Cocco may have come out of retirement back in 2005, but the artist who emerged from that hiatus was not the same who entered it. SINGER SONGER, her collaboration with members of Quruli, was breezy but rushed. 2006’s Zansaian attempted to conform to the Cocco template but fell short. The following year’s Kira Kira didn’t even make an attempt.
She managed to keep the birth of her son secret till he sang backup vocals on Kira Kira, and it’s a good guess his birth was responsible for soothing Cocco’s stormy inner world.
Cocco hasn’t released much music since 2007, but she has published more books. Cocco-san no Daidokoro essentially serves as a promotional item for a collection of essays with the same title. Regardless, a bit of the old Cocco surfaces in the new.
No, the wailing rocker chick from the early aughts doesn’t stage a comeback, but the tunefulness and majesty of her grander moments inform "Kinuzure" and "Ai ni Tsuite". "the end of Summer" is so transparent as to waft away, but "Bye Bye Pumpkin Pie" brings her back down to solid aural ground.
Kira Kira had a maverick, unpolished feel that wasn’t as refreshing as it should have been, but that kind of looseness gives Cocco-san no Daidokoro some room to breathe.
Cocco’s voice sounds radiant, her harmonizing the best it’s been in a long time.
Cocco-san no Daidokoro doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it’s also enough to crave for more. She struck a nice balance between her newer, lighter songs and her older, heavier sound. A full album would be nice?
Do As Infinity, like many bands, is greater than the sum of its parts. When the duo announced it would break up in 2005, it seemed Do As Infinity had run its course. At the same, it was difficult to picture Van Tomiko and Owatari Ryo in another context.
Owatari’s band, MISSILE INNOVATION, didn’t have much innovation, and Van? Her solo career looks like a lot of bad planning.
First, she springs a solo album, Farewell, in 2006 with no singles to precede it — an odd course of action for a pop star in Japan. Then she releases a series of promising singles that … don’t lead to an album. Rather, she spends two years releasing covers before those singles are collected onto an album.
And the resulting work sounds like … Do As Infinity.
LEO Imai’s major label debut in 2008, FIX NEON, held a lot of promise. Capturing the feel of New Wave without ripping it off wholesale, the album demonstrated Imai’s keen ability to synthesize the essence, not the sound, of a style.
He just sang too many "Oh oh oh"s while doing so.
He’s mitigated the wordless vocalizing on his second major label album, LASER RAIN, while also performing a major upgrade to the music. The music goes deeper into the dance roots of his refracted ’80s sound, dipping into some of the ’70s better moments, while maintaining a foothold in rock.
The opening single, "Synchronize", gets excessive with the Autotune, but with the spare disco bass and the space age effects, he’s more Sam Sparro than Duran Duran.
One of the best singles Shiina Ringo ever recorded was not recorded by Shiina Ringo.
"Shoujo Robot" was the last single Tomosaka Rie would release before concentrating her attention on acting, leaving her abbreviated music career behind. Despite Tomosaka’s starring role, the three-track release was pure Shiina — part mechanical, part noir, all sophistication and all rock.
Compared to the pop confections of Tomosaka’s preceding albums, "Shoujo Robot" was the protein anomaly, a substantive ear meal.
That was in 2000, when Shiina was still a fairly new but rising commodity and Tomosaka was a burgeoning actress. Nine years have passed, and Shiina has become rock royalty. Back then, Tomosaka was boosting Shiina’s career. This time, it’s the other way around.
For Toridori., Tomosaka’s first album in almost a decade, she’s hooked up with Shiina and her Tokyo Jihen crew, plus members of Clammbon and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. The difference from her early work is stark.
Utada Hikaru’s 2004 English-language debut, Exodus, came at a transitional time for the singer creatively.
The reliable template she forged in Japan over the course of three albums showed signs of wear, and what works at home risks getting lost in translation abroad. (Although for the multi-national Utada, where is home? And where is abroad?)
So she underwent a drastic sonic makeover, creating a heavy-handed work that bent too far backward to distance itself from what had gone before. Beneath all the sonic sizzle of Exodus was a songwriter reaching the end point of a style.
