CLEAR AND REFRESHING

Clear And Refreshing is moving home

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:26:44 +0900

Much as I like the look of this antique little piece of blog software, I've decided it's time to get with the 21st Century and go over to Wordpress. I'll keep everything here as an archive if I can, but all new posting will go on over at the new blog. I'll be working on getting this domain name transferred over to the new blog if it's possible too, but as I say, I'll try to keep this site accessible.

Girls' Generation, "Girls' Generation"

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:52:18 +0900

Girls' Generation
Nayutawave (2011)

(Originally published in Japanese at Goblin.mu)

A common comparison to Girls' Generation is AKB48, since the two groups present such starkly contrasting images of femininity, as well as radically opposed musical styles, and some of Girls' Generation's popularity in Japan must surely be down to the fact that they provide a convenient stick with which Yasushi Akimoto's critics can beat him and his mass idol venture.

On the other hand, while Girls' Generation provide some answers to what is so horribly wrong with AKB48's music, the reverse is not true. As far as Girls' Generation's music is concerned, a more useful comparison is probably Perfume, probably the only properly modern sounding idol group in Japan, and one with whom Girls' Generation share an electro influenced sound.

Perfume are in many ways a more precariously balanced product, with producer Yasutaka Nakata's constant pursuit of contemporary sounds often putting him in opposition to the Japanese pop industry's inherent conservatism. On the other hand, the sound on "Girls' Generation" is a thoroughly international one that is the result of constant cross-fertilisation of ideas between numerous countries, genres and scenes over many years. Perhaps because of this, it's a thoroughly modern-sounding and energetic album, yet also a curiously characterless one.

While Perfume remain the work of a single writer and producer, Girls Generation employ numerous overseas songwriters, and the result is that while Perfume's music is instantly recognisable and has a certain conceptual purity to it, Girls Generation often have so many ideas battling it out for space that it's hard to pin down exactly where this album is shooting from.

Compared to the mainstream of current Japanese pop, however, it's certainly a striking musical statement. "Girls' Generation" inhabits a tradition of pop music that could perhaps loosely be classified as Euro-R&B -- a sound particularly associated with Scandinavian producers like Max Martin, that fused American R&B with European electro and defined the early sound of artists like 'N Sync and Britney Spears. It's a constantly evolving sound though, and throughout the album, the songwriters and producers mine ideas from more cutting-edge artists in the electro and minimal techno scenes and appropriate them for themselves, fusing them with pop melodies that would have sounded at home in the hands of almost any singer from the last twenty-five years, from Madonna to Avril Lavigne.

"The Great Escape" kicks off with a thrillingly dirty, scratchy piece of electro synth-abuse, which the song goes on to use as the base for what might otherwise have been a fairly standard slice of clubland R&B. "You-aholic" does something similar, although it does a better job of integrating its pop and electro strands.

Elsewhere, "Run Devil Run" and "Beautiful Stranger" deploy the schaffel beat (listen carefully, that sound you hear is a thousand Japanese record company executives having heart attacks at hearing the schaffel beat at the top of the Oricon charts). The former deploys it more effectively, with the swing on the off-beat more robotic and mechanical than rock, although neither song neglects to include a genuinely catchy chorus, and the mixing on both is sensitive to the notion of multiple vocalists in a way that AKB48 with their mass shouting or even Perfume with their glacial, auto-tuned Hatsune Miku-isms rarely are.

Critics of the group who would like to label their music as being somehow "un-Japanese" and something that will never fly in this country (generally these people seem to be foreign J-Pop fans who can't help orientalising Japanese music) are missing the point. The sound of "J-Pop" today is more the result of conservative music industry practices than public taste. Opening track "Mr. Taxi" is a case in point. An aggressively catchy bubblegum electro-glam stomp, it might seem a risky choice for the group's first exclusively Japanese language single, but it's one that paid off in the charts, and suggests that Japanese pop audiences are more musically open-minded than the entertainment industry thinks they are.

Sometimes the need to differentiate the nine members of the group creates awkward sounding moments, and the occasional American-accented growls, moans and purrs with which members of the group embellish some of the Japanese phrases can sound a little incongruous, but as with the deliberately exaggerated katakana way Perfume enunciate English words (the word "di-su-ko" is rapidly becoming the trio's calling card), it's perhaps excusible as a function of the music's style.

