2021 Japan music roundup: INDIEPOP/SHOEGAZE

Obviously this section is another one with a lot of crossovers with earlier parts of the roundup, but I’ve gathered these acts together as two parts of the indie scene that often trade in dreamy or dreamlike atmospheres — they often intersect for this exact reason in the sort of music that often gets called dreampop, and there is often a shared foundational influence of The Velvet Underground. The acts here span from the guitar pop fringes of Shibuya-kei and neo acoustic, through lo-fi indiepop, dreampop, shoegaze and the guitar-heavy end of post-rock.

Boyish – Blue Rain
There’s a strange sort of disconnect on Blue Rain between the low-key understatement of the male-female vocal interplay and the extravagant, emotional thrashing about of the saxophone whenever it makes its presence felt, as if some intrusion from another genre has burst through a fold in reality. Squaring those two elements might say more about my expectations going into the album than what Boyish themselves are trying to do, and it gets easier as the album goes along in tracks like Pale Blue Lights, where neo acoustic and yacht rock snuggle up together and spoon in a way that feels quite natural. It’s towards the second half of the album where Boyish’s guitar pop side shines through a little more clearly, with quietly chiming guitars washing the songs in more neutral emotional tones, somewhere between Trembling Blue Stars type post-Sarah indiepop and 1990s J-pop of the My Little Lover strain.

concretetwin – “Re : encounter” sound source #04
The most immediately striking thing about this EP is the way Concretetwin combine their wall of heavy, distorted guitar and barely-distinct vocals with trip-hop-influenced beats. One effect of that is to reconnect shoegaze to a rhythmical thread originally spun out by A.R. Kane in the late-1980s, which is a welcome endeavour although one Concretetwin don’t fully commit to on here. Rather, opening track Nigella sounds like a band in the early 1990s caught between a shoegaze guitarist and a rhythm section tripping on Madchester vibes. The 90s is probably the best era to evoke with this sort of music though, and like that early wave of shoegaze, Concretetwin get that the music is meant to sound immense, employing all the tricks to whip up just the sort of storm-of-guitars in heaven that a lovelorn teen could use to burn their soul clean of heartbreak, if only for a moment.

The Florist – IN CVLT
There’s a bit at the beginning of second track Nocturne where the song seems about to lurch into The Flaming Lips’ Race for the Prize, and while certainly affiliated with the Japanese shoegaze scene, The Florist are really a band who operate in that broader indie rock space that pulls in influences from whichever (cult) sounds appeal to them — Cure-like ringing guitar lines here, emo-punk chords there, post-rock drum cascades at the back, a gothic post-punk bass rumble down the centre. The tunes themselves are in pretty familiar J-rock territory, and over the course of the whole album the guitar textures are where the most consistent care and attention reveals itself.

Her Braids – EP01
Four years after their charming and lo-fi demo cassette, the three songs on this EP by Matsumoto-based trio Her Braids follow on from their quite lovely song Forest from a 2020 fundraiser compilation put together by local venue Give Me Little More in the tighter sound and sense of growing cohesion as a band. That’s not to say there isn’t still a lot of instrument swapping going on, and the band’s willingness to just do what the song needs at any given moment is a key part of their easygoing charm, from the piano that anchors the opening Dream, through the subtle, Young Marble Giants post-punk guitar/bass interplay of Garden, to the washes of synth and dreampop vocals of the closing Midnight Blue. It all falls together beautifully, making EP01 a highlight of the year far beyond what its unassuming title promises.

The Moment of Nightfall – Light Is Beyond The Nostalgia
Formed by a supergroup of musicians associated with Nagoya-based indiepop label Galaxy Train, The Moment of Nightfall include parts of Pervenche, Red Go-Kart and H-Shallows, and the fact it all hangs together so well probably says a lot about the consistent atmosphere the label and the community around it has fostered over the years. Third track Well,Well,Well,Well is a good example of the musicians channeling their shared sound to powerful effect, with wisps of vocal drifting through a summery haze of guitar that recalls Yo La Tengo in particular, and that whole thread of distorted dreamlike psychedelia that runs back to The Velvet Underground.

Mono – Pilgrimage of the Soul
Twenty-two years and eleven albums in, there’s a thing Mono do and you’d be disappointed if they didn’t do it. Restrained moments, pregnant with portent, followed by big, cathartic swells of guitar — quiet and loud, in multiple but similar variations — they’ve been stewards of this dramatic landscape for a long time, and they rarely stray from its windswept crests and valleys. Step back for a moment and it might seem strange to see that amount of energy channeled into hitting so many of the same beats, but once immersed in it again, it’s perhaps more like sailors too in love with the churning waves of the icy ocean not to keep returning time after time.

pervenche – quite small happiness
Twenty years after their debut album, Subtle Song, Pervenche have finally come round to making a follow-up with this cassette album from the Galaxy Train label, and it bridges the decades like no time has passed at all with its quietly strummed, whisper-voiced, autumnal psych-pop sound lilting eternal. A cover of Bob Dylan’s I’ll Keep It With Mine is decidedly Velvetsy in their hands, and Peter Ivers’ Miraculous Weekend replacing the quirky jaunt of the original with something far more breathy and intimate, spiralling into eerie Lynchian space as it goes on. After years of prayers to the music spirits, it’s a delight to have Pervenche back in the pop jingu.

Puffyshoes – Again
It’s always nice to have a new Puffyshoes EP, even if the songs are often gone before you’ve had time to even notice they’ve arrived. These nuggets of 60s girl group melodies and teen drama lyrics come in an ultra-compressed package that come across like brief, frustrated scrawls in a diary pulled out and set to music, usually with a single, simple sentiment ground into a catchy refrain through as much repetition as the one-minute runtimes of the songs permit. It’s been a long time since the duo last made an album, and I wonder if they’ve refined their art into such minimal sketches of songs now that the broader canvas of an album-length release would feel too cluttered to comfortably hold that much of Puffyshoes’ music, but with four songs in about four and a half minutes, Again leaves you hungering after more.

Pulsnug – Fanfare For Farewell
There’s an all-consuming live for the 1990s running through this album. There are little things scattered throughout the album, perhaps nodding to Blur’s It Could be You on the riff that opens Turn Off, maybe referencing Radiohead’s No Surprises in the melancholy guitar line that runs through Slow Starter. The overarching sense, though, is that Pulsnug somehow felt that Cornelius’ Fantasia simply hadn’t been made enough times or there weren’t enough Hideki Kajis running around Tokyo already. And if making giddily eclectic and optimistic pop music out of perky pieces of synth-smoothed indie is a crime, Pulsnug is joyously guilty.

Optloquat – From the shallow
Shoegaze in its early form was often about the edges and specifics being softened or simply blasted to oblivion by the noise and distortion of the music, but over time, it has become more a tool in the box of guitarists than a genre in itself, sharing space in the music with other, often more traditional approaches. On this album by Tokyo’s Optloquat, walls of guitar noise and distortion play apart, but at the same time the vocals ring out strongly and emotionally, while guitars grind out riffs or solo away, all the specifics and clear edges of the music intact. On Giver, the band dial up a snowstorm of distorted guitar that almost transports the song into the shoegaze dreamscape, while Imaginary Host cuts harder shapes, with echoes of forgotten futures of British rock like The Music or The Klaxons.

re:lapse – re:lapse.ep
The debut release from this Tokyo-based band, as well as from new Nagoya-based shoegaze label Dreamwaves, re:lapse’s first EP is a strong statement of intent, never really pushing the sonic limits of the style, but crafting rich and subtle textures nonetheless around icy-sweet melodies. Sitting comfortably in the dreamy centre of contemporary Japanese shoegaze, re:lapse have appeared as fully-formed masters of their craft.

Softsurf – Returning Wave
Dreamwaves’ second release comes courtesy of label hometown of Nagoya’s Softsurf, whose take on shoegaze follows in the indie rock footsteps of British forbears like Ride and especially Slowdive, the wall of noise (sometimes underscored by synths) bursting in to add a heart surge to the choruses, while one guitar is also free to cut shapes or solo, Britpop style, in the spaces. The band hit many of the joyous, floppy-haired surges of indie-kid emotion that wouldn’t shame their influences at all on songs like the anthemic one-two punch of It’s OK and Hello My Shadow marking a triumphant return for the band after what appears to have been a long hiatus, and making for a successful first year for Dreamwaves.