It took a few albums, but Shiina Ringo eventually distinguished her early solo work from her latter-day efforts with Tokyo Jihen. 2007’s Goraku even found her abdicating songwriting duties to her bandmates.
So when Shiina announced the release of her first new original solo album in six years, it was plausible to think the border between Ringo-chan and Tokyo Jihen would be maintained.
The pre-release single "Ariamaru Tomi," a tender rock ballad, hinted as much. It was a shock, then, when Sanmon Gossip turned out to be … a Tokyo Jihen album.
Some artists can get away with recording the same album over and over again. Antony Hegerty’s distinctive voice almost requires the most minimal of accompaniment.
So it’s no surprise The Crying Light contains more of the same sparse orchestral arrangements employed on previous albums. A full band pops up once, but for the most part, it’s Hegerty, a piano and a few other instruments to punctuate the open spaces.
That makes it all too easy to compare The Crying Light with the critically-lauded I Am a Bird Now, and personally, it’s not looking good for the former.
Hegerty can write a poignant piece of music like anyone’s business, but the kind of focus that served I Am a Bird Now so well is missing here. The album is just a bit too dour.
It does have its moments. The title track is a wonderful showcase for Hegerty’s unsettling vibrato. "Epilepsy Is Dancing" is an evocative title, but the song itself is sweetly lilting. "Aeon" eschews the piano for guitars, with Hegerty digging deep into his inner gospel singer.
The rest of the album revels a bit too much in transparency, pushing less to be less, not more. Hegerty has a compelling voice, but the compelling music that usually goes along with it isn’t quite there on The Crying Light.
When … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead made its more prog rock influences known on 2005’s Worlds Apart, listeners familiar with the band’s output were left wondering, “Hah?”
This foray into seemingly unfamiliar territory made sense, given the tight construction of the band’s previous albums, but it was hard not to miss the bombast of Source Code & Tags and Madonna. Thankfully, The Century of Self brings everything together.
The loud crush of guitars propel such tracks as "Isis Unveiled", "Far Pavillions" and "Halcyon Days", but they veer into tangents that don’t feel needless.
All the album’s tracks blend seamlessly, returning to the solid architecture that anchored the band’s early work. Festival Thyme, the four-track EP that previewed the album, didn’t capture the depth and breadth the album. The EP’s tracks — including "The Bells of Creation" and "Inland Sea" — make more sense in the context of the album.
Pianist Clay Morris adds a new dimension to … Trail of Dead’s sound, providing a velvet glove to the iron fist that is the guitar work of Conrad Keely and Jason Reese. The band, on the whole, sound more fiery than ever, the album recorded live to tape (or hard drive?) than meticulously multitracked.
The Century of Self brings … Trail of Dead back closer to its roots while taking the best bits of the recent past. The band has always experimented with its sound, but this time, they sound complete.
Some listeners admired the audacity of the band’s reckless abandon. Other listeners (myself included) found the wild improvisation lacking and unskilled.
In the end, ZAZEN BOYS III was an extreme album, and going further would have taken Mukai Shuutoku and company down some creatively treacherous paths.
Instead, Mukai stepped back. He went to long-time producer Dave Fridmann to helm the follow-up, and the band started to experiment with synthesizers and beat boxes. ZAZEN BOYS 4 is the result, and it reigns in all the ideas Mukai has been exploring up to this point into something actually cohesive.
Before VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE released its full-length debut album, Android ~like a house mannequin~, the band did a few live shows with POLYSICS. The one-note, Ritalin-immune influence of VOLA’s tourmates could be felt all over the album, and it didn’t do it any favors.
Some of that unfortunate residue can still be heard on VOLA’s major label debut, Halan’na-ca Darkside, but it’s been mitigated with the tunesmithing from 2005’s brilliant debut, Waiting for My Food. Despite the compact 20-minute length, Halan’na-ca Darkside is actually an incredibly ambitious release.
(I guess you can tell I can’t fucking stand POLYSICS.)