There's a brutal efficiency to the album, with the twelve songs coming in at just over 40 minutes, averaging about 3:30 each (the correct length for a pop song -- in fact no pop sing should ever exceed 3:45 as an extreme outlier), and each with its own infectiously catchy chorus, often involving the same word repeated three or four times just to ensure that it sticks in your head like a tumour for weeks afterwards. It's also a thoroughly filler-free album, where pretty much all the songs would work as singles. That said, the constantly evolving nature of the musical world in which "Girls' Generation" is positioned means that it will likely date badly and quickly, with the excellent "Gee", a song one can just as easily imagine being performed by Pink Lady over thirty years ago, perhaps the only track that will age gracefully.

A listener immersed in modern Western music would likely recognise the quality of the songwriting craftsmanship but would probably not find "Girls' Generation" to be a particularly revolutionary work, and compared to someone like Lady Gaga they come across as positively tame, but look around the rest of the Oricon charts and it's clear that they offer something very different here in Japan.

It's worth remembering that Japanese pop has only really sounded the way it does now for the past ten or fifteen years. The early 1990s were a period of great creativity with bands like Judy And Mary, producers like Tetsuya Komuro and Takeshi Kobayashi, and insurgents like the Shibuya-kei generation causing a series of revolutions that killed off the moribund late-80s kayoukyoku scene, and similar revolutions typically occurred at roughly ten year intervals before that. In this context, the popularity of a group like Girls' Generation should be a sign that Japanese pop is in need of a similar revolution right now, and it will be interesting to see if it gets one. Ian Martin 2.September.2011

Connect And Receive Podcast -- August 2011

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:53:02 +0900

Episode 2 of Call And Response's Japanese music podcast is now up. Enjoy!

It can be downloaded from its host at Archive.org.

1. Ydestroyde: zzzzzMONSTERzzzzz (from the 2011 album Synzosizer)
2. Skyfisher: Zero Emission (from the 2005 album Eco-Side 21)
3. Umibachi: Body Conscious & Joystick (from the 2010 album Body Conscious & Joystick)
4. bctnx: Zombie D (from the 2011 CD/R mini-album Dareka no Karuma)
5. otori: Kaitai/Sai Kochiku (from the 2010 CD/R mini-album Seisei1)
6. Miila and The Geeks: New Age (from the 2011 album New Age)
7. cottonioo: Three Girl Rhumba (from the 2008 compilation Post Flag)

This info is cross-posted from the Call And Response blog, which until this page gets some protection against spambots, is the only place where you can comment on this -- sorry.

capsule, "World of Fantasy"

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:56:52 +0900

World of Fantasy
Yamaha Music Entertainment (2011)

(Originally published in Japanese at Goblin.mu)

The original title of this latest album by electro-pop duo capsule, "Killer Wave", was poorly chosen in more ways than just its unfortunate connection with the events in Tohoku in March. Relying as it does on a rather abstract, multi-layered English language pun ("Killer" can refer to death, but also indicate something wonderful or tremendously effective, while "Wave" could refer to water, a sound or radio wave, or a movement in fashion), it runs against the grain of an album that shuns ambiguity. The beats have been narrowed down to a single, rigidly enforced 128BPM from start to finish, the lyrics have largely been reduced to simple, repetitive slogans, and while the band name may still be resolutely lower case, the song titles are all now rendered in big, bold capitals, making clear, unambiguous proclamations like "KEEP HOPE ALIVE" and "I JUST WANNA XXX YOU".

However, that's not to say that "WORLD OF FANTASY" has less to offer than previous capsule albums. Rather that it condenses the duo's message down to a clearer and more easily graspable form. Instead of detracting from capsule's message, this approach reveals for the first time that the group actually has a message. Based on this album, it can basically be divided into two main threads: On the one hand, there's the idea of unfettered, drunken hedonism evident in the refrain of "Drunken boys, drunken girls" in "I JUST WANNA XXX YOU" and the cheerfully idiotic repeated line "Tonight it's party time, it's party time tonight," in "STRIKER", while on the other, there is a more dreamy sense of escapism most clearly expressed by the title track, but also by the opening and closing tracks, "OPEN THE GATE" and "CLOSE THE GATE", both of which seem to deliberately recall the melodies and chiptune synth effects of 8-bit and 16-bit fantasy role playing games.