Sugardrop – Eventually
Despite the candy-sweet name, Sugardrop feel like a different sort of culinary treat in the Tokyo indie scene: more the happy, solid reassurance of comfort food than an insubstantial confection. The guitars crunch, the drums pound, the riffs cut their grooves, the choruses burrow their way into your ears, everything throwing all the right indie rock shapes at just the right moments, with a sense of urgency that makes each shift move in just a fraction of a beat ahead of when you’re expecting it. Eventually isn’t overflowing with originality, but it’s dense with stuff it knows works: not a drop of sugar so much as a well-packed kebab.

Indiepop roundup (Summer 2020)

Tangingugun – Yasui Jumon
Matsumoto, Nagano-based Tangingugun typically trade in laid-back pop melodies delivered through a hazy filter of psychedelic-tinted guitar distortion, the male-female twin vocal interplay between Saori Nakamura and Masashiro Nimi adding an enriching layer of texture to the sound — sometimes trading lines, others intermingled as harmonies, and on Kiri wa Hagureta slipping easily between the two. While there are moments where things step up to a bouncier tempo, as on second track Koumi-machi, the prevailing atmosphere is one of quietly sophisticated, summery melancholy.

Puffyshoes – I Might Be In Love
I wrote about this EP for the Undrcurrents blog’s Bandcamp roundup in June, singling out the simple economy of Puffyshoes’ songwriting in how they create ultra-short lo-fi pop nuggets by focusing in on the hooks and rarely getting diverted once the point has been made. I Might Be in Love also sees the band playing around with other songwriters’ material, as on their joyously ragged-edged cover of The Strangeloves’ I Want Candy, and it’s testament to Puffyshoes’ own songwriting that they can flit between the two seamlessly.

Sloppy Joe – Waiting For The Night Begins
It feels strange to be writing about Sloppy Joe almost ten years after their first album, With Kisses Four, with the same mixture of irony and giddy joy and with almost the same words, but here I am and here is Waiting For The Night Begins. And really it’s like not a moment had passed, which is to say that from the bat it sounds like the meticulous and loving work of a passionately devoted Smiths tribute band. To leave it at that assessment alone would be more dismissive than Sloppy Joe deserve though, and they wear their jangly 1980s indiepop influences so proudly, their love for the sounds, the tone, the inflections and melodic habits of the era running far deeper than Morrissey and Marr — fans of Aztec Camera, The Pale Fountains, early Orange Juice, The Monochrome Set and plenty more will frequently find themselves in a familiar place. Above all, the craftsmanship underlying these songs and their attention to detail is spellbinding, sweeping the listener up in the band’s obvious love for the music — originality be damned.

Half Sports – Intelligence and Delicious
Intelligence and Delicious is Half Sports’ first album since 2014’s Mild Elevation, although a couple of 7-inches have appeared in the meantime, and the propulsive opening Missing the Piece of my Miseries shows the band still have their peculiar cocktail of energetic melancholy, combining punkish 1970s powerpop with shoegazey scuzz and distortion, with the album taking a turn towards the hazier end of that spectrum on Emperor Soy Sauce and leaning on the rockier end on Isolated Facts.

Morningwhim – Talking to Myself / Smoke From Cigarettes
The first of a couple of new releases by Aichi Prefecture’s Morningwhim, this cassette single is perhaps the more immediately striking of the two, with Talking To Myself in particular pushing all the right bittersweet buttons from its heartache chord changes to the slight rough edges of the vocals’ celestial 4AD harmonies. That’s not to diminish the other side, Smoke From Cigarettes, though, which carries a similar scuzzy, jangly garage-shoegaze energy with just as much assurance. The cover art suggests a lingering influence from Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but from the evidence of this, Morningwhim have plenty to offer in their own right.

Morningwhim – Most Of the Sun Shines
In addition to the wonderful Talking to Myself / Smoke From Cigarettes cassette single, Morningwhim also released this 7-inch this spring, with a cleaner, less fuzz-inflected sound, the title track setting an acoustic guitar groove against a haunting synth string backdrop, while B-side Wandering turns up the jangle and chime. This single makes for more of a low-key introduction to the band than the cassette, but demonstrates that their sweetly melodic guitar pop songwriting talents run deep.

