Back in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, albums were just a collection of singles. Greatest hits albums, in fact, were some of the first kinds ever made. In Japan, that model still holds true. Many Japanese pop acts tend to release three or four singles before an album, and those singles invariably end up in the final product.
Such is the case with Tommy heavenly6’s second album, Heavy Starry heavenly. If you’re a fan who bought every single since the release of Tommy’s debut, you already possess eight of the album’s 12 songs. In fact, the only coupling track not to make it on the album is "Always Somethin’ New" from the "Heavy Starry Chain" single. The album itself offers up only four new songs.
Luckily, I did not buy any of the singles, so Heavy Starry heavenly ends up sparing me from having to. (I’m not so much of a fan to be a completist.)
I was wondering why orchestral versions of old Shiina Ringo songs seemed like a familiar idea. Then I remembered: Baisho Ecstacy, her concert DVD from 2003.
On that DVD, Shiina performed orchestral rearrangements of her songs, with Saito Neko conducting. My brother called it the closest thing she’s gotten to an MTV Unplugged concert. I was pleasantly surprised by how well her music adapted to new settings.
It’s been a while since I watched Baisho Ecstacy, so I haven’t confirmed whether some of those arrangements found their way into Heisei Fuuzoku. (I suspect not.) Nonetheless, the creative direction Shiina takes on her first solo album since announcing the end of her solo career (to form Tokyo Jihen) isn’t new.
The problem with stellar debut albums is that they sometimes set a bar that cannot be surmounted. Sasagawa Miwa’s 2003 debut album, Jijitsu, was one I couldn’t stop playing when I discovered it. Sasami has released more albums since, but her debut still casts a long shadow.
Mayoi Naku, her fourth album, finds the singer taking a starkly different approach from her previous works. On the whole, Sasagawa is an introspective writer, someone more comfortable with a tender song than a big gesture. While she includes enough of her trademark writing on Mayoi Naku, she’s also offset it with some very big gestures.
The title track effectively establishes the tone of the album — a mid-tempo song with thick orchestration and more guitars than she’s previously shown off. If there’s any stumbling to be made, Sasagawa gets it out of the way early on. The second and third tracks, "Yukigumo" and "Kourizatou", sound so similar, it’s easy to mistake them as a single song.
UA is set to release her first new album of original material in two years, titled Golden Green, so says Bounce.com. The album hits stores June 20. In addition to the pre-release single "Oogon no Midori/Love scenes", Golden Green contains 10 tracks, including "Melody La La La", "Paradise alley/Ginga cafe", "Moor" and "San Andreas Fault". Think Sync engineer Zak (Matsumura Kazuyuki) produces.
Cocco continues her comeback with a new album titled Kirakira, scheduled for release on July 25, so says Bounce.com. Recorded in Okinawa and London, the album contains 18 tracks, including the theme song for the NHK program Do~Suru? Sakyuu no Atashi, titled "Harehireho". Cocco is scheduled for appearances at the Rock in Japan Festival and Rising Sun Rock Festival this coming summer.
toddle releases its second album, titled dawn praise the world, on June 8, so says Bounce.com. The album contains 10 tracks and is produced by bloodthirsty butchers’ Yoshimura Hideki. The article itself gets into a lot of flowery language about the album’s sound, but I think I’ll reserve my judgment till I hear it. On the same day, swarm’s arm, which features toddle bassist Kobayashi Ai, also releases an album, titled 3285D.
I’ve been waiting for Winamp to support Unicode-tagged MP3 files for a good half decade now, and with the release of Winamp 5.34, it’s finally happened. But I couldn’t really see it until I uninstalled my Last.fm plugin.
With Winamp 5.33, Unicode-tagging support was extended to most of the Media Library but not all. Question marks would still appear in the taskbar of Windows. That behavior is resolved in version 5.34, but according to the release notes, Winamp reverts back to the old behavior of substituting question marks for Unicode characters if third-party developers do not update their plugins.
Winamp hasn’t really done a good job of sending Unicode data to Last.fm since, well, the beginning, and now it looks like it can … but not until the AudioScrobbler plug-in is udpated. As I mentioned in a post to the Last.fm support boards describing this exact situation that I had to make a choice: tag files in Japanese with no Scrobbling, or Scrobble with no Japanese tags.
Of course, these efforts will be for naught since Last.fm still seems to be working on integration with Musicbrainz. I’ve actually been contributing to Musicbrainz in the hopes of affecting change in Last.fm, but I don’t see any evidence of those changes trickling down. Sometimes, AudioScrobbler will take my Shiina Ringo-tagged files and display 椎名林檎, but with, say, Hatakeyama Miyuki, it’ll go through as Hatakeyama Miyuki, not 畠山美由紀.
Which, I guess, begs the broad question — what’s the point?
(So — who can recognize from where I took the title of this post?)
I’m usually surprised if the first quarter of a year yields something which really gets my attention. Q1 of 2007 is not surprising.
CD sales are down 20 percent since the start of the year, and a soft release schedule has been cited as a reason for the slip. Norah Jones was probably the biggest release event in the first quarter, but I listened to her album once and nearly slipped into a coma. How the hell is this woman such a zietgiest?
I’m going to take a stab at listing some favorite first quarter releases, but I can already tell that by third quarter, many of these titles will fall off. If they don’t, this year is really going to suck.
Collecting web links isn’t something I do often or, for that matter, well. And while I’ve been tempted to try out del.icio.us’ linklog capabilities, I end up passing. It would become yet another Internet property I’d neglect.
So here’s a one-off linklog of stuff I’ve saved to my del.icio.us page.
JWID Musicians who record cover songs can go to the websites of the Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, BMI or SESAC to find out to whom to pay mechanical royalties. What happens if you cover some Japanese bands? I’m kind of toying with that idea, but I didn’t really know what I’d do if I ever took a Japanese cover album seriously. JWID is the JASRAC equivalent of ASCAP, BMI and Harry Fox. Of course, you’ll need to know how to search in Japanese to find something such as the publisher for Shiina Ringo’s "Tsuki ni Makeinu". Nor have I found out just how to make remittance to an international publishing company. But finding who owns the publishing is a start.
International Music Score Library I saw this on Metafilter. I haven’t downloaded anything yet, and of course, the 20th century selections come with a huge disclaimer about their public domain status.
Samples of the Javanese gamelan of Museum Nusantara Delft A museum in the Netherlands has sampled individual notes of its Indonesian gamelan instruments. Last weekend for a class project, I downloaded these samples and assigned them to individual keys in the Reason NN-XT sampler. I was very impressed. Now if only someone would sample a jegog.
Vanity searches and referral logs sometimes uncover wonderful feedback about this site.
Over at the Japanese Music Room boards for the like-named Soulseek community, I’ve heard tell of difficulties with site navigation. I have to say as a user, I miss some of the functionality of the old site. As a content provider, I’m all too happy to have drastically reduced my work load.
One thing I don’t really advertise is that the old site is actually updated with new reviews. When I post a new review, I’ll link from the archive site to this one. That way, folks who find stuff there can wander their way over here. If you’d rather find content by band name, you can still visit the old site to find reviews published here. Right now only reviews and release news items are linked from the archive. Other content might be added if it seems right to do so.
I really should explain the category names, which I will probably do here in the distant future (i.e. after I get back from vacation.)