ALBUM REVIEW: MORNING MUSUME “12, Smart”
MORNING MUSUME
12, Smart
(Zetima)
Available on CD, CD/DVD combo, and on iTunes US and Japan
Rating: 
It took a couple of days longer than I expected, but I wasn’t about to not review a Morning Musume album for the second time in a row. (At least in the instance of Fantasy 11, I could blame the Christmas holidays.) Let’s do the math quick: This is Morning Musume’s third album in nineteen months (I can’t help but recall back when Husker Du dropped New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, and Candy Apple Grey – solid albums, all – within a similar time frame back in the mid-80′s). And it’s the soonest they’ve followed up a studio album since the three-and-a-half month gap between Cover You and Platinum 9 Disc. (The second shortest gap was between Second Morning and 3rd Love Paradise). And this album is coming out on the heels of Ai Takahashi’s graduation from the band and the addition of four new members that have yet to see the inside of a recording studio, and that’s on the heels of four more members being added at the beginning of this year. Things are getting way busy over in MoMusu land, and that’s a good thing. They’re also changing a mite too fast, but thankfully, the new album is giving veteran MoMusu fans like myself a chance to catch up.
I do have to admit that I was a little wary of how the songwriting quality of the album was going to be considering the tough double act 12, Smart has to follow with the two solid albums that bookended 2010, the semi-experimental 10 My Me and the more group-centric Fantasy 11. [Which I still wish I had written a review of last December; If you haven't bought that album yet, go get it now 'cause it still holds up.] I also wondered how the 9th Generation members were going to mesh in an album setting, considering there were basically thrown front and center their first single in, before being reined in by Tsunku afterward (and quite wisely) on the two singles that followed.
Tsunku has had a pretty good game plan as far as sequencing the opening tracks of the past several Morning Musume studio albums – new studio track followed by one of the recent singles – and he adheres pretty much to that same operating procedure. “Give Me Ai” (sung as “Give me love” in the lyrics itself, if you didn’t know what the word “Ai” meant in Japanese) recalls both Platinum 9 Disc‘s “SONGS” and Fantasy 11‘s “Onna to Otoko no Lullaby Game”, with an arrangement that mixes some of the best elements of both tracks.
“Only You”, one of the current lineup’s best single A-sides, follows “Give Me Ai” out of the starting gate. Tsunku’s songwriting for Morning Musume singles has been displaying a determination to have more than two strains of music (in other words, not just a verse and a chorus ad infinitum) in a pop song if he can get away with it. Here, he gets away with it in spades. Ai Takahashi, Reina Tanaka and Risa Niigaki are in excellent voice (even if some of Gaki-san’s vocals are deliberately effected with AutoTune in the song’s prechoruses).
One of the unique things about the last Morning Musume album, Fantasy 11, was that the album was dominated by group performances, with only Ai Takahashi and Reina Tanaka getting solo cuts and no subgroup features to speak of. This time around, the band gets splintered around for four of the album’s twelve tracks. On “Silver no Udedokei” Reina is paired with Riho Sayaski (the only member of the 9th gen to get any solo lines on “Only You”) for a classic H!P urban R&B workout a-la the ROMANS one-off “Sexy Night”, with Risa and Aika Mitsui brought in to contribute rap-style vocals here and there. Although Morning Musume can pull off pretty much any style they are confronted with, modern R&B is one of their strongest suits.
Sayumi Michishige and newcomer Mizuki Fukimura take their turn at a subgroup cut next with “Suki da na Kimi ga”. Apparently Mizuki is cut from similar cloth vocally to Sayumi, and they get a heavily electronic track to play with.
“Kaiketsu Positive A” starts with traffic sound effects before a soul horn section (albeit a synthetic one) kicks in, bringing the entire group along for the ride. Here some of the ninth gen members hold their own very well alongside the veteran members, both with solo lines and harmonies.
