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.

Using my last.fm page’s static weekly charts as a guide, I’m going to self-analyze my listening habits and try to put a paragraph to them. Because goodness knows, I’m the only one who can explain why Mission of Burma comes up on my iPod one moment and John Coltrane comes up the next. (I’m sure the guy who has been running Gallery of Sound in West Hazleton since it first opened in 1987 sometimes tells the guys who work under him about the one time in 1992 when I walked up to the counter with a New Kids on the Block remix CD in one hand and the Bitches With Problems CD in )the other…

Just as a general foundation, here’s what my overall last.fm Top10 chart looks like:

1) Morning Musume
2) The Stooges
3) Nine Inch Nails
4) Minutemen
5) Black Flag
6) W
7) Puffy AmiYumi
8) Sayuri Ishikawa
9) Frank Sinatra
10) Hank Williams III

Now, here’s what my listening habits looked like, from #10 on down, as they looked for the week ending Sunday, August 30, with my somewhat pithy/pitiful explanations following each one: (Last.fm usually finalizes these charts at Midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Sundays)

10) Whiteberry. I wrote about their brilliant (and tragically out of print) Chameleon album at length at MotokoAoyama.com v1.0, and I wish that my former web host during that site’s existence wasn’t run by an inept hair metal drummer who apparently isn’t very good at his new real estate ventures, let alone running his half-assed webhosting company. Otherwise, I’d be linking to that blog entry. Anyway, the article in question pretty much cemented why Chameleon rates so high amongst my favorite albums. Last week was one of those times when I decided to start my workday with Yuki Maeda and company rockin’ out from start to finish.

9) KISS. This is as close to a guilty pleasure as there probably is on my iPod right now. I do admit that Ace Frehley is, along with Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, one of the reasons why I picked up a guitar in the first place – although I have to qualify that it was because of the likes of Johnny Ramone, Mick Jones, Steve Jones, Greg Ginn, Richie Stotts, and Philo Cramer that I kept that guitar in my hands. (And then I heard Jah Wobble, Horace Panter and Mike Watt and picked up the bass as well.) So I spun some Kiss favorites last week, although at least half of those spins were Ace’s “Rocket Ride”. They’re putting out a new album soon, as is Ace himself, and I’ll ruminate on both in the immediate future.

8) Motley Crue. Another what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking selection. I felt like listening to Shout at the Devil for the first time in years and that was that. Still a pretty decent album. I’m not bothering with Cruefest though, even though it’ll be in town on Friday – I refuse to sit through the talentless Godsmack just to hear Nikki, Tommy and company play Dr. Feelgood from beginning to end. And fortunately, many of Nikki Sixx’s lyrics aren’t as embarrassing to my matured ears as Gene Simmons’.

7) AKB48. Since they’re hardly an album act compared to, say, Morning Musume, its was their singles – specifically, all of their King Records singles – that were getting enough airplay on my iPod to crack my Top 10. They seem to be pretty quick with the single releases lately, too: it only seems like six weeks ago that “Namida Surprise” came out (in time for my birthday,too), and already there’s a new single (which I’ll get to this week, review wise).

6) Justin Duerr and The Etheric Phoenix of L.O.V.E. Justin is the lead singer of the fine Philadelphia trio Northern Liberties and a good friend of mine. This past Friday was his birthday, so while thinking of my friend I played his first side-project CD, a collection of four-track recordings he did between 2004 and 2006. I played some Northern Liberties, too, but not enough to crack my Last.fmTop 10.

5) Black Flag. Sometime last week seemed like a good Black Flag day, so The First Four Years and Loose Nut came to the rescue. Loose Nut in particular is one of my all-time favorite Black Flag albums.

4) Morning Musume. Yikes! How did my favorite band get kicked so low on the chart last week? Nothing they did wrong, nor did I have any kind of crisis of faith about them. I blame the top three:

3) Mike Hale. Mike does some great, introspective acoustic solo music when he isn’t fronting the trio In The Red, and I got a bit hooked on the highly recommended Lives Like Mine album (Suburban Home Records) as late-night listening last week.