Various Artists – Miles Apart Records presents “Moments”
Drenched in nostalgia for times of which most of the featured musicians are too young to have their own memories, this cassette compilation from Osaka-based Miles Apart Records sits somewhere between indiepop in its classic, jangly, Byrds-influenced British 1980s roots and the more recent smooth, soft-focus synth strain where the indiepop venn diagram crosses over with city pop. At the murkier, more garage-influenced end are the likes of Pale Beach and Superfriends, whose respective entries Deadbeat and Fake Flowers have a reassuringly cheap, indie or alt-rock edge to their own particular brand of nostalgia, while Pictured Resort lie at the other extreme, their song Comfortable bittersweet and bathed in soft neon. An interesting entry is Cairophenomenons’ Spring (Moments ver.), its jangly, reverb-soaked guitar pop base elements employed to ends that play out with the sort of VHS-haunted atmosphere that other bands here use synths to evoke, and in the end, the sharper edges this setup gives them to work with helps to offset the cloying mellow their more synthetic peers often veer into.

Chris Jack – Miles to Go
Based in Oita in Kyushu, Chris Jack has a certain low-key notoriety as the guitarist and vocalist of garage rock band The Routes, but in this solo album he trades in the explicitly retro for a sound better characterised as classic with music in a timeless singer-songwriter tradition that could have been from any decade in the past fifty or more years. There’s a refreshing sense of space and warmth to the recording, aided by understated arrangements that may subtly underscore a phrase with organ here and there but mainly work to give the vocals and guitar lines space to walk their gently affecting paths.

Letters To Annika – Letters To Annika EP
Letters to Annika is the name under which Azusa Suga, better known from Tokyo indie rock band For Tracy Hyde, records solo work from his room, with this EP being mostly born out of the semi-lockdown conditions of pandemic Tokyo. Perhaps because of the speed and lo-fi recording conditions under which most of these songs were written and produced, during those curious weeks in April where the pandemic-led disruption to life was as much an interesting shift in perspective as a source of fear, there’s a lightness to this EP that feels both refreshing and somehow restless. Manifesting not only in the faintly washed out, shoegaze-tinged sound but also in the almost panicked urgency of the cranked-up motorik rhythms of songs like Love Song, Tidal and Wavelength, Letters to Annika mixes its reverb-drenched polaroid indiepop nostalgia with an immediacy or even urgency. Also worth attention is the non-EP single Summercrush, released in July, which makes an interesting companion to Letters to Annika, taking the EP’s fuzz and jangle and bringing in an on-trend wash of almost vaporwavesque VHS synth.

June 2020 Bandcamp recommendations

Earlier this month, I wrote a rundown of ten recent Japanese Bandcamp releases over on the US-based Undrcurrents blog, covering punk, experimental, indiepop and a little bit of electronic and hip-hop, with releases by Barbican Estate (also covered on this site), a new Puffyshoes, My Society Pissed, Uhnellys, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto & Riki Hidaka, Phew, Yoshida Shoko and Getageta, plus compilations from Tokyo’s Discipline underground event and from the local music scene in Kumamoto, Kyushu. Check out my comments and links to the music here.

And if you’re still in the mood to explore, my own Call And Response label has been going through its back catalogue and uploading old releases to Bandcamp where the artists themselves haven’t already made them available. The page also has Call And Response’s new release, the Secret Code Y single from Hiroshima noise-punks Jailbird Y, so check that out if you only check out one new release today (all funds go to helping out one of our local live venues, Nakano Moonstep). All non-compilation releases are now available to listen/buy, with links to them all on the label’s top page here.

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.

Puffyshoes: Let’s Fall In Love

Puffyshoes stumbled chaotically through their messy career, shining with brilliance but regularly chucking it all in the trash in a fit of eternally teenage passion before re-emerging and doing it all over again, eventually splitting for what felt like the final time in 2014. For those of us who were wowed and frustrated by them in their initial incarnation, the appearance of this brand new song after four years away is an unexpected delight.