Six tracks in and we get our first non-uptempo cut of the album, “Kono Ai wo Kasanete”, a sort of torch-passing duet between Takahashi and Niigaki. Given that the release date of this album was – somewhat stupidly – done a couple of weeks after Takahashi graduated from the band, its fortunate that then-leader and then-subleader were given a chance at a subgroup cut.
The one/two punch of the band’s current double-A-side single “Kono Chikyuu no Heiwa o Honki de Nagatterun da yo!”/”Kare to Issho no Omise ga Shitai!” follows. I’m glad the band and Tsunku retained the crossfade between both songs from the single version for the album. In my mind, this is the best double-A-side single since Husker Du’s “Makes No Sense At All”/”Love Is All Around”.
“My Way ~Joshikou Hanamichi~” combines rock guitar riffing and drum-and-bass percussion loops. That combination shouldn’t work, but here it does. The band members engage in some top-notch harmonizing over the somewhat frantic musical arrangement.
“Otome no Timing” starts with a Motown-esque double-time rhythm on the intro (and choruses) before giving in to a brighter pop arrangement on the verses. Back when Sexy 8 Beat was released, an 60′s-influenced musical bed allowed then-newcomer Aika Mitsui to have some solo space with veteran Eri Kamei. Now, Aika is in the veteran’s spot with a similar song and she has her hands full with newcomers Erina Ikuta and Kanon Suzuki, whose vocals are already starting to remind me of Ai Kago & Nozomi Tsuji circa 2000-2001.
“OK YEAH!” starts off somewhat weak then almost threatens to drown out the band members with its happy-hardcore sound (so much so that one would not be blamed to double check to make sure Anabolic Frolic’s name isn’t in the credits). Fortunately, saner heads prevailed at the mixing desk and the MoMusus are front and center.
“Maji Ka Desu Ska!”, the first single by the new lineup (review from when the single was first released here), closes out the album – not only a further reiteration of standard Tsunku operating procedure for sequencing a Morning Musume studio album of late, but a reminder of how the year started for the band in the first place.
If there are any weak spots on the album, they are when the newest, youngest members of the band are featured so prominently. Perhaps it is because we now have a MoMusu lineup that has members younger than the members of Berryz Koubou and C-ute. Fortunately, the songwriting and the vocal performances of the veteran members are still top notch and sustain the album. Hopefully the newer members will develop more vocal personality by the time the next band’s album drops.
4 and a half out of 5 stars.
REVIEW: SHONEN KNIFE “Osaka Ramones”
SHONEN KNIFE
Osaka Ramones: Tribute to The Ramones
(Good Charamel)
Available on CD, iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic
Rating:
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: This review was originally intended for what I have referred to at TGML's Facebook page as "The Secret Project", but since there's going to be an unavoidable delay in that project's debut, I've moved it here because I didn't want it to sit any longer. Shonen Knife deserves it.]
Naoko Yamano, Shonen Knife’s front woman, guitarist, chief songwriter, and only consistent member of the veteran Japanese trio (as well as a MILF to both the punk rock and J-pop fan bases), learned how to play guitar by listening to the Ramones. In that aspect, she already has one thing in common with millions of people around the world, this writer included. On top of the obvious Ramones influences that have been part and parcel of Shonen Knife’s music from the beginning of their storied career, the band has also been known to encore with Ramones songs and even do occasional gigs consisting of all Ramones covers under an assumed name, and their 2008 album Fun Fun Fun also contains a tribute song, “Ramones Forever”, that includes autobiographic details on how Naoko first heard the band and how Shonen Knife got to open for the Ramones on their last tour of Japan.
With their own 30th anniversary occurring this year, Naoko and her bandmates decided commemorate the occasion by cutting a full album of Ramones covers, using the name of their occasional Ramones tribute act side project, Osaka Ramones, as the album’s title. About half the album was recorded in their hometown, while the other half was recorded in America with Good Charamel founder (and GooGoo Dolls member) Robby Takac co-producing.
