There are too many vectors by which to determine the success of this album. How does it compare to other Tokyo Jihen albums? How does it compare to the solo work of Shiina Ringo? Does Tokyo Jihen sound better when Shiina takes complete control of the songwriting? Or do the songwriting contributions of the band’s remaining members give a much-needed jolt to the Ringo enterprise?
Regardless of listener reaction, Goraku comes at an important time in the band’s life. The debut, Kyouiku, served as a transition for Shiina Ringo, solo artist, to become Shiina Ringo, band member. The follow-up, Otona, could be considered Tokyo Jihen’s true debut, with the quintet solidifying its sound and Shiina catering her writing specifically to her cohorts’ strengths.
Goraku, then, finds the band asserting itself as, well, a band, with creative duties spread among its members. By becoming more of a unit, Tokyo Jihen’s members are once again reinventing the whole. It’s the typical career arc of an ensemble in reverse.
TOKIE is no stranger to the marriage of indie rock and jazz improvisation. She played bass with LOSALIOS, the instrumental outfit led by former Blankey Jet City drummer Nakamura Tetsuya. It’s easy to assume there would be overlap between TOKIE’s own band, unkie, and her other gig with LOSALIOS.
Perhaps.
Both bands share the ability to play hard, fast, loud and free, but where LOSALIOS can get expansive — saxophone is a regular component — unkie focuses strictly on its core. The latter’s first album, the Price of Fame, showcases the white hot electricity this trio can produce.
Guitarist Aoki Yutaka keeps surprising with his versatility. As an original member of downy, he crafted thick, hypnotic textures with a tortured sound. downy broke up, and he was drafted into VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE, where he turned into New Wave guitarist with a lot more distortion and overdrive. With unkie, he turns into a surf twanger channeling the ghosts of Jimi Hendrix and his jazz band bosses.
With Billy Corgan, I really have to separate the persona from the art. That’s the diplomatic way of saying the guy annoys me.
That is, the way he comes across in public annoys me. Dude takes out a full page ad in a newspaper asking his band back together. Not announcing — asking. Your average former rock stars would just pick up a phone (or have their managers do it for them.)
As the undisputed creative force behind Smashing Pumpkins, Corgan let his deification in the early ’90s get to his head, and the fans of the music have had to put up with it since.
All that to say I went into Zeitgeist with an excessive dose of skepticism — perhaps even hostility — and I was summarily humbled. This album is one of the best I’ve heard all year.
The members of Quruli really overextended themselves in 2005. 2004 saw the release of Antenna, one of the group’s strongest works, and a lengthy tour which took them all over Japan and portions of North America. After all that activity, it would make sense to recharge a bit, right?
Nope. Guitarist/singer Kishida Shigeru and bassist Satou Masashi went headlong into helping Cocco stage a comeback with Singer Songer, then later Quruli released its fifth album, Nikki. Neither project possessed the focus of the band’s recent work at the time. Kishida and co. were spreading themselves too thin.
So it’s with cautious optimism that I approached Quruli’s sixth album, Tanz Walzer. Opting instead to release a greatest hits collection in 2006, Quruli took the break they should have in 2005. Was it enough time for the band to recharge? That depends on your expectations.
For the last five years, UA has set her muse loose to do pretty much anything it wanted. Children’s music? Check. Covers with a jazz trio? Check. Avant-garde big band? Check.
These explorations yielded adventurous results, and it was easy to admire the gumption behind the drive. It wasn’t necessarily music you could like, but YMMV, of course.
Golden green shows the pendulum swinging back, with UA delivering some of her best pop music in years, at the same time not surrendering the eclecticism she’s forged on the last few albums.
Do not assume you will be adventurous with your music tastes forever. Ten to twenty years from now, the bands you love today will be recycled by so-called new bands, and you too will voice the refrain, "I liked it better the first time around."
I thought I would welcome an ’80s revival. I thought it would be nice to see bands I grew up with exert influence on bands coming up. I was wrong. I liked Franz Ferdinand better when they were called Gang of Four. The title of Duran Duran’s 2004 album was supposed to be Astronaut, not Hot Fuss.
