Make Believe Melodies For July 25, 2022
*rubbing my temple, having to write about Cornelius again*
Fake Creators — FAKE EP
The strongest argument for plotting out details anyone could make in under 15 minutes. Fake Creators brings together electro-pop pioneer De De Mouse with math/post rock four-piece LITE, and this is a combination that makes tons of sense before you even here a note of their FAKE EP. Both projects revel in precision, De De Mouse making sure every digital chirp and sliced-up vocal yelp falls just into the right place while LITE…I mean, they are an instrumental outfit focused on two crannies of rock demanding you roll extra long sheets of graph paper to make. The trick with this new collective is making sure none of the wire shows.
The four tracks here pull it off, and do so while flexing new sonic territory for both. Opener “Here Come The Fake Jets” starts everything strong, with LITE’s guitar chug propelled forward by De De Mouse’s skittering elements, before it opens up and adds elements of jazz to the rush (high compliment here that this sounds inspired by the similar dizzying kaeldiscope of Cosmogramma). “When You Fake Sleep” offers the best merger of their two sides, with delicate guitar strumming running up against muffled vocal samples and, eventually, a rush of neon electronics, both brinigng out new dimensions in the other. Then they both get wild with “Look At Me Not,” where they offer up their band-assisted read on footwork, both being reverent (like, these guys know it well) but also just off in a way that lets them add their own spice to it. It’s also the moment this project really nudges their primary creators into new space, revealing even more potential off of an already impressive start. Listen above.
Noah — “gemini - mysterious lot”
A song inviting you to fly further and further into dream. Noah — responsible for some of my favorite albums of the last decade — excels at pulling listeners in to an alternate sonic world, one built from the notes we know but refashioned into something surreal. The piano, the bass, the beat, the softly spoken French pillowed by a chorus of Noah’s come together to form an elegant escape slide into fantasy on the first preview of her forthcoming album Noire, which is shaping up to be a 2022 highlight. Listen above.
Boogie Idol — Otona Ga Kieru Hi
Speaking of longtime favorites, Boogie Idol’s ability to turn sounds lost to used bins and Aeon in-store soundtracks into shimmering, emotional fireworks remains unparalleled. Alongside his recent Rain Dragon Records release, Otona Ga Kieru Hi continues to find him celebrating the joys of percieved junk, with this album featuring some slick MIDI sax and full-blown dance ecstasy on “Romance Bluebird.” Get it here, or listen above.
Dempagumi.Inc — “DNA”
At some point, I lost touch with Dempagumi.Inc, but whenever I check in on them I can always count on the group…whoever the heck is in it…to have at least a few charming moments bordering on local theater absurdity around. That might be the highest compliment an idol outfit can get. New album DEMPARK!!! is pretty bright-eyed, though nothing comes close to the seven-minute-plus “DNA,” where the group recite a letter written to their future selves over Disney pomp. The mix of ridiculousness and real heart central to the group. Listen above.
Oyubi — Chirp EP
A welcome gust of icy wind during a hot summer. Oyubi maximizes machine steeliness to create floor-focused liveliness. The speedy “Can’t Jit” unfolds like Earthbound fight music, with someone spamming PSI Freeze to send the song into whole new directions, while chirp interrupts minimal bounce with warmer vocal samples, only to be boxed out soon after. Get it here, or listen above.
Peterparker69 — “tours”
Remember when Post Malone looped the chorus of his song “Rockstar” as a way to game chart systems back in 2017? Highly prescient for about 15 different reasons, but especially because of how much music in a TikTok-dictated world now pretty much plays out the same way. Not a bad thing, as long as the hook really works! Peterparker69’s “tours” clocks in at 80 seconds, but all of it plays out like a sweet and surprisingly innocent fever dream. Their name offers all the hints you need about whether they’re open to goofing off, but alongside “Flight To Mumbai,” “tours” shows they are seriously one of the best social-media-age melody makers going in Japan. Listen above.
Cornelius Featuring Mei Ehara — “Kawaru Kieru”
Happy one year anniversary to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics! Remember those? No? Well, yeah, but you see it consumed media coverage in this country for like a year and a half, some people aghast at the notion of holding this event during a pandemic and others going hard the other way, that only Japan could pull it off. Not a bell? What about pictogram man, remember pictograms?
Yeah, no one remembers any of the Summer Games, which is both a mark against and for Tokyo. For all the doomsday forecasting leading up to the first event, the sporting side of the Olympics went off relatively free of scandal or incident — while the Opening Ceremony, yeeesh. Central to that one was Cornelius’ history of bullying coming into the global spotlight. I’m not here to get into the weeds about that again…you can watch the two-hour Dommune special to see the “why were we all angry” side make its case…but one fallout from that was the sense Cornelius would step away from music for a bit, at the very least to let everything blow over.
Well, a year turned out to be all that was needed, though it’s more like everyone linked to him now has to deal with it. Keigo Oyamada is all over headlines right now, albeit fractured across topics. NHK’s Design Neo kids show, which previously called on Cornelius for a soundtrack, unveiled a new set of artists to bring the program to life. Supergroup METAFIVE’s “lost” album — banished from store shelves while the Olympic brew-ha-ha played out — will finally come out later this year, although it being billed as their “last album” carries with it the sense of “just get this fucking thing out of here already.”
