I used to write a feature for OTAQUEST rounding up some Japanese recommendations for Bandcamp Friday. I’ve decided to keep doing that for the remaining installments of this campaign. Here’s a dive into Japanese releases worth your time, attention and money from the last month. Welcome to the June edition…which arrives during a summer break from this activity. Still, that’s no excuse to buy new music from the site, and I’m using this week to highlight some recommendations from the last month well worth your time.
COR!S —TAKE FAKE LAKE
Making cool sounds is great, but when an artist can also wring emotion out of their production…all the better. Creator COR!S has been flexing her electronic craft for the better part of a decade, as a solo act and as part of the duo KiWi, which indulged in a kind of “The Addams Family meets Mad Decent” sound powered by an incredible attention to sonic texture. She’s plenty accomplished, but TAKE FAKE LAKE stands as her most impressive work to date. Here’s a decade-plus of experience being bent into a meditation on memory and fantasy, where the sounds themselves reveal the feeling at the album’s core.
TAKE FAKE LAKE tells the “story of a man and a woman's journey to a fictional lakeside resort called ‘Lakeside Memory.’” You don’t have to dwell too much on the specifics, but rather appreciate the way this concept allows COR!S to play around with concepts such as nostalgia, told both by her lyrics and the sounds around them. “Floating” turns to drum ‘n’ bass but avoids trendy traps by surrounding the percussion with touches that feel like they are already fading away (the strings, the pianos). There’s playful experiments recalling resort-ready electronic compositions like Digital-Dance on tracks like the cheery “Lakeside Memory,” and ‘90s-accented euphoria on the zippy “Water Recreation,” begging to soundtrack some lost jet ski racing game for the Sega Saturn. Yet it’s the more dramatic moments —the sample-interrupted electronica of “Storm is coming at 3 pm,” the shape-shifting longing of “ROOM303,” the robo hardcore of “Boy meets SS” — that turn this set of songs into something with depth, using sounds from across time as inspiration to create a piece functioning outside of it (without losing the energy, I should add). Get it here.
Carpainter —Enoshima Ocean Blue
Maybe all that time hanging with Guchon has paid off…or more likely, Carpainter is just in a summery mood and ready to deliver some sweltering dance jams for the season. Enoshima Ocean Blue sticks a little parasol into techno chug, resulting in a lively set of songs exuding a warmth built for outdoor raves rather than the clubs the creator and his Trekkie Trax crew usually occupy. Get it here.
Various Artists — Ganymede Ginza Elevator Hour
Thank goodness we have labels like New Masterpiece out here thinking up concepts for compilations like “let’s get a bunch of very-online artists together and have them cover famous songs, but in the style of elevator music.” An absurd pitch that delivers wonderfully from the supermarket-MIDI notes opening up Nishoka Diddley’s take on “Rock N’ Roll High School.” A really clever and fun experiment featuring legitimate surprises…when it clicked to me just what Tsudio Studio was doing on “Perfect And Ultimate,” I just like, wanted to clap. Get it here.
Ajate —Dala Toni
I had the chance to profile Ajate for The Japan Times this week, and they are a really interesting project in a lot of ways —the main dude moved to the middle of nowhere Saitama so he could have access to bamboo in order to make half their instruments. Even without the accompanying feature, I love the sense of joy and revelry coursing through Dala Toni’s blend of matsuri sounds and Afrobeats. Get it here.
BOYISH —For those of us who can’t sleep
Lots of personal memories wrapped up with Tokyo indie-pop project BOYISH —followed / covered them for years when I moved to Tokyo, and have most certainly had drunken Burger King with band leader Yoshiki Iwasawa in Shibuya after a how at (oh god) now defunct venue Echo —which works out well on this latest neo-acoustic collection. It’s a melancholy, reflective set, made all the more so by the lack of electronic energy in favor of vulnerable strumming. Get it here.
UNCIVILIZED GIRLS MEMORY And Wolf Creek —ANGELIC CONVERSATION
Look, I’m just going to share every Siren For Charlotte release at this point…but here’s the fledgling label getting into noise! Wilder still, multiple members of Endon appear on UNCIVILIZED GIRLS MEMORY’s second song here. And that’s before the 22-minute-long aural assault Wolf Creek cooks up. Get it here.
