release, titled simply Demo, with a new singer, Minami Yokota formerly of o’summer vacation and LLRR, and her distinctive voice does a good job of highlighting the band’s existing quirkiness and invention, moving that off-kilter aspect of their sound a little more to centre stage.

worst taste – お願いシンパシー / Onegai Sympathy
The second of Call And Response’s releases from the year, Akumu ni Warae! is another comeback of sorts (although like Jailbird Y, the band have continued to be a very active live proposition), marking what’s essentially Tokyo punk/alternative trio Worst Taste’s first album in ten years. As I say, it’s one we released ourselves, so we’re biased, but it’s a delightfully demented, carnivalesque whirl through the goofy-smart fringes of punk, garage and new wave, shot through with a structural intelligence in the arrangements.

Nicfit – Human Inane
Another band who made a bit of a bang overseas thanks to their release from UK label Upset the Rhythm, Nicfit have been a longstanding feature of the Nagoya underground scene with their distorted, twisted art-punk. With their previous releases coming out piecemeal on a series of singles, split releases and compilations, Fuse is their first time tackling the challenge of a full album from scratch and it’s top notch.

WBSBFK – Haircut
Also from Nagoya, WBSBFK (pronounced “wabi-sabi fuu-kay”) took their time following up their 2017 album Open Your Eyes, but the results on Grotesk seem to pick up their sparse, precise post-punk more or less where they left off, finding new ways of expressing as few emotions as possible using as limited a range of sounds as they can. This dedication to minimalism, however, means that even the smallest diversion or distortion has even greater impact when it sneaks through.

The Noup – Geodesic
Hailing from Okayama, The Noup made a minor but noticeable impact in the Japanese underground scene with their tightly wound 2018 kraut-noise debut Flaming Psychic Heads, but with this follow-up, Nexpansion, they’ve dialled it back to stripped down beats and finely honed repetition, like Nisennenmondai’s entire career trajectory condensed into the step from one album to the next. There’s more than four years of silence in that leap from 2018 to now though, and you can also hear elements of drummer/vocalist Takafumi Okada’s side gig as a member of rhythmical ensemble Goat, as well as his own solo work as Manisdron here.

former_airline – Phenomena
One of Tokyo’s most reliably prolific artists, former_airline continues to explore the fruitful, faintly melancholic 1980s landscape bordering krautrock, post-punk, shoegaze, dub, minimal wave and ambient music in his very nice new Control Factor EP.

Jin Cromanyon – Stone henji
Taken from the Synth in Japan split album with Tokyo’s always excellent Soloist Anti Pop Totalization from the Berlin-based Objet Trouvé label (released as an LP in a series of increasingly expensive and limited edition boutique packaging designs), Jin Cromanyon provided the bouncy and unashamedly pop counterpoint to the dark sonics of the Soloist Anti Pop Totalization side.

Masami Takashima – Stairs-01
Takamatsu-based Masami Takashima is known primarily as a singer-songwriter and as part of the new wave trio Miu Mau, but on her latest solo album she takes a more experimental, instrumental route, weaving piano and keyboard through intriguing electronic soundscapes (or sometimes simple silence).

2021 Japan music roundup: INDIETRONICA

In this section, I’m taking a look at electronic (or including significant electronic elements) releases that don’t sit easily in the club music or pop fields. I know indietronica is a stupid word, but that’s what this is.

BD1982 – Distance Vision
One of the founders of the Tokyo-based Diskotopia label, BD1982 has been a regular feature in the label’s release lineup over the past ten years, but this 2021 album is really a standout. Still based firmly in electronic music, it nonetheless sketches out shapes and colours that echo shoegaze and krautrock, with the blurred boundaries of the vocals, the distorted washes of sound and the occasional dalliances with motorik rhythms. It recalls the less abrasive Hot on the Heels of Love side of Throbbing Gristle too in places, constructing an icy, crystalline dreamworld from glistening synthetic parts.

Buffalo Daughter – We are the Times
To see any sort of optimistic vision of the future, it seems like we have to look further and further back to the past. With We Are the Times, Buffalo Daughter are a band in the 2020s who sound like a band in the 1990s looking back at the 1970s, and even when the world songs like Global Warming Kills Us All describe is a grim one, the vantage point they’ve staked out allows the music itself to look forward with both the clean lines and smooth textures of still-new technology and the inquisitive playfulness of someone given all sorts of disco, math rock and technopop possibilities to explore.

former_airline – The Air Garden
Following on from his 2020 full length album Postcards From No Man’s Land (that I put out from my Call And Response label and which is excellent), this new EP by instrumental bedroom technopunk-krautgazer Former Airline is in familiar territory, touching on all the motorik beats, noisy urban clatter, hazy ambient textures and spacious dub workouts that those who’ve encountered is work before will recognise right away. It’s expertly assembled and makes for a concise calling card for this prolific artist’s larger body of work.

Her Ghost Friend – Itsuka no onshinre
Released as a farewell collection of loose or unreleased tracks to mark the dissolution of the group, this high-sugar dose of ferociously cute, pastel-coloured technopop is going to be too candy-sweet for some ears, but there’s a wonky charm to some of the arrangements and it’s all done in good humour by an act who know how silly they sound and revel in it.

Jesus Weekend – Rudra no Namida
In their first flurry of action back in the early 2010s, Jesus Weekend were always uncertain whether they were lo-fi indie-guitar songwriters or purveyors of quirky, abstract synth instrumentals, but this new incarnation (which seems to now be the instrumental solo project of former vocalist Seira) embraces the synth fully, turning out a sparse, atmospheric and affecting mini-album of ambient music that isn’t afraid to take eerie and unsettling turns.

Mikado Koko – Maza Gusu / Alice in Cryptoland
Mikado Koko is one of the most interesting artists currently firing out album after album of fractured electronic beats and eccentrically delivered poetry into the eager ears of those listeners who can keep up with her. The first of these two 2021 albums is Maza Gusu, a katakana rendering of “Mother Goose” that sets Japanese readings of the famous children’s stories against sinister synth textures and skittering beats. The second takes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as its starting point and relocates the action to the metaverse with the help of Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine from Crass. Obviously. Obnoxious as NFTs are, it’s hard to fault Mikado Koko her playful and good humoured enthusiasm for them, having gone as far as creating her own pixellated character Alice Voxel to cheerlead them on one song, and really the whole album is dizzy, kaleidoscopic fun throughout.

Susumu Hirasawa – Beacon
A lot of the attention this album by veteran new wave musician Susumu Hirasawa came from his striking performance at Fuji Rock, which due to its high profile YouTube live broadcast, not to mention the pandemic-necessitated all-Japanese lineup that boosted some eccentric acts to unusually high profile positions in the bill, meant the festival offered a fascinating, in-depth and widely accessible view into the Japanese music scene. Susumu Hirasawa has been farming pretty similar musical ground to this since the later days of his old band P-Model in the late-80s and early 90s, which means he knows what he’s doing as he continues refining his Southeast Asian-flavoured operatic synth-techno toolkit. Less easy is describing exactly what that thing is. There are echoes of No.1 in Heaven-era Sparks, but Hirasawa has made this territory his own over the years and there’s really no one like him.

Connect And Receive – Winter 2021 Japan underground picks

As a year-end answer to my earlier summer 2021 mix, I decided to make a follow-up of some of the other Japanese indie and underground music that interested me this year. In tune with the wintry times, this one mostly skirts punk, in favour of various eerie and melancholy shades of experimental music and a few indie bangers. I’ve added Bandcamp links where they exist, and you can listen to the mix here.

Phew – Snow and Pollen
Phew has been not only prolific in recent years, but in perhaps the best form of her career. This opening track off her latest album, New Decade, is a suitably sinister introduction to the album, the times and this wintery mix.

z/nz – Days
Always great to have some new material from this mathy yet always playful Fukuoka-based trio. Taken from the second volume of the Mitohos compilation series, put together by Loolowningen & the Far East Idiots and featuring a solid cross section of contemporary Japanese experimental indie.

Loolowningen & the Far East Idiots – Concorde
As well as their work on the Mitohos series, Loolowningen also put out another new album of their own new material in Pareidolias, which comes quite swiftly after 2020’s Anökumene and continues their journey through surreal landscapes of sparse, intricate arrangements and offbeat melodies.

LeakLeek – China Doll
This track comes from these Nagoya-based psychedelic punks’ new mini-album Leak, which came out from my own Call And Response label at the tail end of the year and sure to kick off a wave of hysterical violin- and saw-led no wave. Look out for members Charley and Kuwayama’s other band Nicfit in the January releases of UK label Upset the Rhythm.