Most tellingly…Cornelius himself is back. He’ll play Fuji Rock later this week, but ahead of that he shared a new song called “Kawaru Kieru,” featuring Make Believe Melodies’ favorite Mei Ehara and lyrics by Shintaro Sakamoto. Well great, time to grapple with this ape earlier than expected. “Kawaru Kieru” as pure musical offering …alright? That’s largely thanks to Ehara’s vocals, which unfurl between Oyamada’s metronome experiments and turn slight surrealism into something pretty. The biggest knock against it musically is that it’s slow like a lava lamp, rather than slow like an fading memory, which is what he did well on Mellow Waves. He’s just letting sound swirl around, taking up time like he knows its better not to say anything,1 but leaving room for one to fill it in themselves. Listen above.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of July 11, 2022 To July 17, 2022
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 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 trip down…the Oricon Trail.
Snow Man — “Orange Kiss” (830,163 Copies Sold)
Yeah, J-pop’s doing fine domestically. “Orange Kiss” nearly moved a million units in its first week out, easily becoming the best selling single of the year so far. I think they have better songs, but mark this as Snow Man’s moment of true ascension, with numbers easily putting them up among the heavyweights of the music industry.
News And Views
COVID-19…it’s back for the summer! Hooray. Tokyo case numbers reached record numbers last week while the entire nation saw a spike. Critical cases remain low so it’s not all gloom and doom, but the latest wave is impacting industries across the board. This includes the music industry. Tatsuro Yamashita caught the virus and had to postpone some Sapporo dates. Sakurazaka46 cancelled the major W-KEYAKI FES. after several members of the group tested positive. The kabuki-equivalent of a major idol festival also got cancelled.
This all comes right before the start of the main stretch of the summer music festival season, one anticipated to be a return-ish to normal after two derailed years. And right on cue, Fuji Rock announced two big cancellations Monday night in Japan, as YOASOBI and Black Pumas won’t be trekking out to Niigata this weekend. I’d be stunned if they are the last. Barring something Outbreak (1995) level wacky, I think every fest will happen…but not in the forms they are promising now.
Yumi Matsutoya celebrates 50 years of her career this October with a huge best-of compilation.
Temporal Drift is prepping OZ DAYS LIVE '72-'73 Kichijoji: The 50th Anniversary Collection, a special edition of a compilation created for the final shows of the titular live house. Based on my research for this article, this is going to be rad.
My original idea for a newsletter this week was to listen to only the lo-fi Johnny’s stream for like two days straight…maybe I still will, but uhhhhh a man has his limits. Anyway…a really clever idea, shout out the Johnny’s Store for being on top of how people absorb music in the 2020s.
Jimin of BTS shared a song called “Okinawa” by the Korean duo 92914 on Weverse. Song promptly topped Japan’s Trending 50 chart on Spotify for three days. Powerful guy! Too bad he upped sleepy beach-bore pop, but the market corrected itself by allowing Nayeon’s much more fun “POP!” to tower over said chart for like five days now, but good luck getting blog posts on that.
The parent company of famed Shibuya club-music store Technique filed for bankruptcy.
Metropolis profiles Kashiwa Wang, who quit his salaryman job to go play handpan in Taipei.
Russell Thomas digging into some of that kankyo ongaku for The Japan Times.
This isn’t about music per se, but involves ASOBI SYSTEM (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Yasutaka Nakata, etc.)…Hot Topic, bringing Japanese culture straight to Japan! OK, it’s more like they have US designs based on Studio Ghibli IP, so not quite worthy of that much cynicism. Me, I’m wondering when every male model in the States started looking like Jack Harlow.2
I wrote about the power of anime to lift up Japanese music to wider audiences in this week’s Sound Off at The Japan Times. SG5, LDH’s Sailor-Moon-inspired pop group targeting international markets, stands as an intriguing test case to watch to see if it can go further than one-off song hits on streaming into something more sustained. You’ll just have to believe me that this exists because it hasn’t been uploaded to the site yet.
One other artist I think encapsulates how these medians can intersect…VTuber Mori Calliope, who released her major-label debut EP this week. She also held a concert. Real Sound has an interesting column about the EP, arguing it’s the intersection of “net rap and K-pop.” A great hook that got me reading…and the author calls “Zimzalabim” Red Velvet’s masterpiece which I don’t quite agree with but respect completely3…though I’m not fully onboard with. Still, a daring take I salute, you don’t get a lot of those in the online Japanese music space.
Jonas Blue working with BE:FIRST? Alright.
If we’re constructing a canon of “most influential J-pop songs of the 2010s,” I think Austin Mahone’s “Dirty Work” as highlighted in Blouson Chiemi’s famous “career woman” skit needs to be on the list. Mainly, it’s surprise success convinced every major label in Japan that the best way to break a Western artist into the market is pair them with a comedian. Doja Cat, your time has arrived, because Naomi Watanabe features on a special version of “Kiss Me More.”
Every baseball team in Japan is going to try to replicate Nippon Ham’s success with the Kitsune Dance…but what the Orix Buffaloes miss like a routine grounder is you need a truly attention-wrecking song like “The Fox,” not NHK e-TV-level jingles. Good luck with this.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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God, could you imagine if he tried an Enon Kawatani-type meta song about his scandal?
Every under-25-looking white guy I’ve seen around Tokyo since this spring also looks like Jack Harlow…is this the simulation everyone’s always talking about?
It’s definitely their last “great” single, and is aging spectacularly.