Let’s Fall In Love is drenched in ’60s girl group harmonies, underscored with fuzzy, chugging, reverb-edged guitars and naively clomping drums, which is to say it’s everything fans of the band already know and love about them. The years apart may have added a touch more sophistication to the songwriting, though, and they have fun playing about with a little bit of keyboard to fill out the sparse arrangement. The song lurches to an abrupt, almost cliffhanger conclusion at around one and a half minutes, but with the band hinting at a new album potentially on the way, Let’s Fall In Love offers up plenty of promise for what this more mature Puffyshoes might have to offer.

CAR-84 – V/A: Dancing After 1AM

CD, Call And Response, 2012

This is part of a series of posts talking about music I’ve released through my own Call And Response label. I explain in a bit more detail here.

As 2012 rolled around, I started thinking it was time to do a new compilation. It had been four years since my last one, the Post Flag Wire covers album, and obviously I’d discovered a load more bands since then and picked up new audiences along with them, so it was time to lay down another marker about where Call And Response was. I settled on the title Dancing After 1AM in response to Japan’s absurd anti-dancing laws that saw a bunch of club owners arrested in 2011 and 2012, and completely devastated the club scene in Osaka. In Tokyo we weren’t affected, but on tour in Kyushu you could see the poisonous effect it had had on the club scene there. I added the subtitle “Japanese electric music in the year 2012” as a way of instantly dating it, and then wrote some text in Japanese for the sidecap/obi strip reading “Compilation albums are a waste of time because they’re already out of date as soon as they’re released”. I did a little illustration of a dancing policewoman with a hippy flower in her hair and N’toko contributed by designing the sleeve around my drawing. I kept it to Japanese bands, which meant the design was his only contribution, but I tried to get all the other bands from the label involved. Praha Depart were very much doing their own thing by this point though, and when I mentioned it to them, they gave the impression that it would be difficult to get any new recordings done. Zibanchinka agreed to do something and then promptly imploded, but vocalist Iguz was keen to keep things moving with her new band Futtachi, who contributed a thundering psychedelic monster of a track in Kaiko no Oto. (One other band I really wanted to get on the album was the brilliant blues/Krautrock band Buddy Girl and Mechanic, but they were absorbed in the recording of their own album, which they released finally in early 2013 and was one of the best albums of the year, so they obviously used the time well.) Neither Mir nor Hyacca had released anything for a long time, so getting them involved was essential for more than just their role as the heart and soul of the label. They both needed a kick up the arse to get on and do something. Mir had lost their drummer somewhere between their recording of Wire’s Mannequin for 2008’s Post Flag and 2010 when some electronic recordings they’d done as a duo emerged. It was from these sessions that the version of their perennial closing number Dance (which naturally closed out the album too) came from. I chose that over their excellent 2010 version of the song TV partly because of its appropriateness to the compilation’s title, and partly because Mir’s TV is a song I’ve over the years become very superstitious about. it’s a beautiful song and the 2010 version of it is brilliant, but there’s a sadness at its heart that starts sucking you into itself the more you think about it, and the closing refrain of “Sayonara, sayonara” feels way too much like tempting fate. In Hyacca’s case, the bassist, Seiji Harajiri, was by this time managing the coolest and best venue in Fukuoka, Yakuin Utero, and so he and his band used Utero and its PA engineer to record a new song, Uneko. Uneko was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for from them, both catchy and musically intelligent — the exact right balance of smart and dumb that only they can really pull off in this particular way. The video we later made for it where I filmed them with a cheap pocket camera just goofing around and getting drunk in a karaoke box was actually one of the spare ideas for Zibanchinka that their indefinite hiatus had left us with, and Hyacca attacked it with gusto. Looking to the label’s future, Hysteric Picnic went on to record an EP/mini album for Call And Response, while hopefully Jebiotto and Slow-Marico will follow in one form or another.Hyacca: Uneko There were a lot of other bands on DA1AM who were in similar positions, having been out of the recording game for a while and happy for the opportunity (and the deadline) that the compilation gave them. Extruders had just recorded a wonderful live album at a Buddhist temple, and were looking to go into the studio to record an album proper soon (the result, Colors, was another of 2013’s best) and so they came up with Collapsing New Buildings (translate it into German and see what you get) with its constant electric buzz running through the whole song in the background, causing me and the friend who was helping make the master copy to spend a while debating whether it was intentional or not (it was). The Mornings’ debut had been my album of the year back in 2011, and they were just starting to put together material for