Non Band – Ti’s Worq
Non Band’s 1982 debut has been gaining increasingly broad recognition as a hidden masterpiece of the Japanese punk canon, and they have been gradually becoming more active in recent years, culminating in this second album after nearly a 40 year wait, hanging idiosyncratically between punk, no wave, folk and psychedelia.

So Oouchi / 大内聡 – Niji / 虹
As the vocalist from noise-drenched post-punks Hysteric Picnic/Burg, you’d be forgiven for being surprised that So Oouchi’s first new release in years is an EP of Nick Drake-esque solo acoustic ballads, but as an artist who never had much regard for people’s expectations, it’s still somehow on-brand (and quite lovely).

mmm, Takako Minekawa – Hachigatsu no Mado / 八月の窓
Singer-songwriter mmm (pronounced “me-my-mow”) has been slowly working her way through a series of collaborations with other artists over the past couple of years, working with Shintaro Sakamoto and Oh Shu last year, and this year following it up with songs featuring Takefumi Tsujimura of Kicell and this immersive musical mystery with the wonderful Takako Minekawa.

re:lapse – f
The first of two tracks on this mix from the Dreamwaves shoegaze label, re:lapse released a debut EP this autumn, pushing the dreampop end of the shoegaze spectrum with, all gentle washes of guitar and synth (on this track synth arrangements courtesy of Azusa Suga from dreampop-tinted Tokyo pop band For Tracy Hyde.

softsurf – It’s OK
Also from the Dreamwaves label came Softsurf’s Returning Wave EP, with this song jumping out as what’s essentially a punchy indie-rock anthem, with just enough gliding and fuzz to remind you that it’s shoegaze.

Pulsnug – Turnoff
Given his troubles over the summer, 2021 was probably a bad year to be a massive fan of Cornelius and an even worse one to have built a huge part of your sonic identity around recreating the skittish avant-pop of Fantasma, but Tokyo’s Pulsnug came out with Fanfare for Farewell towards the end of the year anyway, packed with the shamelessly 1990s fun (am I imagining it or is the intro to this song a nod to Blur’s It Could be You?) and nary a scandal to be seen.

Susumu Hirasawa / 平沢進 – Yurei Ressha / 幽霊列車
Since the later days of P-Model, Susumu Hirasawa has been farming this grove of melodramatic synthetic grandeur, and the trees keep growing bigger. His epic appearance at the covid-limited Fuji Rock was one of the highlights for those of us watching at home.

former_airline – The Air Garden
Last year, Tokyo-based bedroom krautwave/dubgaze musician former_airline put out the full album Postcards from No Man’s Land, and he followed it up swiftly with a new self-released EP, with this song a motorik highlight.

Daisei Stockhausen – It’s too late
With roots in older punk-underground bands like The Hasshin Telepathies and Nemo, there’s a bit of Psychic TV to these weirdos, a bit of EBM, a bit of psych-rock, but hard to pin down. It appeared via a split cassette with the always enjoyable Shizuoka punk band Half Kill and it was intriguing stuff.

Buffalo Daughter – Times
There’s always something a bit oblique and out-of-time about Buffalo Daughter, like a band looking at the future from a half-dozen fragmented starting points at various points in the past. In some ways, this track, from their new album that dropped online in September, feels like something lost in the 1990s, but there’s also so much Kraftwerk in there that it starts drawing lines that place it not in a specific time so much as in a (paradoxical) tradition of looking forward. “We are the times” they sing, and sure, but which times?

Greeen Linez – The Call
If Buffalo Daughter’s music often seems to be looking to the future from a variety of starting points in the past, Greeen Linez can be seen as looking to the past of the 1980s from various starting points over the subsequent decades. There’s an affecting sort of romanticism to the duo’s hauntology on this track. Taken from the album Secrets of Dawn.

Seiichi Yamamoto / 山本精一 – Terminal Beach
In a way, a collection of experimental offcuts, underground legend Seiichi Yamamoto’s album Cavinet was a strangely warm and inviting album, like wandering through a series of misty, mysterious landscapes in an old videogame.

Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 – Monologue
Regular favourites of mine, Aichi duo Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 put out a couple of releases this year. One was a sort of hits compilation — a digest of early material — and the other a curious and understated EP on most of which 3chi5’s vocals take a low-key role, but which covered a lot of interesting musical ground.