Rave Racers —Engine Blow
Look, I’m sure the rest of the album is great…but Rave Racers had me with “featuring Zombie-Chang” on the first track. Blur those worlds! Get it here.
BBBBBBB — “Yuhi”
Sometimes you love life so much that you just have to sample some old-school Japanese pop hits and scream over them. This is what enjoying oneself really looks like. Get it here.
Oricon Trail For The Week Of May 20, 2024 To May 26, 2024
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.
King & Prince —“halfmoon / moooove!!” (305,258 Copies Sold)
I do not come this week to ignore King & Prince. The duo’s latest Oricon-topper is one half ehhhhh balladry and one half stab at King-Gnu-ish funk with far less bite. The latter, in particular, is interesting, at least in terms of where idols take cues from in the 2020s (they are most certainly not the first to be drawing from Daiki Tsuneta, and do so in a much more tasteful manner than others). Yet they are not the point of intrigue at the end of May.
That comes further down…like, midway through the top ten. It’s a pretty stacked week when it comes to physical sellers, with idol groups NMB48 and M!LK taking silver and gold respectively. The latest AKB48 single actually moves up to four…leading to the following:
“GANG PARADE came pretty close to beating NewJeans????” OK OK, calm down, surely the combined chart, taking in to account digital sales and streams —which in theory should be key to both of these new-era groups —should give them a boost, perhaps not to overtake the top spots here (the power of physical) but enough to remind that they have been billed as powerhouse pop players for the 2020s in Japan.
hmmmmmm
Charts, of course, aren’t the be-all-end-all factor of determining a song or group’s overall place in the cultural zeitgeist (let alone if it will pop later), and certainly says nothing about the actual quality of the music. Yet I think this is the rare case where debut positions for both should raise some concerns, and wherein the works themselves explain a lot. NewJeans at least have an excuse —casual K-pop fans1 might know them as “the group the lady in the Dodgers’ hat raves about” more than “the group going Miami Bass.”
Still, I’ve been kind of shocked at how muted coverage of this song or preceding (and better) number “Bubble Gum” has been in music media, given how NewJeans became the critically adored K-pop group of 2023. The state of K-pop coverage in general has, like, collapsed in 2024…but I thought NewJeans would be the exception. I don’t think it helps that the song itself is just…pleasant? “How Sweet” actually shows how smart the team behind the group is, because they have correctly identified that the UK garage and Jersey Club sound they broke out with isn’t sustainable on a fickle mainstream level2, and are trying out different electronic mutations. At first I didn’t think this is the style for them, feeling too lethargic for their abilities —they need a little energy to perk up the vocals, which have this daydreaming quality that works wonderfully when the music around them offers the drama. Yet the first verse has rattled around in my head for like five days now so…they are doing something right.
Forget all that though! NewJeans are supposed to be a powerhouse in Japan, but they can’t even debut in front of an old AKB single? Point to the physical sales as the difference…except NewJeans is playing the exact same game, with six versions available to collect. “NewJeans Ojisan” are supposed to have disposable income, though inflation is tough out there3. “How Sweet” is completely fine as a song, but given the hype around this outfit, it makes sense to me that it is sitting at #23 on Spotify Japan’s Top 50. Not bad of course but also…shouldn’t they be ahead of an aiko single?
But hey, it could be worse.
It’s wild to think that a year ago this project made actual history on the US radio charts behind an adept throwback to turn-of-the-millennium R&B. XG then went and pivoted away from it for its subsequent EP of…vaguely futuristic dance-pop, with a few nods to Jersey Club but also tracks that sound like FAKY leftovers. They didn’t even want to stick with that! Instead, they doubled down on their worst attribute to make their “first all-rap song,” with the press materials emphasizing that the members “exude a powerful hip-hop identity.” It’s as fun a song as that line reads. “Woke Up” is marketing engineering a rap song, with clunky nods to Motorola flip phones (the past, remember it!), “Tokyo Drift” and what feels like a survey-approved amount of slang squirted in. A rap song for people who make reaction videos, rather than a work sharing any interesting viewpoints, ideas or hooks4. I do like the part in the video where one member shaves her head, because it’s funny to remember that actually happened over a decade ago with a different set of idols and it was a big to-do (I think a direct reference here, I can get behind that).