the follow-up (Christ alone knows what’s going on with that — I heard a full album’s worth of rough mixes last summer but no final version has yet emerged) so Fu-ji was what got them back into gear. Puffyshoes contributed the short and sweet girl-group garage rocket Oh My God, went on to have a busy 2013 and released a great cassette album before exploding in a shower of unfulfilled potential, while Otori recorded the brilliant Hanten (which is their best song and I’m incredibly smug that I got it), Anisakis did the XTC-esque Popcorn Bata ni Kuroi Kage, She Talks Silence gave the album the eerie Long Ways, and New House did the sampledelic Natural Blessings (the last song to arrive, just a couple of days before the album went off to press, and which much to my shame I misprinted as “Nature Blessings” on the jacket — and which also ensured I’d be an insufferable grammar nazi come time to print the Hysteric Picnic CD jacket the following year).She Talks Silence: Long Ways The main problem was in knowing exactly what was going to be on the album, and as with the New House track, right up until the final day or so it wasn’t completely fixed. It wasn’t just a problem for printing the track listing, but also for the CD itself. Bands like Futtachi and macmanaman delivered songs that ran to over seven minutes, and at one point there was real danger of it becoming a double album (I went as far as making an alternative track list where I worked out how the tracks would divide over two discs just in case). There were also moments where tensions ran a bit high. New House didn’t make a fuss over the mistake on the jacket, but one of the other bands (no, I’m not naming names: they did a very good song and it didn’t turn into any kind of feud) was very particular about every aspect of how they wished to be presented with tempers flaring on both sides. The problem of projects like this where everyone (myself included) is working pro bono is that you never have the cushion of money to fall back on, so everything comes down to self satisfaction, and often in a related sense to pride. In a small society like the indie/underground scene, however, the axiom of “don’t piss people off” is a solid general rule. It’s a contradiction of rock’n’roll and punk: both bands and labels are in it in the first place because they’re in some way dissatisfied or disaffected, but within the circle you find yourself, you often have to keep under control the same impulses that led you there in the first place. In addition to Hyacca, fellow Fukuoka crazies macmanaman (the best band named after a twinkle-toed former Liverpool winger in the whole world) recorded a live version of their song Michael, which I retitled Michael in Utero partly because it was recorded at a venue called Utero and partly because the combination of a Michael Jackson reference and a Nirvana reference amused me. Along with Tokyo postpunk trio Tacobonds’ superb Ane with its deft boy-girl vocal call and response (by now you must know how I dig that sort of thing) and slowly building dynamic tension, that made three superb recordings at Utero by the same engineer. You want to do good recordings cheap? Get yourself your own live venue and get the staff to do it.Tacobonds: Ane Still in Kyushu, Kobayashi Dorori and cynicalsmileisyourfavorite from Kumamoto are also on there. The former contributed an oddball nursery rhyme about whales called Shepherd, while the latter contributed the baffling Carnival. I’m still not sure what I think of Carnival now. It has so much going on, with the insistent dance beat, the post-hardcore shrieking, and you’ve got to admire the balls of the way the one guy just throws everything he’s got into his bit of the vocal melody with zero regard for whether he even gets close to the right notes. But at the same time, cynicalsmileisyourfavorite are one of those bands that are all about what happens in the moment. Carnival is usually a chaotic babble of freshly improvised nonsense, but for the recording they tried to work something out and make a proper song of it, and so while the results are, well, they’re something, they’ don’t quite sound like the band when they’re just left to be themselves. Jebiotto are a very similar kind of band in that regard, but their track, Deacon Punk, with its mad cat meows, dirty synths and semi-inebriated sounding vocals, treads that path more assuredly. But like I said, with cynicalsmile you can’t not admire the sheer weight of passion they hurl at it and for some reason I always come out of hearing Carnival with a smile on my face. I’m just not sure why.The Mornings: Fu-ji One of the biggest motivating factors for me while putting DA1AM together was the existence of Nagoya label Knew Noise’s wonderful Ripple compilation of local Nagoya bands. Throughout the production process I was listening to Ripple and my gradually forming compilation and comparing them. I would just not be beaten by this collection from one mere city (and not even Tokyo!) Pop-Office contributed to both Ripple and DA1AM, and it’s interesting that both they and Extruders off this CD went on to make albums for Knew Noise. In any case, both albums to me seem to come from a similar kind of taste, and I’ve been keen to make more connections in Nagoya ever since. On the current rate, Call And Response’s next proper compilation is due towards the end of 2015, which will be just in time for the label’s ten year anniversary. In the meantime, there were new Mir and Hysteric Picnic releases to think of.