While the beats keep the same BPM, there is still room for variation, with "STRIKER" slipping back and forth seamlessly between a pulsing disco throb and a sleazy electro-glam shuffle without ever letting the tempo slip. "KEEP HOPE ALIVE" retains the slight shuffle, giving the track a more languid atmosphere that is compounded by the Giorgio Moroder-esque synth line, while "I WILL" kicks off and closes with some tribal sounding drums that perhaps might also be influenced by the sounds of traditional Japanese summer festival music, and draws a contrast between that hard beat and the soft, sweet vocal melody that vocalist Toshiko Koshijima delivers.

In many ways "WORLD OF FANTASY" marks the completion of ideas that capsule were experimenting with on 2010's "Player", in particular on tracks like "The Music", with a move towards a more Dutch house influenced sound evident over much of the album. The divergence between Yasutaka Nakata's club-oriented tracks, often led by sampled vocals, and the more song-oriented tracks featuring Koshijima's vocals has been reversed, with the duo now deeply and thoroughly immersed in club music but with Koshijima's vocals now much more firmly integrated into the sound.

"WORLD OF FANTASY" is also a much more coherent album than its predecesor, which suffered from having to unite a number of songs originally written for film soundtracks and TV commercials with the increasingly heavy sound and production style that Nakata was using. Similarly, it's clear that Nakata is no longer able to freely move tunes and ideas back and forth between capsule and his work as producer of idol trio Perfume, whose music now exists entirely in the realm of TV commercials and product endorsements. Only in brief snatches of melody, as in "PRIME TIME", does "WORLD OF FANTASY" reveal the two groups as the work of the same musical mastermind.

In this way, there is perhaps some truth to Nakata's claim that "WORLD OF FANTASY" is the first real capsule album. It's a bold one too, running the risk of alienating fans who got into the group round the time of "Flash Back" and "More! More! More!" off the back of the emerging success of Perfume, but the group largely gets away with it through the sheer, brutally direct, devastating effectiveness of the tracks. That's not to say that it's perfect -- by sticking to rigidly to 128BPM, the album can be a gruelling experience to take in all in one sitting -- but it's nevertheless an achievement to be proud of.

Despite the troubles surrounding its release and the divergence in sound from Nakata's more mainstream work with Perfume, "WORLD OF FANTASY" has given capsule their highest chart position and some of the best sales of their career, and one wonders whether, amid the official post-quake language of "self-restraint" and attempts by Tokyo authorities to curb outdoor festivals and cherry blossom viewing parties, the honing of the group's message may have captured a previously unvoiced aspect of the zeitgeist, delivering the Japanese people with the party atmosphere and sense of escapism that they really want. Ian Martin 18.August.2011

AKB48, "Koko ni Ita Koto" (2)

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 01:53:14 +0900

Koko ni Ita Koto
King Records (2011)

(Originally published in Japanese at Goblin.mu)

With the staggering popularity of AKB48 and their ever-expanding legions of sister groups, there can be no denying that Yasushi Akimoto is in possession of a particular kind of genius. To have taken what at first seems like a niche product, best suited to performing at anime conventions and amusement parks, and made it into the most successful group in the country demands attention. The release of "Koko ni ita Koto" provides as good a platform as any to subject the AKB phenomenon to some measure of analysis, not least to answer the question of whether Akimoto's genius extends beyond the group's marketing and into their music.

THE MARKETING

To achieve the level of commercial success that AKB48 have, they would never have been able to do it without attracting a sizeable female following. Nevertheless, look at the queues outside AKB48's theatre in Akihabara and you see precious few female faces. And while many of their casual casual audience are female, everything the group does is predicated on the assumption of a male audience. In this way, it seems that the group's success is built on an obsessive core of male fans, to whom they faithfully pander, and female fans are simply invited to follow: "This is what kind of female image is considered attractive,” “this is how to be cute,” etc.