2) Hiromi Iwasaki. Hiromi is one of the first Japanese kayokyoku albums I got ahold of last year when I was looking for some nourishment for my turntable. A few times last week when I got in bed, I put my iPod in my JBL speaker/charger pod and put on her Album album, a very pretty and calming record, at a soft volume and let it help me drift off to dreamland. Speaking of Iwasaki-san, you’ve probably heard one of her songs already, but not her version: Morning Musume covered her song “ROMANCE” last year.

1) Shonen Knife. How’d they get here? Simple. I blame how good their newly released album Super Group is. Review in a couple of days.

(And if you see Aerosmith in the lower reaches of the top ten next week, it’s because I was playing Rocks while I was writing this…)

MORNING MUSUME
Pepper Keibu (single)
(Zetima)
Available on CD, CD/DVD and iTunes US & Japan
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

This is the way I like to review a single – not from a torrented download, a PV soundtrack, or a radio rip, but from the actual CD.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the idea of Morning Musume doing a Pink Lady cover appealed to me greatly. I liked MoMusu’s version as heard on the PV, but waited until hearing the actual CD before formulating a final opinion on it for the purposes of this review. I am definitely not disappointed.

Morning Musume’s cover of “Pepper Keibu” starts off rather deceptively with a slow keyboard ending before going into an almost-note-for-note, beat-for-beat copy of the Pink Lady original. When the first verse starts, however, the rhythm changes and we get a suitably rigid-yet-swinging 21st Century dance/pop rhythm. The band could have done the song note for note and it would have been an enjoyable listen, but it wouldn’t have been a true Morning Musume single. In other words, the song as performed here sounds like it should be a strong A-side; a 100% copy of the original arrangement wouldn’t have rated more than a B-side or album track (and probably come off as filler amongst an album of Morning Musume/Tsunku originals).

The B-side, “ROMANCE”, is a song I’m not familiar with – I don’t know who did the original song (someone else in the IW blogosphere mentioned it, but I forget who). It sounds like the arrangers may have stuck a little closer to the original recording’s Showa Era-arrangement, albeit with a few more modern production touches like a sequencer pattern, audio strobing (i.e. in this case, the backing track cutting on and off rapidly and rhythmically), and the like.

The vocal performances are top notch – the A-side in particular has some of the best harmonizing the present lineup has ever done. Nothing wrong with Reina’s solo lines either. There’s a reason why she’s up front on this single and on “Resonant Blue” – the woman can sing!

This’ll be a nice tide-over until COVER YUU drops.

Four and a half out of five.

With Morning Musume’s cover version of Pink Lady’s first single about to drop, I figured it was a good as an excuse as any to look for and post a clip of my very first sight of Mei and Kei. It was May of 1979, I would be turning 12 in two months, and my listening habits at that time included Kiss, Cheap Trick, the Who, and a bit of what I knew back then as “new wave” (The Clash wouldn’t put out London Calling until the end of the year – I think I only had the US version of their first album at this point). I was home on a Friday night, about to sit down and watch The Incredible Hulk when the usual CBS Special Presentation animation comes up, indicating that something other than Bill Bixby morphing into a green-painted Lou Ferrigno was going to fill up the next 60 minutes of airtime on the “Tiffany Network”.

That something was Leif Garrett’s only network television special. I had a tape of his first album somewhere in my home, as well as a 45 of his then-current single “I Was Made For Dancing” (still a pretty decent song despite its disco’ed origins), so I sat and watched it. Outside of seeing him lipsync some of the songs from his first album (which was all covers of 50′s and 60′s songs – whoever was handling Leif at the time must have been taking a cue from Shawn Cassidy’s first album) and a skit where him and one of his guests couldn’t get away from different musical takes (punk, tango, polka) on “I Was Made For Dancing” no matter where they went, the most memorable moment of the special didn’t even belong to the then-former Odd Couple cast member and then-future celebrity convict, but to two beautiful, leggy Asian girls:

My mother happened to come into the room at that point, see Mei and Kei on the screen, and thought their dancing was “nothing special”. “Maybe,” I said, “but what about their singing?” She didn’t have an answer for me, but I had it for myself – they were pretty damn good.

