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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).

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Shoegaze in Japan

I wrote an article for MTV 81 a few months ago about the current state of Japanese shoegaze, which seems to have got a bit of a shot in the arm from the My Bloody Valentine comeback and with Slowdive on their way to Japan this summer that little wave of interest perhaps hasn’t quite crested yet. Anyway, it took ages to be posted, which means it missed the Lemon’s Chair album release that I wrote it to coincide with, but it’s up now and a lot of what it says is still current. You can read the whole article here.

One of the things that came out of it was the way that shoegaze seems to have bled out into a lot of other genres now, and it’s especially interesting how many visual-kei musicians are involved in shoegaze as well. I suppose this has some parallels in the way bands like Deafheaven have drawn metal and shoegaze together.BP.: Goodbye Love

The article has a few embedded videos of some of the bands I talk about, and looking back, it’s worth noting that the Sugardrop album is one I definitely keep coming back to. The BP. album is probably the more interesting of the two though, mixing more styles together. On Goodbye Love you can hear it in the way it suddenly goes all metal at about the two-minute mark.The Earth Earth: Beautiful Future

I also really want to draw attention to the two new bands I mention in there. I’ve talked about The Earth Earth before, and they proudly wear their MBV influence on their sleeves with that perfectly recreated Kevin Shields distortion. When the vocals come in, however, it sounds more like Lush, without the washed out textures MBV drench their vocals in.Azma: Thousand Lights

Azma are less of a pastiche and perhaps a bit more musical in the sense of being technically minded. The Earth Earth feel essentially like a garage-punk band and their songs like pretty conventional pop tunes whereas Azma have that post-rock mindset that puts them more in the ballpark of local Fukuoka indie scenesters macmanaman. Both bands are good, but in different ways. The fact that they come from opposite ends of the country and have such contrasting approaches to the style made them a nice choice for the examples anyway.

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Top 20 Releases of 2013: No.14 – V/A – Dead Funny Compilation Vol.1

2013 saw a glut of new indiepop and shoegaze releases, and many of those were on the new Fukuoka-based label Dead Funny Records. This compilation can in a way stand for all of them, featuring as it does pretty much all the movers and shakers (or “standers and starers” as the case may be) in the world of Japanese 80s throwback indie guitar music. Highlights abound but standing out above all others is the gorgeous The Blind by Fukuoka’s Hearsays, with a guitar riff that hints at Happy End’s Kaze wo Atsumete, simple, catchy and affecting vocals, and a faintly dissonant underlying chord sequence.

But pop nuggets abound in Dead Funny Compilation Vol.1, with further highlights being Jappers’ jangly, uptempo Give It, Talk’s opening In Refrain Refrain, Old Lacy Bed’s Little Girl and The Paellas’ reverbtastic Fall Even Further. On the more feedback-heavy side, Nagoya’s Pop-Office have a winner with the driving, fuzz-soaked End of the Summer, The Earth Earth are another standout with the punky Empty Boy rather less of an obvious and direct My Bloody Valentine ripoff than some of their other material, and Azma Shoegaze Explosion’s (now just known as Azma) immense Thousand Lights a mind-shattering gut-punch of sound. Not quite fitting into either category is the Nephogram by Fancy Books, with its synth-led arrangement and distant vocals giving the compilation a bit of unexpected but nonetheless welcome Trembling Blue Stars-style romance.

Many of the tracks are incredibly rough, with the mix of Half Sports’ entry in particular almost indecipherable, but in many cases this serves to simply emphasise the naive charm that is such a point of appeal for much of this kind of music.

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