AKB48's image treads a thin line in lyrical content, participating in the obvious “moe” sexualisation of childlike imagery but avoiding the kind of direct appeals to lechery that were the stock in trade of 80s predecessors Onyanko Club. Or, indeed, the earlier AKB48 of "Seifuku ga Jama wo Suru"-- in many ways, "Koko ni Ita Koto" shows these earlier works to be naive. The sex is merely a hook to draw audiences towards something longer-lasting: the pursuit of true love, and when we say "true love", what we mean is "the relentless march of consumer capitalism."

The main manifestation of this is in the way that beneath the superficial atmosphere of friendship and mutual support, the members of AKB48 are made to constantly jostle for the affection of fans via the "senbatsu elections" and special edition CDs. Despite the claim that "Dare mo minna Team B oshi desu yo ne?" the song "Team B Oshi" basically amounts to the members of Team B engaging in the equivalent of an intra-team rap battle over who should be the listener's favourite.

There is more to this paradigm of competition than meets the eye. Consider that dozens of girls are singing songs together about the importance and uniqueness of "one true love" to a single imagined male listener. It's reminiscent in some ways of that creepy moment when, listening to a boy band, you realise that there are five guys singing about wanting to get with the same girl -- and yet it's different. With a group like 'N Sync or Blue, the band are the subject and the girl the object: they are seducers and she their quarry. In AKB48's case, the hypothetical man they are singing to is still the subject, with the power to choose from the array of girls before him, while the girls objectify themselves in competing for his attention. This relationship is most obviously apparent on "Ponytail to Shushu", where the girls take on the voice of the male listener and narrate his pursuit of his object of affection from the male perspective. The song also romanticises the obvious point that the man's love can never be physically requited:

Your long hair is bundled in a polkadot scrunchie
I cannot catch that tail of love
If I touch it, this illusion will disappear

In the 2D world that AKB48 and their fans inhabit, "true love" has been systematised like that. The girls make a play for the man's attention in the brief snatches of time the format of the group allows them, through their enactment of the various pre-determined "moe" behavioural elements that act as shorthand for more complex human character traits. At the same time, the man sits in judgement, indicating his affection through voting power that is conferred on him directly in accordance to how much money he spends. It is love as perceived through the mind of a piece of accounting software.

That is not to say that AKB48 fans are stupid. The notion of the single true love that they perpetuate through their lyrics is a lie in which both sides are complicit. The whole time the group and the fans are acting out this curious late-capitalist pastiche of love, what we might call the "Akimoto System" is encouraging the fans to take time to sample the different flavours. "Come to the theatre more than once to see all the girls perform, buy all the different versions of the single, complete the set. You will fall in love with one, but you don't know she's the best until you've shopped around, right?"

In this way, the relationship between AKB48 and their fans is rather like a video game dating simulator played out in real time and on a mass scale. Like with AKB48, "gyaruge" and visual novels operate in a paradoxical world where the player and game enter into a shared fantasy of true love and intertwined destiny, while at the same time, the player is encouraged to replay multiple times to complete the paths of each girl on offer.

"Heavy Rotation" pushes the notion of one true love hard, although it also (probably unintentionally) hints at this "replay factor":

I wonder how many times can people fall in love in the span of a lifetime?
If I could have just one unforgettable love story, I'd be satisfied

The beauty of this system, of course, is that whatever the fan does, whether he completes his collection, or whether he focuses wholeheartedly on the one girl he truly loves, Akimoto is always there to collect the money. The house always wins.

THE MUSIC

Musically, the image of the group as an offshoot of otaku culture is not really accurate. Genuine otaku culture, for all its quirks, is constantly evolving, and most of the fans AKB48 had among hardcore otaku have already left them for the likes of Momoiro Clover or the all-virtual world of vocaloid software. AKB48 have always been a simulation, an otaku-themed Disneyland ride.

In contrast, the music on "Koko ni Ita Koto" remains in a musical furrow that has existed relatively unchanged for years. These are the same watered-down, eurobeat-influenced rhythm and major chord progressions that you hear from pachinko parlours and game centres all over Japan. In each case, the sound is linked not to the specific content of what goes on inside, but to the image of cute, cartoonish, colourful, synthetic good cheer. It’s a world where human interactions and life experiences can be simplified to commodities and financial transactions, a world where the only law is "Follow your dreams," and for convenience's sake, the choice of dreams available to you is laid out on a laminated menu.

While this sound is evocative of the 90s, it's not really retro. To be retro, you must first consciously draw a distinction between the music of today and the period that you want to imitate. In contrast, with a few exceptions, this music simply doesn't recognise the existence of any musical advances made since the mid-to-late 1990s.

It's a shame that it has to be like this, since a group like AKB48, at the very pinnacle of the Japanese pop music scene, are in a position with audiences where they could define a new direction that would influence J-Pop for a generation. But that isn’t what’s happened. Whether through fear of alienating fans, or the need to provide reliable content for the advertisers that bankroll an increasingly significant proportion of the music industry, or through sheer lack of imagination and curiosity, the music relies to an extraordinary degree on a sound that has been in stasis for at least fifteen years.

That's not to say, however, that the album never diverges from this template. If you can get over the karaoke backing track production, the firm beat and more aggressive arrangement of the 2010 single "Beginner" sounds like it might be an attempt at a response to the rising popularity of Korean girl groups like Girls' Generation, although the lyrics disregard these superficial trappings of sexual maturity in favour of a familiar brand of faux-inspirational sentiment:

We should be as brand new as a child...
Let's tear off the chains that controlled us

To be completely fair, both "Kaze no Yukue" and the title track are competent enough ballads. "Ningyo no Vacance" is also notable for actually sounding like it might have been written by a human being, and is perhaps the closest thing on the album to legitimate pop songwriting. None of this is enough to redeem the album, but it bears mention.

THE FINAL WORD

While it seems like the music of AKB48 is a relatively minor aspect of the total media-mix, the problem remains that the popularity of AKB48 and their sister projects as entertainment icons grants an undeserved aura of legitimacy to this regressive, infantile, musically unadventurous approach to pop. Recent Japanese-language singles "Jet Coaster Love" and "Go Go Summer!" saw Korean girl group Kara aping the thin-sounding, cheap production values and lolita-esque demeanour of AKB48 even though their more mature and sexy image had made them stars in their own right. More upsettingly, Japan's most forward-looking pop group Perfume slipped into a worryingly familiar sort of sentimental 90s balladry on their recent B-side "Kasuka na Kaori". It would be a terrible shame if the enormous popularity of AKB48 were to drag an already creatively moribund Japanese pop scene any further into the abyss. Connor Shepherd & Ian Martin 3.August.2011

Connect And Receive podcast -- July 2011

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:54:03 +0900

Clear And Refreshing and Call And Response are now joined by a Japanese indie music podcast called Connect And Receive, where you can enjoy me struggling to operate the simplest electronic apparatus whilst shilling for my own record label and digging out some contemporary Japanese indie gems.

It can be downloaded from its host at Archive.org.

This month's tracklisting is:

1. Hyacca: Hanazono (from the 2009 album Hanazono and the 2011 compilation Style Band Tokyo Vol. 1)

2. tacobonds: This Count (from the 2011 album No Fiction)

3. Praha Depart: Kyo no Nagare (from the 2009 album Uou Saou)

4. Zibanchinka: Nagisa no Hors D'oeuvres (from the 2011 album Hatsubai Chushi)

5. Puffyshoes: Anata ni Muchuu (from the 2010 compilation Valentine's Candies)

6. She Talks Silence: Fragment (from the 2011 album Some Small Gifts)

This info is cross-posted from the Call And Response blog, which until this page gets some protection against spambots, is the only place where you can comment on this -- sorry.

She Talks Silence Interview

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:06:44 +0900

An interview I did with indiepop duo She Talks Silence went up on The Japan Times' web site earlier this month. Check it here.

tacobonds, "No Fiction"

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 18:18:16 +0900

No Fiction
Take a Shower Records (2011)

(Originally published in Japanese at Goblin.mu)

tacobonds aren't really a rock band in the sense that they're not really about melody or conventional song structures. They have much more in common with dance music in that the rhythm is where everything of significance happens, and on "NO FICTION" it happens with such style.