Outside of transposing the key signatures of some of the songs to make them more friendly to their normal female vocal ranges, Shonen Knife remained otherwise faithful to the original recordings, even trying to reproduce as accurately as possible the production styles of the original Ramones recordings (save for “Blitzkrieg Bop”, where the band and Takac wisely avoid emulating the extreme Meet the Beatles-style panning of the guitar and bass tracks in favor of a more contemporary mix). Also remaining unchanged are the gender viewpoints of the original songs, giving some of the covers an unintended faux-lesbian subtext.
The song selection isn’t as completely predictable. A few obvious choices – “Rock n’ Roll High School”, the aforementioned “Blitzkrieg Bop”, “Sheenah Is a Punk Rocker”, “Psycho Therapy” (thankfully, no “I Wanna Be Sedated”, which every bar band in America tends to play very badly) also share space with a couple of not-so-obvious choices, particularly “Scattergun” from the final Ramones studio album Adios Amigos! and “Chinese Rock” from End of the Century.
Given that Shonen Knife’s original songs often cover more kawaii (Japanese for “cute”) topics – food (“BBQ Party”, “I Wanna Eat Chocobars”, “Ice Cream City”), animals (“I Am A Cat”, “Deer Biscuits”), rock and roll (“Golden Years of Rock n’ Roll”, “Rock Society”, “Your Guitar”), campy sci-fi (“Riding on the Rocket”, “Giant Kitty”), with the rare weighty topic (“S*P*A*M”, “Economic Crisis”) – it is quite the shock to hear Naoko and the others (bassist Ritsuko Taneda and new drummer Emi Morimoto sing one song apiece) take on some of the Ramones’s darker lyrical moments, particularly with “Chinese Rocks”, “We’re A Happy Family”, and “Psychotherapy”. This doesn’t distract from or lower the quality of the album, just makes it stand out from the rest of the Shonen Knife catalog.
Beyond that, Osaka Ramones does exactly what Shonen Knife intended the album to do – pay tribute to their heroes and commemorate their own milestone anniversary, one made possible one way or another by the Ramones themselves. Fans of both the Ramones and Shonen Knife will love this, and if one is a fan of one band but not the other, hopefully the album will inspire explorations into the other’s back catalog.
REVIEW: PETER TOSH “Legalize It” and “Equal Rights” Legacy Editions
PETER TOSH
Legalize It (Legacy Edition) and Equal Rights (Legacy Edition)
(Legacy/Columbia)
Available on 2CD sets and on iTunes and AmazonMP3.com
Rating: (for both)
Peter Tosh’s debut solo album Legalize It is not only one of my favorite reggae albums, it is one of my favorite albums, period, so when an opportunity came to hear advance copies of newly remastered and expanded editions of both that album and its follow-up Equal Rights, I went for it. (Big thanks to Randy at Sony Legacy.) And I’m not kidding when I say Legalize It is one of my favorites – I’ve owned several editions in the past 25 years, starting with a cassette copy and then going on to the first original Columbia CD edition from the late 80’s, Legacy’s original single-disc remastered reissue, a 180-gram vinyl release from 2000, and a Jamaican pressing done on Tosh’s own Intel-Diplo H.I.M. label.
I have tried several times to write about this album’s new reissue and honestly, it’s been hard to do. I have been listening to this album for close to three decades and it never has failed to entertain me. Both longtime fans of Tosh and of reggae music in general know how seminal, how much essential listening that an album Legalize It is. Tosh was starting basically from scratch after a frustrating if amicable departure from The Wailers (amicable between himself and Bob Marley – Tosh’s relations with Island Records chief Chris Blackwell were another story, given that Tosh would later christen him “Whiteworst”) when he proceeded to start putting together what became Legalize It, even sending copies of the original Jamaican mix to three interested labels before Columbia took the chance. The album has not gone out of print since.
