Make Believe Mailer #130: A Look Back At mitsume
A Stroll Through The Band's Albums
mitsume (2011)
I don’t know the first time I heard the name “mitsume,” but my Osaka-based self approached this quartet with skepticism.
It’s somewhat quaint to reflect on now, but back then I really did lean in to the “Kansai vs. Kanto” mindset. This even applied to music. I thought everything happening in my region was exhilarating, and far more mixed up than what I had encountered in Tokyo.
At some point, “mitsume” started coming into my view, thanks to a combination of people in the capital talking them up plus the eventual release of its self-titled debut album, which earned prominent rack space at indie stores such as Flake Records. It’s very much the sound of a band working through its influences in search of an identity. The four members of mitsume — Moto Kawabe, Mao Otake, Yojiro Suda and no-full-name-given Nakayaan — connected at Keio University over a shared love of Western indie-rock. A familiar story, shared by countless outfits in the capital, and one that comes across clearly on its eponymous debut album.
On mitsume, the members were figuring out their sound, veering between chiller tempos and speedier indie-pop dashes, all of them easily traceable to what was happening in the States. A few moments rose above — opener “Kurage” revealed a deceptively laid-back groove concealing precision, with lyrics veering between the mundane and the surreal — but it’s the sound of four young guys figuring out just what mitsume is.
There was a twist, though, that I would not have known upon the release of mitsume and would only come to know a few years later.
"We didn't know what Tokyo's indie-rock scene was like, we were mostly just listening to music online at home," Suda told me for an interview with The Japan Times. "We weren't focused on playing live, just on recording music first and sharing it through sites like MySpace and SoundCloud."
It should have been clear — I came across them through MySpace first, which is where it seemed like all of the group’s early buzz was coming from. Here was a band playing with sounds once heavily associated with physical spaces and scenes…but using the internet as its primary home ground.
Even more than a decade later, when mitsume announced they were taking an extended break at the end of this past September, it remains hard to tie them to any specific neighborhood in Tokyo. Usually you can peg a group as a “Koenji band” or a “Shimokitazawa band” or start zooming out to larger regions like a “Kangawa band.” I don’t think you can do that with mitsume. They were a slippery group hard to pin down…but offering a sturdy foundation for an era of Japanese indie rock.
eye (2012)
One of the very first shows I saw after moving to Tokyo permanently happened to be mistume. The quartet hosted an event called Summer Night Recordings at the cozy Shibuya 7th Floor venue in Dogenzaka. It would be my first time seeing them live, and in retrospect the bill also includes another Tokyo indie-rock staple in the form of singer-songwriter Skirt, who has gone on to become a prolific act in his own right and an in-demand songwriter for others.
Neither of them were the reason I schlepped out from Nerima ward on this August Saturday over a decade ago. The draw for me was the far fuzzier outfit Super VHS, a project nailing a nervy balance between the then on-trend chillwave vibes and familiar indie-pop melodies. I loved their set and probably could have gone home happy after just catching them…but hey, it’s a weekend, let’s enjoy the show.
Glad I did, because mitsume’s headlining performance helped me come around to them. This event happened weeks before the quartet released second full-length album eye, though the bulk of the set list would be made up of songs from that forthcoming collection. I liked those numbers way more than what appeared on the self-titled. Back then, they sounded like a band trying to see how they fit into a familiar indie-rock template. On eye, they started figuring out how they could bend it to their own means.
Most immediately, mitsume started using more electronics, giving songs like “Fly Me to the Mars” a wide-eyed wonder that wouldn’t be as pronounced without its synth stabs. It wasn’t as simple as “band buys keyboards,” as the actual revelation of this concert and eye was the way the band flirted with dance music. While they made space for familiar indie-rock sprints — on the ironically titled “Disco” — the bulk of the album found them playing with repetition and herky-jerk rhythms. This was still very much dance as interpreted by four music nerds fresh out of college geared towards a bunch of blog-obsessives capable of filing 7th Floor, but the stutter-step of “Towers” and guitar-shimmy of “Cider Cider” revealed a side to mitsume’s sound previously unexplored…and a really fun one at that.
It was also fitting given the atmosphere of Japanese indie music in 2012. These were the peak days of blogs, with a variety of Japanese language efforts exploring this niche emerging and doing a fantastic job of documenting the underground. It was a time when rock and electronic were crisscrossing in new ways, and mitsume made sense as a flag bearer for this period based on how they played with both sides on eye, coming across on record and live.
Sasayaki (2014)
This is mitsume’s best album as far as I’m concerned, because it’s the band laying out every side of their sonic curiosities for listeners, keeping nothing in the shadows.
“This time we tried to be more experimental," Otake told me when I interviewed them about the album. "If we made a mistake while playing a new song, we left it in to see how it sounded. "I listened to less American and British music, and instead listened to various psychedelic-rock compilations from other countries.”