Dancing After 1AM is available now from Call And Response’s online shop.

Top 20 Releases of 2013: No.9 – Puffyshoes – Puffyshoes

This no-fi duo bade us farewell in 2013 with a typically DIY valedictory statement, releasing an album on a self-titled, self-released double cassette, with slightly different versions of exactly the same track list on each tape. It was made available through the band’s web site and a handful of live performances before the band unhelpfully imploded, sputtering to a close a couple of months before their planned end — but then Puffyshoes were never a band to do something they didn’t feel like out of a sense of mere professionalism.Puffyshoes: Matilda

There’s a contradiction at the heart of Puffyshoes’ music, which at once affects to be confessional and intimate, but at the same time exists in a fantasy world where the band are forever living in a faintly unreal teenage fantasy of dream lovers, infused with the innocence of 60s girl group harmonies and ramshackle 70s punk energy. Puffyshoes fall in love so many times throughout the course of the album and yet for all they they seem to be playing characters, there’s a level at which you suspect they half believe it’s true, and this tension inherent in the illusion that is so alluring that it should be real gives the album its sense of genuinely affecting, fragile yearning. Don’t Wake Me Up, they cry, and they mean it.Puffyshoes: I’m in Love with a Boy from USA

The songwriting follows along lines that will be familiar to anyone who knows the group (or anyone who knows the also recently departed Vivian Girls), but the songwriting is better than anything they’ve so far released, adding an extra tinge of regret to their passing. Tonight is built round a dirty riff straight out of The Creeps’ Down at the Nightclub but overlaying it with honey-sweet harmonies, Why is just the most beautiful, simple, plaintive melody they’ve ever done, while I’m in Love with a Boy from USA and the frankly pretty silly I Wanna be Your Shoe are joyous one-minute bursts of headbanging punk. You can dip into the album anywhere and come out with something equally gorgeous though. Given Puffyshoes penchant for splitting up and reforming on a pretty much biannual basis, don’t bet against them making a comeback at some point in the future, but at the moment that seems unlikely and this album is a jubilant, heartbreaking memorial.Puffyshoes: Goodbye to You

Guardian Song of the Week: Puffyshoes, “Goodbye to You”

This week’s pickup for The Guardian’s music from around the world guest blogging series is from a much-loved duo who are leaving us with so much unfulfilled potential.Puffyshoes: Goodbye to You

The joy you get listening to Puffyshoes is always tinged with an edge of frustration at all the could’ve beens in their career. For all their fiercely lo-fi ethos, their songwriting has an undeniable power to make people swoon, lovestruck, and yet they’ve never quite been able to capitalise on the goodwill their charm and sweet, sweet tunes have brought them in the Tokyo indie scene through which they have for the past few years drifted like ghosts. The announcement that their newly released cassette album will be their last gives an extra bite to the 60s girl group melancholy of songs like Goodbye to You.

A lot of bands (the Vivian Girls have obvious parallels here) use the aesthetics of lo-fi and indie fanzine culture, and as mainstream pop music becomes ever more corporatised and alien, the appeal of something more wilfully down-to-earth in its production values and tunesmithery is obvious, but with Puffyshoes, you get the sense that it goes deeper: that the band exists as a kind of window into a faintly dysfunctional private world, like the “Fourth World” of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”. In that sense, the goodbye that the duo bid in this song could be read as both a heartwrenching farewell to each other, and to a future that they deserved but never seemed to really want.