It is because of all that familiarity with this album and the various editions that I have proudly owned it on that I can say with all certainty that this new edition of Legalize It is simply the best I have ever heard this album sound, and whatever price one pays for this new edition is worth it just for the remastered version of the original LP. All of the bonus tracks are pure gold, but the best of the whole bunch is the original Jamaican mix of the album that dominates the first half of Disc Two. Comparing the two will easily reveal how pure the original mix is and how much the album was nicely decorated to make it accessible to a wider audience (in spite of the fact that openly endorsing the legalization of pot pretty much made Tosh eligible for being Public Enemy Number One).
Equal Rights is, this writer also admits, an album that I’m not as familiar with as Legalize It, which is practically imbedded in my bone marrow at this point. But Tosh was firing on all cylinders at this point, reclaiming “Get Up Stand Up” from the Wailers (which wasn’t hard – he co-wrote it and sang the closing verse on the original recording) for himself and getting even more political, writing a song bashing apartheid at a time (1977) when most people didn’t even know what it was (One of the participants in the album that was interviewed for the reissues’s liner notes admits that he originally thought Tosh made up the word, given that he was known for his own distinctive wordplay, e.g. referring to oppression as “downpression”, understanding as “overstanding”, calling corrupt systems “shitstems”,), and another encouraging everyone of African heritage worldwide to be proud of their ethnic roots, years before the likes of Public Enemy and KRS-One would do the same thing. Equal Rights‘s bonus tracks are just as revealing as those of Legalize It’s, presenting a slew of unreleased tracks recorded during the album sessions (some of which Tosh had recorded before with the Wailers and on early pre-Island solo singles). For this listener, the whole package makes me appreciate the album just as much as I appreciated Legalize It for all these years.
These are important albums both in reggae music and in general. If you don’t own them, you have no excuse not to now, and if you already own other editions, it’s time to upgrade.
Five stars for both. Obviously.
REVIEW: AKB48 “Koko ni Ita Koto”
AKB48
Koko ni Ita Koto
(You! Be Cool/King)
Available on CD, CD/DVD and on iTunes Japan
Rating: 
Given the amount of long playing albums – fourteen in total as of this writing, counting this release – that they’ve released in their short time as a group/project, it’s rather mindboggling to think that this is, for all intents and purposes, AKB48’s debut studio album. Last year’s second singles collection Kamikyokutachi did come off like a well-sequenced studio album, but given that pretty much 90% of that album was already released as A and B-sides of singles, its familiarity probably made listening to that album an enjoyable, if relatively surprise-free, listening experience (It’s still essential listening, given that it sums up the band’s career up to the spring of 2010.)
After all that time – extended even further thanks to manufacturing delays related to this past spring’s earthquake and tsunami – we finally get AKB48’s first real studio album (everything else, save for Kamikyokutachi and the band’s first best-of album Set List ~Greatest Songs 2006-2008~ (DefSTAR/Sony Japan), was “original cast albums” of the separate team’s stage shows). Although not indicated as such, the album appears to have been sequenced into separate sections by the band’s producer/lyricist Yasushi Akimoto.
The first part of the album gets off to a good start with the mixed-team opener “Shoujotachi yo” and three separate Team tracks, “Overtake” (Team A), “Boku ni Dekiru Koto” (Team K) and “Renai Circus” (Team B) – none of which would have sounded out of place on an AKB48 single or one of the separate team’s stage albums. So far, so good.
The next section of the album gets devoted to random groupings of the various group members. “Kake no Yukue” isn’t far removed from the kind of material that ends up somewhere in the middle of the various Team’s stage shows, and it’s ballad-like pacing is a balm after the opening four-song salvo. “Wagamama Collection” is basically an attack of cuteness dominated by some of the group’s younger members, while the following “Ningyo no Vacances” and “Kimi to Boko no Kankei” sound like outtakes from the first Berryz Koubou album. “Iikagen no Susume” appears to shift the album’s gears with an arrangement that recalls AKB’s classic DefSTAR singles, then things get turned backwards with the Team Kenkyuusei feature “High School Days” – which, for whatever reason, sees that team’s participants sound more assured (despite their young ages) than the Berryz-sounding cuts from their elder bandmates.