The guitar-powered grooves of previous mitsume releases remain, but now they are jostled around and introduced to new sonic spaces. “Teitaya” brings in muffled drum machine beats to add a more pronounced club rhythm, yet the whole song sounds like it has been recorded in a cave, the dance touches at odds with everything else, an effect popping up later on too. There’s a lot more echo and Kawabe’s voice often sounds humid, mixed up with the music rather than rising above it. The melody on the title track feels like it is about to trip over itself, while slower moments such as “Boat” and “Park” let flakes of reggae in to the late-afternoon strolls. Something as subtle as the sound of a kick drum on “Iradachi” casts the band in a new light.
A large part of what makes Sasayaki such a Japanese rock gem for me is mitsume’s willingness to go outside of their comfort zone, to the point where little screw ups become essential to the album’s overall experimental vibe. It’s an honest-to-goodness “difficult third album” from a band that could have easily coasted on its indie-pop vibes, but chose instead to see how out there the project could get without losing its core sound.
Helping make this happen — and something I focused on when I chatted with the band for the first time — was its independence. Despite actually gaining a buzz eluding so many other bands from the community they came up from, mitsume did everything themselves, including paying for CD pressings. That meant no demands for a hit single, or a roadmap for how to become stars in five years. The group could do…whatever they wanted. Sasayaki is them making the most of that choice, and still something special all these years later.
A Long Day (2016)
In some alternative dimension, mitsume play a central role in the late 2010s “neo city pop” wave.
A Long Day isn’t quite in line with the funk-pop breakthroughs of the time courtesy of Suchmos or Lucky Tapes, but it also moves forward on similar grooves and themes, albeit from a 2010s Tokyo perspective rather than one shaped by a distant past. In many ways, the quartet’s fourth full-length feels like a beefed up version of its debut. The electronic touches have been scaled back in favor of a greater emphasis on guitar and bass, Kawabe’s vocals float up to the top rather than get lost in the sound around him, and the whole affair offers more moments of indie-pop upbeat-ness. That’s especially true out the gate, with the first two songs being throwbacks to the style they started out with…and highlights of that approach, showing a comfort at writing this kind of rock.
As A Long Day goes on though, I start hearing a lot of the same sonic touches that would define a new wave of acts over the later part of the 2010s. This album is filled with mid-tempo numbers teasing guitar grooves that aren’t quite dance-floor ready…but seem built for a stroll through the city. “Objet” and “Tadayou Fune” slink ahead and features the kind of backing vocal touches that would give extra cool to the likes of Suchmos or Nulbarich, though in mitsume’s hands its all more minimal, less about capturing a lost sparkle but seeing how to create the same effect from as little as possible.
Even the more familiar driving-ahead rock songs feel, in retrospect, parallel to other developments that signaled a musical shift. Whether “neo city pop” in the style of Suchmos or the more Hosono-indebted sounds of a group like never young beach, the lyrics from this cohort leaned towards celebrating the everyday and choosing optimism in the face of everything (see the latter’s “Akarui Mirai,” a jaunty number about just how bright the future will be between snapshots of our protagonist…eating fancy pancakes? Very 2016.).
The words appearing in mitsume songs aren’t that much different, centered on the familiar while powdering them with a little poetic flair, but the situations all very relatable. There’s a song here with the translated title “Weather Report” that largely describes going outside and not knowing how the elements are going to act. There’s obviously a metaphor lurking behind that, but at its core this is in line with what was playing out in the greater Japanese rock space…though, in very mitsume fashion, the best of A Long Day avoids the obvious in favor of something a touch more subtle.
Ghosts (2019)
Some invitations are too eye-catching to pass up. Despite only coming back from the States a few days before, I decided I had to see the combination of mitsume and a solo Mac DeMarco at Liquidroom in early January, 2018.
Reading the email asking if I wanted to attend, I was struck by how at odds the two seemed, at least in my mind. DeMarco is a goofball with an earnest artistic side1, but even when playing his tenderhearted songs solo he’s prone to going into jokester mode. That’s not how I see mitsume at all, as both live and in interviews they are as laid-back and focused as you’ll get. Both trapeze similar styles, but with very different attitudes.
Yet seeing them share a bill in early 2018 kind of made sense. Despite being very different stage personas — a joke for mitsume was a quick commentary on their day, a gag for DeMarco was an extended bit about having a Japanese son truly running through the whole set (it was his Japan connect, long story) — the music of both moved at similar paces, with plenty of thematic overlap lyrically. The crowd was definitely influenced by DeMarco — these were the peak days of him being the coolest Western artist to Tokyo’s indie scene, with 60 percent of the crowd cosplaying as “degenerate Canadian singer-songwriter” — but totally in tune with mistume as well.