So thank your dieties for Voxtrot — a band that sounds like the ’80s without having to rip off the decade wholesale.
I’d seen the comparisons between toddle and the Breeders, but when the Tabuchi Hisako-led project first debuted, I focused more on how it related to bloodthirsty butchers and Number Girl. Now that toddle has a second album under its belt, it’s easier to evaluate the group on its own terms. And toddle sounds like … the Breeders.
The butchers’ Yoshimura Hideki — who is also now married to Tabuchi — once again serves as producer, and toddle’s second album, Dawn Praise the World, has a beefier, cleaner sound. Studio technology is a wonderful thing, and the heavy processing on Tabuchi voice makes me question how much she’s improved as a singer.
At the same time, it’s difficult to find much fault with the sweetness of her overdubbed harmonies. They just sound so nice! They also figure very prominently on the butchers’ latest album, Guitarist wo Korosanaide, where they provide a sharp contrast to Yoshimura’s monotone wail.
There’s some interesting discussion happening over at the Keikaku message boards about bloodthirsty butchers. Some folks have observed the addition of Number Girl guitarist Tabuchi Hisako has coincided with a wane in the quality of the band’s albums.
It’s an observation I’ve been reluctant to acknowledge myself. Green on Red, the first butchers release to feature Tabuchi, didn’t seem to be the kind of live album I’d picture out of the group, while birdy, her first appearance on a studio album, tended to drag. But banging the drum found the band being adventurous, and the latest album, Guitarist wo Korosanaide, is confounding if not enjoyable.
At the same time, the post-Tabuchi work doesn’t grab the way yamane or Kouya ni Okeru bloodthirsty butchers do.
Guitarist wo Korosanaide has something of a strange identity crisis. There’s a brashness comparable to the band’s early work, but with Tabuchi contributing more backing vocals, it’s imbued with an unprecedented sunniness.
How can happiness sound so angry? Or angst sound so bright?
The stereotype dictates gay people are tastemakers and pioneers when it comes to fashion, art and culture. But rock ‘n’ roll is a straight man’s club, which is why I have this terrible assumption that only lesbians are best suited for the task.
When Sony announced it would form a label that would sign only gay-identified artists, the measure of my skepticism burst any indicator. Music with a Twist aims to feature gay artists with potential mass appeal, while also releasing compilations geared for gay audiences, so says the press release scuttlebutt. If my abbreviated dating history serves as any reference, that’s going to result in a lot of bad music.
(And somehow I miraculous exempt myself from such criteria. Funny.)
Revolutions is the first sampling of what the label may produce. Oddly enough, only two artists on the compilation, the Gossip and Kirsten Price, have actually signed with the label. Everyone else seems to have licensed their content. Given the major label backing, the collection itself leans heavily to commercial music. The indie gays won’t find their Grizzly Bear, Xiu Xiu or Sleater-Kinney.
The 2006 Broadway cast recording of Stephen Sondheim’s Company is the first time I’ve listened to the score. I have no knowledge of the original cast recording from 1970, so I can’t make a comparison.
That also means I’m listening to this score with no preconceived notions, and for a play set 37 years ago, it’s aged remarkably well. The characters of the show have bittersweet attitudes toward relationships and marriage, and it feels as topical today as it probably did back then. (The show opened two years before I was born.)
Company focuses on a guy named Robert, who’s celebrating his 35 birthday. All of his friends are coupled or married, and the show follows his interactions with them. Some couples are in a rut, one couple is about to tie the knot, another is untying theirs. All of them needle Robert about his inability to commit, while he too probes the question of whether commitment is all that it’s cracked up to be.
Director John Doyle took the same approach as his 2005 revival of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd — the actors doubled as the orchestra, with the set kept to a bare minimum. Although the show got good reviews and won a Tony Award for Best Revival, it closed in July 2007. Good thing there’s a cast recording.