“Team B Oshi” is the album’s weakest track – like the title implies, it’s another feature for Team B, and it sounds exactly like what it is – a stage album song that somehow ended up on the wrong (virtual) master reel. In other words, it sounds completely out of place here.
The remainder of the album is dominated by four of the band’s more recent singles. I have to admit, after 2009’s “RIVER”, much of the band’s singles output since then underwhelmed me, with “Beginner” and “Heavy Rotation” being the best of the bunch – “Ponytail to Chouchou” seems more memorable for its infamous locker room skin-tease video opening than for the song itself, while “Chance no Junban” lies right inbetween.
The title track, featuring the band and its three sister units SKE48, SDN48 and Osaka-based NMB48, closes out things. The song itself is a very pretty ballad featuring some great mass harmonies and ensemble singing from the four units. I’m just personally not a big fan of albums having slow songs for closing tracks.
Outside of the album’s weaker tracks, it is the album’s sequencing itself, concentrating on grouping songs according to a loose concept rather than the more logical song-by-song flow a studio album normally calls for, is a bit of an Achilles Heel. Yes, the sequencing itself is pretty much Akimoto’s choice, but the listener would be better served devoting future listens to the full album not in its original sequence but either in shuffle play, or in a sequencing of the listener’s own making. The performances and most of the songs are well done, but the way this album was originally sequenced doesn’t make this album the most perfect of listens for me, and after five years, plus a mother-nature-precipitated two month delay, one would think that AKB48 and their creative team would have delivered a more consistent package for what is essentially the band’s first studio album. At least the band’s sales will insure that a second studio collection will be inevitable in 2012, just like hitting shuffle would make Koto ni Ita Kito a more enjoyable listening experience.
Four out of five stars.
REVIEW: BORIS “Attention Please” and “Heavy Rocks (2011)”
Attention Please and Heavy Rocks (2011)
(Sargent House)
Available on CD, LP, iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic
Rating:
With some bands, you know what to expect before you even bust the shrinkwrap on your newly purchased LP or CD or click that download link. Boris is not one of those bands. When it was announced earlier this year that the veteran Japanese experimental rock trio was dropping both a rock album and a pop album simultaneously, I’m sure a lot of eyebrows were going up. Since we’re dealing with Boris, however, these descriptions of their new material are vague at best. The music, however, isn’t.
Attention Please, the so-called “pop” album, actually sees the trio bringing their experimental tendencies into the pop-rock format with often surprising results. Lead guitarist Wata is the sole lead vocalist on the entire album; while she doesn’t possess the range of many of her more visible countrywomen like Kumi Koda and Morning Musume’s Reina Tanaka and Ai Takahashi, her whispery, almost fairy-like singing does carry its own distinctive recognizable signature. Terming the album as “pop”, however, doesn’t mean that the album is loaded with radio-friendly tracks like the first single “Hope”. “See You Next Week”, for example, marries an industrial found-sound loop to Wata’s reverberated vocals and slowly arpeggiated guitar figures. I’ve noted several times in the past that most Western J-pop fans are usually fans of alternative, punk, and indie music. Attention Please may very well be the album those fans reach for when they can’t decide between listening to Sonic Youth or Morning Musume.
Heavy Rocks – borrowing a name from another album of theirs from ten years ago, and thus a methodology not dissimilar to Weezer’s self-titled, differently colored trilogy of albums – actually seems like the more accessible of the two albums. Here, the band concentrates on various forms of guitar-based riff rock – Anthrax-like riffing on “Czechoslovakia”, raucous hardcore punk on “Galaxians”, first single “Riot Sugar” sounding so much like the Cult that they invite their pal Ian Astbury over to chip in a few trademark vocal interjections. They let their experimental side rest, save for the ambient cut “Key” and the Merzbow-like noise explosion that interrupts “Missing Pieces”. Most of the vocals are handled by Takeshi, but a guest vocalist, Yoshito Kawakita, takes the mic over to kick some Puffy AmiYumi-like “do-do-do”’s over the grunge-influenced barre chords of “Window Shopping”.