This memory influenced how I remembered Ghosts, as a kind of example of the DeMarco-era of Tokyo indie. Yet revisiting it for this essay I was blown away…it’s so much more, and far from just a stylistic artifact.
Clouding my memory and also influencing how I recieved it back in 2019 is “Esper,” probably the best pure indie-pop song mitsume ever wrote. Carrying the same sunny-day vibes as the then-dominating “neo city pop” sounds in Japan, mitsume weaved in a melancholy among the gallop, topped off by one of the group’s prettiest choruses. For me, it was kind of bigger than Ghosts itself.
I was wrong to think that! “Esper” remains a highlight, but Ghosts features some of mitsume’s wonkiest takes on indie-pop in its existence, with the band seemingly eager to explore how they could construct jaunty pop out of weird guitar tones and seemingly haunted piano melodies. My personal favorite mitsume period involved a heavy use of electronic which added a new texture to its sound, but Ghosts finds them doing something very similar with its usual set of instruments, revealing new dimensions on songs like the prickly “Futari” and the tropical-tinged “Namerakana Hibi.”
It’s really a great reminder of what made mitsume so special in the 2010s — while being tied to various movements and communities in the Tokyo indie world, they always found a way to offer a different perspective on it all. In any situation — online or IRL — they stood out.
VI (2021)
Technically the final mitsume album, VI is also the only full-length I’ve written about around these parts. Over three years later, I’m still mostly at the same place with it. It’s the band’s most hypnotic offering, using repetition and a focus on very mundane details to pull you in and make the moments where the group pivots in a new direction all the more exciting. It also includes some of the most interesting sonic details since Sasayaki, highlighted by the glassy notes on the ennui-soaked closer “Tonic Love.”
It’s not a major shift in sound but instead an attempt to once again find a new dimension to the group’s sound, this time unraveling songs more slowly and focusing on what emerges from focus. By this point, mitsume was a veteran band, but one still capable of finding ways to challenge themselves without losing its core approach.
By the 2020s. though, more had noticed this.
Drive EP (2023)2
At some point, the mitsume touch crossed over. While always representatives of Tokyo indie-rock for a certain type of mainstream media, the early 2020s saw the group appearing in unexpected places. It contributed two songs to the soundtrack for the anime series Sonny Boy3, and eventually were called on by the company formerly known as Johnny & Associates to write a very-mitsume song for the project 20th Century. As the years have gone on, Kawabe has started popping up more as a songwriter for J-pop acts, most notably becoming tight with singer-songwriter Aimyon, and helping craft one of the standout tracks4 from her latest album, below.
The greatest strength mitsume possessed might very well have been persistence. Going through the band’s discography, I thought a lot about the groups that were always in the same orbit as them, such as the aforementioned Super VHS or Teen Runnings. They and others in that space either changed sound completely at some point or simply stopped…often both. That’s just the reality of trying to navigate the music space in Japan, making mitsume an outlier. They moved at their own pace — like, both metaphorically and musically — and took time to explore all the angles of the mitsume sound.
At a certain point though, I’m sure one grows restless, and it makes sense that after a decade together, the individual members would want to explore their own interests. The Drive EP ends mitsume — either this current chapter of the band or the whole project if they don’t come back together — on a fitting note. The quartet still find a way to introduce new touches to its sound despite a break on the horizon (see the stand-up bass notes lurking within “Mevius,” which also functioned as the ending theme to a drama…more mitsume attention). Yet it’s the core elements of the band fully on display — the mid-tempo guitar grooves giving way to slightly more unexpected twists, the laid-back vocal delivery, the hints of something danceable in its indie-rock bones.
mitsume helped to define the sound of indie-rock in Japan during the 2010s — and eventually influencing far more than just that corner — by never being easy to define while still being distinctly itself. In the process, they left a strong discography and a deep influence still visible today.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Follow the Best Of 2024 Spotify Playlist here!
Here I add my favorite DeMarco ancedote ever which is…seeing him with the artist now known as CVN (then the head of Jesse Ruins) walk into 2.5D during a Zoom Lens showcase, ordering a Zima and loudly asking “is this alcohol?” Honestly…if I didn’t know what it was, I’d ask too!
Cheating a little bit as this is the only EP included here but…as the band’s last proper release and one not leading to an album (unlike preceding EPs), it feels fitting to give it a spotlight.
A fascinating collection of songs, featuring appearances from Taiwan’s Sunset Rollercoaster and South Korea’s Mid-Air Thief, among others. Revisit this one in 15 years!
Notably, this song also brings in members of DYGL and Brother Sun Sister Moon, making this kind of a 2010s Tokyo indie all-star jam. Which makes sense…if Warner Brothers doesn’t scoop Aimyon up early, I could easily have seen her becoming like, a Kakubarhythm staple.