There was a time when Mukai Shuutoku wasn’t the force of avant-garde nature he is today.
Wrapping up a reissue campaign commemorating what would have been the band’s 10th anniversary, Omoide In My Head 4 ~(Chin) NG & Rare Tracks~ brings together the flotsam and jetsom of Number Girl’s output.
Compilation tracks, demos, live tracks — the two-disc set charts the development of Mukai’s muse in more detail than Omoide In My Head 1 ~Best & B-Sides~.
When the Carpenters were listed as an influence on Hem’s previous album, Eveningland, I braced myself for a sophomore slump.
The band’s debut album, Rabbit Songs, was my favorite album of 2002, and it was so good, I instantly wanted a second album. Eveningland arrived, and I found myself … not as mesmerized.
When news came down that No Word from Tom would contain outtakes, live recordings and b-sides, I thought it would be scattershot. As it turned out, the album’s clarity is threaded by its adventurous choices.
When I was in high school, I lamented the fact I lived and went to school just outside of the broadcast range of the local college radio station.
I didn’t understand the appeal of classic rock stations — why would anyone subject themselves to that overwrought Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin shit when Camper Van Beethoven and Sinéad O’Connor were far more interesting?
During the days of the Musicwhore.org Audiobin, I collected demographic information from registrants, and I discovered the average age of a person seeking out Japanese music was 18.
So I can just imagine readers out there now asking, "Why would Greg subject himself to that underwhelming Talking Heads and Morrissey shit when ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION and the Back Horn are far more interesting?"
The simple answer is because I’m old, and I’m going through my practice run for a mid-life crisis.
So yeah, you’re going to have to put up with more writing about old-people music.
It was a bold move for Shiina Ringo to form a band after a successful solo career. The standard operating procedure is to leave a band to go solo.
But there was a sense Shiina wasn’t totally ready for the leap to team player.
Tokyo Jihen’s debut album, Kyooiku, featured some dazzling performances, but it seemed the songs Shiina wrote for the album weren’t the right ones for this set of players.
Kyooiku might have sounded great with Gyakutai Glycogen (her touring band from 2000) or Hatsuiku Status (a one-off club band featuring members of Number Girl and DMBQ). But not with Tokyo Jihen.
With the ensemble’s second album, Shiina seems more comfortable as a member of a group, and Otona shows it.
I love Mukai Shuutoku for who he is. He is not, however, John Zorn.
ZAZEN BOYS’ third eponymous album brings the band back to the inscrutible improvisation that made its first album a chore. In fact, ZAZEN BOYS III goes further.
Mukai has pretty much abandoned any minimum requirement of songcraft. Opening track "Sugar Man" sets the tone — it starts with a menancing riff but quickly dissolves into a mess of spoken word, scratchy guitars and disjointed rhythms.
A friend of mine had a joke about the Cure — he called them “the Cure for Happiness”.
We lumped the Smiths in with that joke because back then fans of both bands came off as morose.
Morrissey’s moribund disposition preceded him — you didn’t need to hear him sing about how miserable he was. That was just a given.
So for years, I wrote him off, despite the fact I … actually found him kind of hot. (That immortal shot of him shirtless with his hand behind his head never fails to grab my attention.)
I think I like this album because it’s the underdog.
October barely made it onto U2’s early career retrospective, The Best of U2: 1980-1990, and it didn’t even get a listed track!
The most casual U2 fan could probably rattle off song titles from The Unforgettable Fire, War and maybe even Boy. But nobody seems to talk about October, and the band itself doesn’t seem to acknowledge the album’s existence.
And that’s odd because October isn’t anywhere near a sophomore slump.
I was introduced to XTC’s Skylarking through a rather unlikely source — the Hawaiʻi Public Library.
A branch of the library located by my high school had a cassette of Skylarking in its collection. I had just read a cover story about XTC in a music magazine, and I borrowed it.
I was blown away.
It became one of my favorite albums — not life-changing on the level of Kronos Quartet’s Black Angels but certainly comfort listening on the level of the Sugarcubes’ Life’s Too Good.
Funny thing is, I never owned a copy of the album until recently.