Make Believe Melodies For April 6, 2021
*sound of car horn honking on loop*
Tohji, Loota, Brodinski — KUUGA
The beauty of Tohji is his refusal to settle. He animated the best Japanese song of 2020 and underlined in Sharpie every quality that should make him every major label in Japan’s top signing target in 2021. What has he done so far this year? Release limited-edition boxers and link up with compatriot/ “It G Ma” guest Loota and producer Brodinski to…get extra weird. You’d think KUUGA would be Tohji’s opportunity to shout “I’m working with the guy who helped produce ‘Black Skinhead!’” and try to get some attention. Instead, he’s made his CAPS LOCK, the album electronic producer Yasutaka Nakata created with his CAPSULE project that featured two jams and a lot of avant sound, running from jallopy horns mixing with creaking floorboards to ominous ticking clock soundscapes. That was an artist pivoting away from populist gestures in favor of pure experimentation, resulting in a total curve sticking out…gloriously…from their catalog.
KUUGA never quite gets to the “what if a Model T Ford was the foundation for a song?” level of that, but it does find Tohji going more molecular than anything since angel, even more than “Oreo.” His voice goes full angelic on “Aegu” — bathed in light, Sistine Chapel shit! — before getting to work over a beat built out of layered heavy breathing on “Yodaka.” Brodinski throws acid swells and minimalist pounding his way, and Tohji’s response is to coat his voice in more Auto-tune and see how out-of-body he can get (that little run to start “Naked!”). Here’s Tohji looking at the path the heavens have placed before him and delivering a high-pitched electronic wail at it, shattering it into a million pieces. Listen above.
LIL SOFT TENNIS — Bedroom Rockstar Confused
If Tohji represents what should be a co-opted rapper plunging into the void, LIL SOFT TENNIS captures what happens when an experimental oddball discovers hip-hop. Few indie artists in Japan are as all over the place as this Kansai creator, a K/A/T/O MASSACRE party satellite who merges the emotional honesty of SoundCloud rap with the just-try-whatever fuckitall of a 20 something with access to MacSpeak (see last year’s disjointed Season). Bedroom Rockstar Confused finds the young creator sticking with one sonic thread — rap colliding with pop-punk-adjacent rock, kind of an Aeon version of Machine Gun Kelly — to create their most confident offering to date. It can still get a bit dank — “Medicine” veers way too far off path from the more melodic rap-rock LIL SOFT TENNIS does best — but highlights like “Bring Back” and “Lucid Dreams” find the genre smasher turning all that provocation into something memorable. Listen above.
emamouse — Distorted Bayer
Man, was I happy to hear emamouse dropping new music last week. Visiting their off-kilter sonic world is always a treat, and Distorted Bayer offers one of their most intricate offerings yet, without losing any of the quirk that makes trips into this dimension so charming. Get it here, or listen above.
cagpie — “Sakura No Michi”
Despite being one of the safer activities one could participate in during a pandemic, I did not indulge in hanami this year. Walked by plenty of beautiful cherry trees, but didn’t stop to eat any food or drink booze under them. Shame! Thankfully, producer cagpie’s “Sakura No Michi” offers a “digital fusion” rendition of what the season is all about, filling in all the pink-colored joy I missed out on this year. Listen above.
mori_de_kurasu — Landscape
Music for inaka fantasies. Get it here, or listen above.
Utena Kobayashi — 6 roads
There was a very brief moment where Utena Kobayashi was being positioned as a possible left-field breakthrough artist, creating slow-burning synth-pop that in 2016 maybe had an outer shot at the outskirts of the mainstream Japanese music industry. That didn’t happen, but it has allowed Kobayashi to embrace her true spirit as an electronic soundscape composer. 6 roads finds her free of any commercial worries, crafting electronic marches and borderline new age meditations. She’s fully invested in it, though, making for one of the more engrossing Japanese electronic releases of the year so far. Listen above.
Femme Fatale — “Kodoo”
I’m not sure if we will ever get new Suiyoubi No Campanella material again, but luckily that project’s producer Kenmochi Hidefumi remains in demand. Idol duo femme fatale recruited him for a pair of new songs, and they are…basically Suiyoubi No Campanella tunes. “Kodoo,” above, features all the hallmarks of that genre-blurring outfit, down to the speedy talk-rap interludes. While this isn’t quite at the same just-go-for-it energy of Suiyoubi — neither member of femme fatale can capture the magic of KOM_I just going full spinning-top over Hidefumi’s music, creating couplets about mythology and curry like nothing — “Kodoo” reminds of its influence. Listen above.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of March 22, 2021 To March 28, 2021
Back in the day, the Oricon Music Charts were the go-to path to music stardom in Japan. Acts of all sorts traversed these lands, trying to sell as many CDs as possible in order to land a good ranking on a chart choosing to only count physical sales, even as the Internet came to be and the number of versions offered for sale got ridiculous. Today, with the country finally in on the digital, these roads are more barren and only looked at by the most fanatic of supporters needing something to celebrate. Yet every week, a new song sells enough plastic to take the top spot. So let’s take a drip down…the Oricon Trail.
Sexy Zone — “LET’S MUSIC” (172,554 Copies Sold)
The cringey Crown English title aside…Sexy Zone stay hot! After a decade of forgettable pop, Sexy Zone have emerged in 2021 as pretty good, even when just literally reciting a list of genres.
“Seapunk? Hopecore? Bubblegum Bass? Gorge?” (hat tip to Lyrical Nonsense for the lyrics)
Damn, it’s catchy though, boiling “Uptown Funk” down to its core and adding more horns. Besides being a better Bruno Mars song than the one Mars wrote for Arashi, it’s another standout for Sexy Zone, not quite at the level of “RIGHT NEXT TO YOU” but doing better than…pretty much anything else before.
News And Views
Olympic Opening Ceremony update: Shukan Bunshun obtained a copy of MIKIKO’s proposed ceremony for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics…and it is a pop cultural knockout. An absolute failure of the government that this won’t be on display in July (especially since I can’t think of anything people around the world want more than…pure escapism into fantasy worlds!).
Avex, in need of some China cash, forgot about the whole “One China” policy and…well…
Every Japanese entertainment company is going to have to decide in the next five years whether they are willing to take the risks that come with the Chinese market to make big profit…or just avoid it entirely. It’s going to be one of the biggest developments to keep an eye on…and thankfully, we have Avex plunging headfirst into it.
Pop-punk label Pizza Of Death…is getting into the IT game, by teaming with a company from this sector to form a new company that will find ways to enhance the music experience.
Enough time has passed from all those scandals that TOKIO can go back to promoting Fukushima Prefecture.
I missed that Tower Records Japan had published a list of Top 15 City Pop records…here it is! Pretty chalk, though any list celebrating LIGHT’N UP is a winner for me.
One of the more viral songs in Japan as of late was Motoki Omori’s (guitarist and vocalist of yeah-you-can-skip-it rock band Mrs. GREEN APPLE) “French,” below. An article in Real Sound argues it’s one of the first attempts at a Japanese version of “bedroom” TikTok-friendly pop, referring to the somewhat vague idea of genre-less pop in the mold of Tate McRae and Conan Gray (with the spirit of Billie Eilish not far removed). An interesting development, even though I think post-Vocaloid (we really need a name for this stuff) captures what Japanese Gen Z-ers want just as well.
The latest installment of the newsletter Chaoyang Trap is all about Ryuichi Sakamoto fandom in China, and it’s one of those things that just…like, reminds me how little I know about the world. Which is the best kind of writing, really.
You can actually still support artists even after Bandcamp Friday!
PUI PUI MOLCAR SOUNDTRACK
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies