2010 is barely two days old, and already there’s new music to look forward to. Nothing on the Western music front yet, as far as I know. But by the time this post is less than a week old, a new Shonen Knife album will be on my desk. A new Koda Kumi album and new Buono! album will follow next month, followed by a new Morning Musume album the month after that – the latter just in time to define the final months of my bachelorhood. And there’s also singles from MoMusu, AKB48, Buono! and SCANDAL to deal with during that time period as well. The last time I recall looking forward to a new non-J-pop release at the beginning of the year, it was The Stooges’ The Weirdness album, which was scheduled within days of Morning Musume dropping Sexy 8 Beat – and those two albums dropping within weeks of each other early in 2007 made the rest of that year quite the anti-climax. By the end of the year, while I was trying to sum up the year in albums at MotokoAoyama.com, I was also planning to propose to my girlfriend.

Oh yeah, there’s that little interruption.

Truth be told, I’m already planning ahead, and not just for that. I’ve already anticipated that there’s going to be a short break in blogging action around the last week of June and going on for at least another week. Which only means one thing: I intend to stay as busy as possible, trying to post as much as possible here and at So Hot She Shits Fire (and whenever I can at My Sweet Meetan), while also going into final preparations for the wedding, getting the last scenes folded into Here Is The Wonderland in the immediate weeks to come, thus finishing that long-in-the-making first draft before plunging into the second, which should only take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to complete the first draft. And also upping my guitar skills.

What?

Yeah, I got a new electric guitar over the Christmas holidays. I don’t think I will be discussing it much here – this blog is meant for serious music discussion, and personal ramblings about trying to re-master the pentatonic scale or getting a better handle on sweep picking don’t really belong here, so there may be a little place somewhere where I’ll let those out of my system. (Updates about my personal life don’t belong here either, of course. I might refer to them in vague here or in “conversation” at SHSSF, but that’s another story, and I already have places for that.)

This, in a nutshell, is as personal as I intend to get, and I’m keeping it in topic: 2010 is going to see a lot more activity here. Beyond that, I’m not hard to find, as the list of “personal” links that has always existed here and at this blog’s predecessor will attest. With one of the series that I hinted at back in November (the Best Albums of 2009 series) out of the way, the other one will be starting next week to formally kick off blogging activity here at TGML for 2010. For now, I’m going to spend the rest of the weekend decompressing from New Year’s Eve/Day.

Other than that (and my wedding), I don’t know what’s going to take place in 2010. Hell, I didn’t know when 2009 started that Morning Musume were getting ready to announce their American debut and that Ron Asheton was going to be transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band either.

Stay tuned. Things are only going to get insane here. But in a good way, of course.

SCANDAL
Best Scandal
(Epic)
Available on CD, CD/DVD, and on iTunes Japan

The full-length album we’ve all been waiting for since their independently released Yah! Yah! Yah! Hello Scandal EP came out over a year ago. The title is and isn’t appropriate since this is supposed to be their first studio album and not a retrospective, but all of their singles, including the three first featured on the EP are present and accounted for. But there’s plenty of new material to dig into along with the hits and it was pretty much worth the wait. If you haven’t caught on to these spiritual heirs to the Whiteberry/Zone throne, this album will catch your ass up real quick.

Some time ago, another blog covered by IW (I tried to find the link through IW itself but couldn’t locate it – if anyone knows what entry I’m talking about, let me know and I’ll replace this part of the text with that link) asked about the buying habits of fellow bloggers. Given that over a year ago I wrote an entry on Stuck In A Pagoda v2.0 that pretty much lambasted people who rely primarily on pirated mp3’s for their music, and that I practice what I preach, I started to calculate how my buying habits went for new music this past year.

Obviously, my intake of Japanese CD’s has continued at a steady rate this year – loyal grabbings of Morning Musume/Hello! Project releases, Koda Kumi’s most recent album and singles, EPs by The Husky and SCANDAL, the best-of anthology from The Possible, Mai Kuraki’s newest effort, and some initial forays into the world of AKB48 (which is going to be an article in and of itself soon) all come to mind. My interest in enka has also taken a turn towards mostly digital works (both CD and legal downloads – another reason to keep the account balance up on my Japanese iTunes account), which is a good thing.

Then I tried to think back to what non-Japanese CDs I’d bought this year. That was harder, as I tried to recall what was the last non-J-Pop CD I bought.

I kept trying to think it was Metallica’s Death Magnetic, given their having Rick Rubin replace Bob Rock and do some music that harkened, if not to their Ride The Lightning/Master of Puppets days, then at least to …And Justice for All. And kept thinking that I was wrong. It’s on my iPod – that much is sure as I went right to AmazonMP3.com for that one. Why am I thinking that the last American CD I bought was Hawthorne Heights’ new release?
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SCANDAL
Yah! Yah! Yah! Hello Scandal
(Kitty Inc.)
Availability: CD EP, iTunes US & Japan
Rating:

SCANDAL – vocalist/guitarist Haruna Ono, vocalist/lead guitarist Mami Sasasaki, vocalist/bassist Tomomi Ogawa, and drummer Rina Suzuki – have left quite the impression on American J-Pop fans since they toured as part of the Japan Nite package tour this past spring. The group was the smash hit of the entire tour by all accounts, and copies of their first single Space Ranger were selling out at every tour stop. So it is no surprise that anticipation for a full-length SCANDAL album was high.

Well, it looks like anticipation will still be high for a full-length SCANDAL album. Yah! Yah! Yah! Hello Scandal is a four-song EP and three of the songs have already been released as their first three singles. Fortunately, it makes sense to include all three singles on this EP, given how quickly they have sold and how hard they are to obtain as physical CDs outside of Japan.

The “new” track which opens the EP, “Koi No Kaijitsu”, starts with a powerpop introduction a-la The Raspberries before the band shifts into old-school ska/rock-steady for the verses. The introduction and verse are repeated before the band shifts gear again with a Beatleesque pre-chorus and refrain. After the intro/verse/prechorus/refrain sequence is given a second go-round, an instrumental bridge with an R.E.M.-esque chord sequence, but played Beatles-style and flavored with some conservative use of phase-shifting – adds a further dimension to the proceedings. The three-part harmonies by Haruna, Tomomi and Mami are more than pleasant to listen to.

For those that never got the singles and didn’t choose to download them from iTunes, they all follow on the EP in their original order of release, and benefit from an even better mastering job than the original singles. For the curious and uninitiated, here’s what early American adopters of SCANDAL have been enjoying for the past few months:

“Space Ranger” starts with some ominous synthesizer drones before the rhythm section kicks in. The two guitars follow, along with an uncredited organist supplementing the guitar riffs, with the end result being a very catchy song very reminiscent of ZONE.

“Koi Moyo” is my personal favorite of the three original singles. Instead of emulating ZONE, SCANDAL seem to have found a sound almost entirely of their own making. The production recalls Husker Du circa Flip Your Wig and Candy Apple Grey – indeed, the song itself sounds like how the Huskers would have sounded had Grant Hart played a straighter, more Tommy Lee-esque drum beat instead of his swinging style. Tomomi plays a very interesting, cliche-free bass line in the song’s introduction and instrumental tags, laying back to play only half-notes and whole notes during the verses and straight eighth-notes during the chorus. There’s no keyboards to be found, the three-part harmonies are tight, and Rina’s drums have a great wooden-room sound around them.

The EP’s closer, “Kagarou” kicks off with some Wire-sounding powerchords before a single-note synth line akin to early Devo adds its own icing to the rest of the introduction, with the rest of the song sounding like a guitar-heavy Elvis Costello & The Attractions (any keyboards beyond the occasional synth icing are pretty much obliterated by Haruna and Mami’s Stratocasters) and some of the lead vocals, especially during the first verse, recalling W.

Even if you already have the singles – either physically or from iTunes – Yah! Yah! Yah! Hello Scandal is a worthwhile purchase, especially as a physical CD, which I highly recommend as the packaging is pretty cool: An emulation of the Beatles’ Let It Be cover, with the CD packaged in a miniature gatefold album cover, complete with a Japanese-style plastic inner sleeve for the CD itself. (Yet another current CD that I would love to see come out as a 180-gram vinyl record! – Matador, Merge, and Saddle Creek, are you paying attention?) The girls of SCANDAL are apparently just as enamored of their American fanbase as the entire inner gatefold collage is dominated by live picks of the band from the same tour. Hopefully this will be a nice tideover until a true full-length LP from the quartet emerges.

Five out of five stars.