As harsh as that reads, I liked “Left Right” and a handful of songs from that EP (we need more FAKY leftovers). Often muddled, but XG at least felt like they were working towards something interesting and really figuring out what their identity was. “Woke Up” throws all of that out for something way too try-hard.
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News And Views
Yasufumi Higurashi, music critic and founder of influential indie-label P-Vine, died at age 75.
SZA cancelled her headlining set at Fuji Rock Festival this year. That’s a big blow to organizer Smash, who turned to her to be the youthful representative offering a potential answer to the question “who can headline any festival in this country moving forward?” It’s not clear why SZA cancelled —I’m working on a summer festival preview story, and in the process of reporting Smash told me that the news “shocked” them, so stay tuned —but speculation from those who watched her at Primavera Sound is that she might just be too expensive at this point. Which would make sense when you take into account the weak yen.
Meanwhile, Summer Sonic announced they had sold out the Tokyo leg of this year’s festival.
Sticking on the festival beat, Atarashii Gakko! seem to have done well at Primavera Sound.
This story about Luminate and Japanese company Hanshin Contents Link singing a new deal for the latter to continue to sell and distribute music data in Japan isn’t anything too sexy. HOWEVER, I had zero idea until reading it that the Luminate distributor and Billboard brand owner for Japan is…the same company in charge of the Hanshin Tigers pro baseball team.
Thom Yorke coming to Japan (among other places) for solo shows.
I contributed a feature to the independent magazine Rantipole, on the Kansai band Nagakumo! Order that one now!
I’ve gone back and forth about NHK’s “Tiny Desk Concerts Japan” in this newsletter for like months now…but I think I finally came around to liking it and the potential it has to showcase artists who would never have a shot at the NPR version. Worked through it at The Japan Times.
Again…this one stings…but Hololive is collaborating with the Los Angeles Dodgers for “Hololive Night” on July 5, just in time for the Anime Expo crowd to descend on Chavez Ravine. Hoshimachi Suisei is involved, and the seventh-inning stretch will be sung by Gawr Gura. If someone wants to fly me out to this…I won’t say no.
I’m on a big ol’ podcast run right now. I appeared on Primer to talk Taeko Onuki…was a blast, and you should listen to the whole series! Especially because they have like…crazy names coming up in future episodes. Super happy to have been part of it.
I also returned to the Nante Japan podcast to talk about my Coachella experience…and a lot more, it was the longest recording I’ve ever been part of lolz but fun!
Thai pop group filmed the video for its latest video “Situationship” in Tokyo, and it offers a very good tourist-gaze of the city at a time when overtourism is a hot topic. But also…real banger right here! The pianos! The synths! The electronic growl underneath the vocals!
Old bands finding new life from TikTok…still can be interesting, but definitely a familiar story by now. Yet I will say, rock trio andymori becoming a breakout act over a decade after its peak has been funny to watch. I followed them closely back in the day, even reviewing one of its albums for The Japan Times. Now, they’ve become a hit with a younger set, and it makes sense…most of the group’s songs were like two minutes max, so they were built for short-form realities. As a result, all of its albums will be reissued on vinyl later this year.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter —@mbmelodies
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1
A demographic that might not exist in 2024
2
Called this at the end of last year.
3
Theory: The “NewJeans Ojisan” phenomenon was interpreted incorrectly by the company side. Unlike the middle-aged men following other idols, “NewJeans Ojisan’s” whole thing is they love the music of NewJeans, especially compared to the (oh no) far more commercial sound of other K-pop. They grew up listening to Underworld and Aphex Twin…and this lines up with what they like. Yet that doesn’t mean they will commit to the group in a “superfan” kind of way. They’ll just tweet about how good “ETA” is. The actual core fandom for them —teenage girls —doesn’t have the expendable income on hand to buy six versions of a CD single.
4
A good example of how to actually approach this is YOUNG POSSE’s “XXL,” which plays in a similar hip-hop-heavy space but actually references American rap rather than hoping that calling oneself “young blood” with a…hmmm, questionable delivery can earn credibility. It’s also fun…and, critically, funny, an attribute totally absent from XG’s music to date.