Arito Yano's drums shift between steady, firm dance rhythms, punk rock jackhammer beats and occasionally progressive or jazz influenced polyrhythms, often with Yukiyo Kitagawa's bass and Naoki Ogawa's guitar waiting a while before joining him in the new time signature, creating a smooth but sometimes disconcerting transition.

These rhythmical transitions form the core of all tacobonds songs, and there are often several of them packed into a single two-to-three minute song, which makes "NO FICTION" a thrilling and exhausting ride. Each song takes a few listens for the listener to familiarise themself with the strange musical geography of the tracks, but as you become accustomed to the swift changes of direction and hairpin bends that the rhythm takes you on, individual moments of brilliance begin to stand out, the chaos itself starts to take shape, and previously disconcerting shifts in rhythm combine with classically effective chord changes to become devastating moments of joyous disco fury.

In fact, what "NO FICTION" most resembles is a no wave rock opera set on a Second World War battlefield. The lyrics are reduced to a series of incomprehensible slogans, bellowed at the listener from behind a barrage of post-punk guitars, which chop, slash, twist, writhe and explode across the songs like gunfire across a battlefront. On "BPM4" it's like an infantry march, with the guitar and bass drilling into the beat with increasing intensity, as the band chant "Too much, too much, more too much." On "Fiction", the guitars strafe across the beat like fighter planes machine-gunning columns of enemy soldiers, drifting over the rhythm, circling, and returning to the beat for another frenzied assault.

After the tightly-wound, fiercely focussed pieces of condensed mayhem that precede it, the eleven and a half-minute jazz-noise improvisation "Rendezvous", in which tacobonds trade artillery fire with Tokyo electronic noise collective Captain Sentimental, at first seems like an odd choice to close out the album. However, since the songs that comprise most of "NO FICTION" have been built up over several years of playing thirty-minute gigs in small Tokyo clubs, a flow has developed between them that it would be disruptive to break up with such a track. In the end, it just squats there at the end of the album like a troll, belching and farting, making the odd interesting noise, but generally not paying any attention to anything happening around it. On an album that revels in its ability to confound expectations, it's a strangely appropriate coda.

Elsewhere, it's hard to single out individual tracks -- I've seen tacobonds live dozens of times over the past few years, and it was only upon seeing the album jacket that I realised that some of these tracks were individual songs in their own right and not parts of a larger piece. tacobonds' music may be primarily formed of short, sharp blasts of arty post-punk energy, but it really is all about the cool little things Yano does with the rhythm, the moments where Ogawa drops in a killer guitar riff, the dynamics between the instruments, and the back and forth between Ogawa's yelling and Kitagawa's cooing, not self-contained pop nuggets that can be easily extracted from their context and individually packaged.

The way that tacobonds depend so heavily on the contrast between disjointedness and cohesion can make "NO FICTION" a difficult listen. The heart surge that comes when a discordant and arrhythmical segment falls together into a single beat is often quickly counterbalanced by an equally abrupt dash off in another direction, and it's easy to see how this hyperactivity could become frustrating for the listener.

The flipside of that is that none of the songs ever really outstay their welcome. The fact that the band resist the temptation to settle into a groove and start milking it makes each moment all the more precious. "NO FICTION" is certainly not an album for lazy listeners, but for those willing to give it the time it deserves, it's a rewarding one. Ian Martin 16.July.2011

Strange Boutique (June 2011)

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:56:36 +0900

As part of my ongoing idol blitz, my column for The Japan Times this week mostly talks about Korean girl group Girls' Generation (also known as Shojo Jidai or SNSD). When I first found out about these Korean idol groups that were all the rage about one and a half years ago, one of the things that struck me was that some songs used this electro version of the glam rock "Glitter beat", which surprised me because it's practically non-existent in Japan. For me, that point about rhythm became one of the defining differences in musical philosophy between the Korean wave and J-Pop.

AKB48, "Koko ni Ita Koto"

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:23:06 +0900

A Japan Times review of AKB48's sickeningly awful album. Read it here, then don't buy the album. Seriously, an angel self-harms every time you spend money on AKB48.