The next time I was at the record store at the mall, I looked for, and located, the 45 of “Kiss In The Dark” (b-side: a cover of The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee”), complete with picture sleeve. I still have it somewhere but haven’t located it yet. Why I never bought the album is a mystery to me, although I could easily rectify that either by going on CDJapan for the Japanese CD reissue on their longtime label Victor, or hitting eBay for a copy of the original Elektra pressing of their only American album. I didn’t remember their outfits since the only time I saw that broadcast until I located this YouTube clip, but I still remembered that silly sketch they did with Leif at the end of the segment since then.

A simple story, but that was where the seeds of my J-Fandom were first planted, although I obviously wouldn’t realize this until 2002 or so. Not counting Mai and Kei’s later foray on American television, my next taste of J-Music would come five or six years later, but that’s another story for another post.

No sooner did I mention how long it was since Morning Musume last released a studio album, than word comes out (in the wake of “Pepper Keibu”‘s PV hitting Dohhh! UP – suffice it to say that I am knocked out by the song and its current PV and that, for obvious reasons, I certainly won’t complain about the amount of face and mic time Reina Tanaka gets; I’ll save further description for the week the single is actually in my hands) that Morning Musume are releasing an album of covers centered around the work of songwriter Aku Yuu (who died last year at the age of 70, leaving behind 5,000 songs from his prolific pen). This made my ears perk up considerably given my deepening interest in Japanese popular music of all kinds (something that sparked my grabbing that stack of enka 45s on eBay, which sparked The Vinyl Pagoda Project, of course).

Like the tracks that filled out the first W album (including two songs penned by Yuu, the Pink Lady covers “Southpaw” and “Nagisa No Sinbad”), the album will offer to 21st century music lovers a look into Japanese pop music history. The bad news is that since the album’s concept is centered around songs from the Aku Yuu back catalog, there’s no opportunity for Morning Musume to try their hand at some other Showa Era songs – like, for example, a chance for Reina Tanaka or Ai Takahashi to plow through a rocking take on Akina Nakamori’s “Shojo A”.

Unfortunately, as a couple of other bloggers in the IW blogosphere have pointed out, the cover concept also orphans all of the post-Sexy 8 Beat singles that would have otherwise ended up on a MoMusu long-player. Granted, “Kanashimi Twilight” and “Onna Ni Sachi Are” may have a home on the ALL SINGLES COMPLETE anthology, but what about “Mikan” and “Resonant Blue”? I don’t know, but I’m not completely worried about that right now. This is the first Morning Musume studio album to not have a number in its title, so it’s a relatively safe guess to suggest that Morning Musume’s proper ninth album, after another original single release in, say December 2008 or January 2009, will give “Mikan” and “Resonant Blue” a long playing home.

COVER YUU, when released this November (a year after “Mikan”), will also serve one other positive purpose, I think: Not only reinforcing, but cementing Morning Musume’s place in Japanese music history. They’ve already broken Pink Lady’s records for most Top 10 singles and most Number One singles on the Oricon charts, and it already looks like MoMusu’s 21st century take on “Pepper Keibu” will extend those reigns. What other record of Pink Lady’s could Morning Musume surpass? Going higher on the Billboard singles chart than “Kiss In The Dark” did would be nice – but that, as one wise man often says, is another show.

As odd as it might seem for Morning Musume to be following up one of their best ever singles with a cover version, I certainly don’t object to their forthcoming cover of Pink Lady’s “Pepper Keibu”. Pink Lady were the first Japanese act I had ever heard back when “Kiss In The Dark” was being heavily pushed by Elektra Records here in the States, long before that disastrous variety show. And it isn’t the first time Morning Musume ever encountered Pink Lady (their 2004 Music Fair collaborations on “The*Peace”, “S.O.S.” and “Love Machine”, anyone?) or anyone in Hello! Project recorded a cover version from Mei & Kay’s back catalog – Aibon and Nono, of course, covered “Southpaw” and “Nagisa No Sinbad” on their first album as W, Duo U&U, back in 2004. Of course, there was Takitty and Gaki’s recent turn portraying Pink Lady on Japanese TV earlier this summer (doing this very song).

What makes this even cooler is that Morning Musume broke Pink Lady’s record for most Top 10 singles in the Japanese Top 10 awhile back, which adds a nice bit of irony (however unintended) to the proceedings.

Hopefully, once this single hits the racks, we won’t have to wait several months for the follow-up. It’s already been almost two years since the last studio album, for Chrissakes…