Her Braids – Midnight Blue
Following on from the lovely song Forest from 2020’s Soko ni Iru indie compilation, this Matsumoto indie trio came out with an equally tender and touching three-song EP in 2021, with this the heartbreaking closing song.

Top 25 Releases of 2019: No. 5-1

Cassette, self-released, 2019

5. Puffyshoes – Flower
Released together with a home made zine, this cassette collection of seven rough-edged 60s girl group-via-Ramones pop tunes (clocking in at a bit over nine minutes, with only the opening Let’s Fall in Love scraping past one and a half minutes in length) is maximum DIY in both its execution and its wider, thematic meta-nostalgia for the already nostalgic sounds of past generations of indie/twee-pop tape-dwellers. Puffyshoes inhabit their fantasy world so completely that it never feels less than completely real, and the devastatingly simple, infectiously catchy, tremblingly fragile pop tunes that make up this EP drive that point home more effectively than I ever could.

CD, Less Than TV, 2019

4. Groundcover. – ██████
(Text taken from my personal blog)
Throughout their multiple shifting, contracting and expanding lineups, Groundcover have been one of Tokyo’s most consistently interesting noise-rock bands, combining roots in hardcore and post-Boredoms junk with a drift into expansive sonic territory. ██████ is the culmination of that evolution, retaining the raw riffs and explosive energy that characterised their hardcore days but wedding it to via the rhythmically tight, increasingly dub-influenced sound system band leader Ataraw Mochizuki has built up around him over the years. The result is an album that builds up immense, triumphant, richly layered walls of sound, deployed with impressive control.

CD/vinyl, Shochy/Thrill Jockey, 2019

3. OOIOO – Nijimusi
Despite having been at it for the best part of the past 25 years, OOIOO remain as inventive and inspired as ever, lurching dementedly from one idea to another, linking the experimental extremes of post-punk and progressive rock with the sort of drunken fluidity that can only really come from total mastery of their oddball craft, with echoes of both Gong and the Raincoats in equal measures colouring this endlessly delightful album. It’s wild, fun, fundamentally dedicated to the unexpected, and overall a powerful and accessible exploration of completely unrestrained musical imagination.

 

Download, self-released, 2019

2. Takeshi Yamamoto – Somewhere
Sometimes it feels like Takeshi Yamamoto is singlehandedly holding the Fukuoka music scene together, playing in what seems to be at least half the bands in the city (Macmanaman, Sea Level, Kelp, Sacoyans and more), not to mention DJing, doing design work for fellow Kyushu scenesters and generally turning out an endless stream of new releases and collaborations. Despite all this, Somewhere is Yamamoto’s first solo release, and it’s gorgeous. Composed mostly of ambient and drone-based soundscapes, it carries a lot of similarities with some of Yamamoto’s work with post rock collective Sea Level, but where Sea Level endlessly circle eclectically around an implied but never quite described centre, Somewhere is far more comfortable in its sonic identity. Between tones and drones that shimmer like silk in the breeze, Yamamoto picks out gentle guitar melodies here, introduces rippling sequencer patterns there, builds rich or even dirty layers competing sounds, or pares them away to sparse near-nothing, water trickling quietly at the edge of hearing.

 

Cassette, Moss Archive, 2019

1. Former Airline – Rewritten Memories by the Future
(Text taken from my personal blog)
Released as a limited edition cassette in February, Japanese artist Former Airline’s Rewritten Memories by Future is an album born out of a cauldron of 1980s experimental and underground influences but doesn’t remain bound by them. Crash and Learn recalls the claustrophobic rhythms of Liaisons Dangereuses, drawing out and developing the origins of acid house from its chatter of electronic bleeps. Meanwhile, the artist’s love of krautrock and shoegaze – ever present on the album – is expressed most strikingly on the gorgeous closing The Angel Between Two Walls. Through the album, analogue glitches, drones and intrusions of noise act as the cement holding this sonic structure together.