Also curiously, both albums contain a track called “Aileron”, but both songs, like the albums they are on, are rather different. The Attention Please “Aileron” is a William Ackerman-esque acoustic guitar instrumental, while the Heavy Rocks track takes one of the other version’s guitar figures, transfers it to an electric, slows it down, and makes it a lengthy full band piece with lead vocal.
They’re two separate albums, with their own packaging and musical concepts, but together they make one complete whole – and you can’t go wrong with that.
Four and a half stars for each one, or five stars for both.
ETA: When this was first written, the album was reviewed from legally downloaded editions of the albums that contained no credits. We thus originally identified Wata as the vocalist on “Window Shopping”. Having received physical copies of the albums from Sargent House today, we have since corrected that error and apologize for any confusion.
REVIEW: ROBERT JOHNSON “The Centennial Collection”
The Centennial Collection
(Legacy/Columbia)
Available on 2CD set and on iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic
Rating:
By all accounts, I shouldn’t have to try to sell anyone on Robert Johnson. The man’s legend has loomed large since Columbia, under John Hammond Sr.’s auspices, assembled 16 of the long-dead Johnson’s recordings under the title King of the Delta Blues Singers. If you’re interested at all in early blues music, the roots of rock and roll, or early American music in general, you probably already have a copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers or the Complete Collection box set from 1990 (a surprise platinum-selling release – especially in the eyes of Columbia, who only expected to move ten or twenty thousand copies) in your collection. If not, any interest you may have had in the man’s music may have been slowed down by just one thing: “Ugh! Recordings from when they only made 78’s? There’ll be a fuckton of scratches. Important or not, five-star essential listening or not, I’m not listening to music under that bad of a sound source.”
Thankfully, technology has progressed to the point where a good sound engineer could take a scratchy 78, program the clicks and pops out of it, and make the recording sound as crystal clear as possible, as a late 90’s overdue CD edition of the first King of the Delta Blues Singers album proved in comparison to the Complete Collection box.
Of course, even Johnson devotees might whine, “Another reissue of the same bunch of tracks? Jesus Christ, Columbia, why don’t you just dig Robert’s body up and poison him to death again?” upon hearing of the release of The Centennial Collection. But that’s where technology comes into play again. Digital audio archiving has evolved so much that Centennial makes the previous edition of Johnson’s recordings sound less than optimum. I’ve heard Johnson’s recordings on everything from a cassette to the original box set to the 1998 CD edition of KOTDBS to a 180-gram LP. The fact is, these classic tracks are sounding as CLEAN as they have always deserved to be. There is a little high-end hiss that the sound engineers could not remove without compromising the original sonic fields that were recorded eighty years ago, but Johnson’s singing and guitar playing, his signature sound – are ringing clearer than ever. You couldn’t make these recordings sound any better unless you built a time machine, went back to the late 20’s and patched a MacBook Pro with ProTools into producer Don Law’s disc cutting machine.
And that, dear Virginia, is what this release of all of Johnson’s recordings is all about. If you can’t appreciate Robert Johnson’s music under these newly optimum conditions, then there’s something wrong.
Recommended Surfing: TheCompleteRobertJohnson.com
REVIEW: MEAT PUPPETS “Lollipop”
MEAT PUPPETS
Lollipop
(Megaforce/Red Ink)
Available on CD, LP, iTunes and AmazonMP3
Rating:
I welcomed the return of the Meat Puppets ever since Curt Kirkwood polled fans as to whether they wanted to see a reunion of the original lineup through his MySpace page. The first result of that question’s aftermath, 2007’s Rise To Your Knees, was the indie-rock equivalent of Star Trek: The Motion Picture: It was great to see/hear from some old friends again, even if the end results didn’t fully live up to the anticipation built up from years worth of passing time even before a return to action became reality.
With that seemingly odd comparison having been made, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the follow-up, 2009’s Sewn Together (which made TGML’s Top 10 Album list that year) is the Meat Puppets’s Wrath of Khan. Fully recharged after the test run that was Rise To Your Knees, Curt and Cris Kirkwood and then-drummer Ted Marcus had delivered in Sewn Together a long-playing effort that was (and is) fully worthy of standing up with the best albums (II, Up On The Sun, Mirage, Huevos, Too High To Die) of their classic back catalog.
Now, two years later, comes Lollipop; While they’ve had a major personnel change – Shandom Sahm, son of the late Sir Douglas Quintet/Texas Tornados leader Doug Sahm and also a former Meat Puppet back in the short-lived Golden Lies period, replaces Marcus behind the trap set – they not only haven’t lost a step, they’ve progressed nicely without losing an ounce of what makes the Meat Puppets who they quintessentially are, be it Curt Kirkwood’s lead lines or his and Cris’s brotherly harmonies. Much of the material could have fit nicely on Up On The Sun or Mirage, but there are also a few welcome twists and turns, like the reggae/ska rhythms that propel the verses “Shave It”, or the almost Coldplay-esque piano chords that open “Orange” only to get near-obliterated by “My Sharona” drums and some nasty fuzz bass from Cris Kirkwood. All of it works.
So, if we’re going to fool around with Meat Puppets/Star Trek comparisons, does that make Lollipop their Search for Spock? Well, put it this way: Search was a must-see flick back in the day. Lollipop is a must-hear album. Enough said.
(Hot tip: Advance order customers who ordered Lollipop from the band’s website – your humble reviewer included – initially received a high-quality digital download of the album with the songs in their original, pre-manufacture sequence [but accidentally labeled with the final sequence’s song titles] – an error long since corrected and rectified by the band’s management. To emulate the original sequence, program your CD player or iPod playlist in the following order: 2, 3, 11, 10, 9, 5, 6, 7, 8, 4, 1, 12.)
Stream: Meat Puppets “Damn Thing”
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ALBUM REVIEW: NEW YORK DOLLS “Dancing Backwards In High Heels”
NEW YORK DOLLS
Dancing Backwards in High Heels
(429/Savoy Label Group)
Available on CD, iTunes, and AmazonMP3
Rating:
After listening to the advance single from this album, “Fool For Your Baby”, I had a severe amount of trepidation as the release date for the New York Dolls’ third studio album approached. “Fool For You Baby” and its Phil Spector-gone-lo-fi production really underwhelmed me, and in my track review I openly stated that I hoped that this song was the exception rather than the rule as far as the full album was concerned.
Two of the major tenants of the Dolls’ operating manual – the strong songwriting and the mining of 50’s and 60’s rock and pop influences – are still abound on Dancing Backwards in High Heels. That’s the good news. David Johansen is in the best voice he’s ever been in his entire career. That’s more good news. For the first time on a studio album since Too Much Too Soon the group throws in a Dollsified cover of an oldie, this time taking on “I Sold My Heart to the Junk Man” (an early Patti LaBelle hit), while DavidJo and Syl Sylvain reclaim “Funky But Chic” from David’s first solo album and insert it into the Dolls canon that it belonged into in the first place.
Knocking down the star rating on this album is the production. The electric guitars on the album take a pretty much permanent back seat to the rest of the instruments, including the same cheesy organ sound that dominates “Fool For Your Baby”, and the drum sound is quite wimpy, almost cardboard-box like. These are two developments that simply run counter to the usual Dolls esthetic. Blame for this should be placed squarely on new producer and bassist Jason Hill, rather on the absence of Steve Conte and Sami Yaffa who had been filling the voids left behind by Johnny Thunders and Arthur Killer Kane quite nicely.