Top 25 Releases of 2019: No. 25-21

It’s always hard to tell if it’s the scene as a whole or just me as a listener, but it feels as if music in Japan is becoming ever more fragmented and compartmentalised. It goes through cycles, for sure, but the impression I get is that it’s at a particularly introverted point in one of those cycles at the moment. We see it going out to shows, where bands increasingly play in the same venues with the same kinds of lineups, and I can feel it happening to me too. Where, in the past, I would have paid some glancing attention to recent pop releases, the only J-pop album I listened to this year was Babymetal’s Metal Galaxy, which I couldn’t get through more than a minute of. In the past, it was interesting to look through similar year-end roundups by Make Believe Melodies and Beehype and see where some crossover might be, but this year neither of their lists made any impact on me; it feels like we’re all in our bubbles (although Tokyo Dross continues to listen quite widely). I’m pretty comfortable in my bubble though, and the nature of the Internet is that it’s often more useful if people know what they’re going to get. In this case, what you’re going to get is a view of 2019 from a pretty militantly underground/alternative perspective, with increasing numbers of limited-run cassette and CD-R EPs, but even within those limitations there were plenty of new Japanese releases that I enjoyed in 2019.

Cassette, Instant Tunes, 2019

25. V/A – Noise Three City Story

Noise Three City Story is a compilation cassette EP featuring, as the title implies, one band each from three different cities. Tokyo act Soloist Anti Pop Totalization, whose Instant Tunes label released this, along with a couple more of this year’s most interesting releases, bookends the EP with his Daniel Miller-esque minimalist synths, while Nagoya’s Noiseconcrete x 3chi5 unleash five minutes of glorious industrial noise topped with 3chi5’s diving, twisting and swooping vocals. The third contributing act is Hernear from Sendai, an electronic project of Kamata from post-punk band Waikiki Champions, which channels DAF-style EBM through thumping techno. The whole EP is brutally lo-fi, but the raucous industrial pulse running through it gives it a fierce energy that can’t help but appeal.



CD/download, Hazy/Damnably,2019

24. Hazy Sour Cherry – Tour de Tokyo
On Tour de Tokyo, indiepopsters Hazy Sour Cherry deliver 25 minutes of extremely effective, bouncy Shimokitazawa-esque garage-twee that feels like bands in the 1990s imitating cassette indie acts of the 80s imitating beat music of the 1960s. Coming out from UK label Damnably, who were also behind Otoboke Beaver’s 2019 album Itekoma Hits, it’s representative of a growing trend of Japanese groups bypassing the moribund local indie market and connecting with fans via overseas labels (and presumably-re-importing whatever buzz they get and banking it with local audiences), and it’s easy to see how these sunny, energetic two-minute blasts of ramshackle guitar pop are well placed to appeal to audiences both at home and abroad.





CD-R, self-released, 2019

23. Former Airline – Nu Creative Dreads
One of two excellent albums released in 2019 by sonic bedroom scientist Former Airline, Nu Creative Dreads is the artist’s take on a dub album, albeit filtered through his own particular setup, featuring banks of synthesisers and cassette loops. With its hyperactive basslines and beats against a background cacophony of psychedelic guitar and synth squiggles, this instrumental album is a disorientating listen at times, but a rich one nonetheless.

Cassette, Instant Tunes, 2019

22. Demon Altar – Demon Altar
Emerging from the cinders of Tokyo post-punk/new wave stalwarts You Got a Radio, Demon Altar trade in scuzzy, distortion-drenched, gothic post-punk that leans into the darker fringes of You Got A Radio’s later work and pushes it further into Birthday Party/Jesus & Mary Chain/Joy Division territory, assisted in this general darkening of tone by the insistent drum machine beats. There’s still a sort of melancholy romance to the melodies though, the guitars swirling around the baritone vocals as they intone their cryptic or just plain indistinct mantras. It’s wilfully rough, but there’s something infectious in the combination of the beats’ relentless, driving, robot energy and the music’s insistent, melodramatic air of gothic gloom.

CD, Space Shower, 2019

21. Tawings – Tawings
Tawings are one of the hot new things in Japanese indie right now, with a handful of singles to their name and a lot of the right people as fans (indie royalty DYGL and rising stars Luby Sparks among them), so this debut album from upper-tier indie label Space Shower puts them in a strong position going into 2020. The opening Statice will come as a bit oif a surprise to anyone familiar with their previous material’s shambling yet angular Delta 5-isms, coming in overglazed with Cranberries-does-dreampop synth-laden lushness, but the Devo-esque Poodles swiftly brings a much needed dose of nonsense to proceedings. Invisible still shamelessly rips off The Cramps’ Human Fly, but Tawings have been playing it long enough that it feels like it belongs to them by now (plus songs that end with explosions are always good). Recent single Suisen is another mainstream-ready tune drenched in washes of lush synth, and honestly it’s pretty good, but the band still sound most themselves when they’re charting a ragged, discord-scattered route through brittle post-punk melodies Like UTM, Listerine, Hamburg, and the closing Dad Cry.

Top 25 Releases of 2018: No. 5 – 1

CD-R, self-released, 2018

No.5 – Former Airline – 2011 or so…
Former Airline may have taken his name from a B-side by British postpunk band Wire, but his music is in a broader tradition of experimental rock music that runs from artists like the Silver Apples, through Eno and krautrock, into postpunk, EBM, industrial and beyond. He has been putting out DIY cassettes and suchlike for a while now and 2011 or so… is a collection of material spanning several years. It opens with the musique concréte noise collage Portrait of a City, but gradually dissolves into less sonically uncompromising but no less exciting and interesting territory, with cheap rhythm boxes merging with hazy, ambient synth drones taking over by the time An Incident at the Terminal Beach comes around, while later tracks increasingly incorporate distorted, washes of shoegaze guitar. Taken together, 2011 or so… is an intriguing and quite beautiful musical glimpse into the mind of a mad scientist.

CD-R, self-released, 2018

No.4 – The Doodless – Capture
This wonderful CD-R EP dropped into my lap out of what seemed like nowhere at a show early in the year and Doodless (with the double “s”, not to be confused with the more famous Japanese indie band Doodles) instantly became one of my favourite bands. A lot of other people in the music scene I recommended them to felt the same way, so of course what the band did was immediately stop all their activities and fail to capitalise on any momentum they might have got. What that means, however, is that this unashamedly lo-fi collection of off-kilter garage-punk postpunk whimsy is going to be something you and a very small group of others can claim as your own forever now. It’ll be something where you can meet someone and they mention “this Japanese band Doodless with a double-s” and you can say, “Oh, my God, you’re my friend for life!” and move in together and buy a labrador. Read my original review here.
(NOTE: The band’s Bandcamp page has Capture down as a 2017 release, but I suspect that’s a case of New Year forgetfulness, as their Twitter account announced it in January 2018.)

CD, Space Shower Music, 2018

No.3 – Luby Sparks – Luby Sparks
Sounding like it was transmitted directly from mid-90s Britain, there’s always a temptation to dismiss something like Luby Sparks as retro, but if you did, you’d be missing out on some of the most exuberantly lovelorn pop of the year. Read my full review here.Luby Sparks – Thursday

CD, self-released, 2018

No.2 – The Noup – Flaming Psychic Heads
More a short, sweet mini-album accompanied by an unrelated single than an album outright, Flaming Psychic Heads is a fantastic and long-awaited debut album from Okayana noise-rock trio The Noup. Combining postpunk, post-hardcore and krautrock, the mini-album section is a fierce, driving set embellished with expansive guitar excursions onto almost spacerock territory, most notably on second track Utopia. The band are able to harness and rein in the ferocious energy at their core with thrilling restraint on the electric Monochrome Dead, but when they unleash it, as on the closing Impotents Anaaki, it’s explosive. An additional CD features Geodesic, a percussion-heavy ten-minute track that features echoes of drummer Takafumi Okada’s work with Kansai rhythm collective Goat, with the guitars taking on a sparser role. It’s an interesting track in its own right and a welcome addition to the album, although different enough from the five initial tracks that it’s easy to see why the band might have felt the need to include it as a separate item.The Noup – Impotents Anaaki (single version)

CD, Felicity, 2018

No.1 – Eiko Ishibashi – The Dream My Bones Dream
Images of railway lines run through multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Eiko Ishibashi’s beautiful, multilayered The Dream My Bones Dream, providing the album with a skeleton of sorts, as well as functioning as the means by which the listener is transported back through a series of faded photographs of unremembered memories. The spectre of Japan’s wartime occupation of parts of China hangs over Iron Veil, a half-imagined memory from Ishibashi’s father’s youth in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, but the patchwork of fragmented secondhand memories and dreams mostly takes more abstract shapes, with the album split about half and half between wispy vocal and richly textured instrumental tracks. Echoes of Ishibashi’s experimental work with Merzbow and Jim O’Rourke, there’s a collage-like structure to the way layers of sound intertwine, drifting in and out of focus, and at times Ishibashi seems to treat her own voice as just another of these ghostly elements, her own identity being lost in the series of scattered images flitting by the train window, but the The Dream My Bones Dream has a distinct personality of its own, melancholy but determined, and the journey it takes you on is a thing of extraordinary beauty.