While Dancing Backwards is a decent effort from the band, it’s not definitive Dolls and is basically a fans-only album, if that. It definitely wouldn’t be the album I would recommend to be a first New York Dolls purchase. Unfortunately, this album is what David, Syl, and company will be touring behind this summer when they open (what?) for Motley Crue and Poison (what the fuck?), which means this well-intentioned misstep will probably be the first – and last – purchase for Dolls newcomers unless someone in their immediate vicinity steers them to their earlier albums first.
REVIEW: KODA KUMI “Dejavu”
KODA KUMI
Dejavu
(Rhythm Zone/Avex)
Available on CD and CD+2DVD
Rating:
Shouldn’t “déjà vu” be two words, not one? No matter. It’s the first quarter of the new year, and Koda Kumi wasn’t about to let it pass without a new album, and like a devoted fan I have to welcome it with open arms.
Unlike last year’s 8th AL Universe, Kuu-chin isn’t flirting with rock arrangements this time around – there’s no “Ningyao-hime” or “Can We Go Back” to throw the listener for a powerchord-driven loop; with only one glaring exception Dejavu focuses almost exclusively on pop and urban arrangements.
“POP DIVA”, the album’s advance single, sounds like Kuu-chin is either challenging or mocking Lady GaGa; considering that in the wake of the release of Kuu-chin’s single, GaGa dropped the “Express Yourself” clone “Born This Way”, had herself carried into the Grammy Awards in a large egg, and then accepted an award while wearing an almost Klingon-esque prosthetic forehead, one has to wonder if GaGa got whatever message Kuu-chin was sending. While it’s a catchy song, it’s not one of Kuu-chin’s better A-sides – producer Lil’shorty sees fit both on this song and the album’s opening prologue to unnecessarily mix Kumi’s vocals through AutoTune vocoder effects. It’s not as annoying on “POP DIVA” since it fits the heavily synthetic arrangement, but over the keyboard-triggered orchestral sounds of the album’s prologue, it’s pretty much surplus to requirements.
“Lollipop”, the opening cut to last summer’s Gossip Candy EP, follows. (The PV had my pal, up-and-coming shred guitarist Maxxxwell Carlisle, rather fascinated after I’d linked to it on Facebook awhile back.) Riding an almost sexy-sounding synth-bass line straight out of classic early-90’s R&B, Kumi (multitracking some rather tight and sultry vocal harmonies) delivers a somewhat blunt oral sex lyric. “Okay” follows, some of her introductory vocals getting more unnecessary AutoTune effects; the song’s musical arrangement recalls, of all things, some of Young Jeezy’s work on his The Inspiration album (a male backing vocalist chanting rather husky, Jeezy-esque “Aaaayyy”’s during the choruses doesn’t help matters – I almost expected the song to be mixed into Jeezy’s “Go Getta” at any second, and I had to double-check the album’s liner notes to make sure Jeezy’s usual producer Shawty Redd wasn’t behind this track.
Two ballads, “Aitakute” and “Passing By”, follow. The former is presented with electric piano and live strings, the latter with acoustic piano, string synthesizer, and a male vocalist named B. Howard joining her on the chorus. Both give Kumi yet another change to shine vocally; there’s a reason why one of her early compilations was devoted to some of her ballad performances, and these two songs are pleasant reminders.
“AT THE WEEKEND” is a club banger, albeit one driven by some strong and attentive songwriting (i.e identifiable verses, choruses, and bridge) rather than falling for the 21st Century American pop pitfall of only having one strain of backing music with the “chorus” being simply a different vocal melody/pattern being sung over the same exact chord changes and leitmotifs as the song’s verse.
“Melting” merges a disco-like chorus with more poppy verses and pre-choruses, and the combination works to a tee. Then it’s back to more techno/EDM territory for “Hey Baby!”, followed by “Choi Tashi Life” which is delivered over a faster-paced variation of a house music rhythm, made airier-sounding by warm string-synth chords.
Another pair of ballads, “Anata Dake Ga” and “Suki de, Suki de, Suki de” (both of which featured on a three-track, all-ballad EP last year), follow. Kuu-chin’s vocals are at their most tender on the former track, while she gets the album’s only presence of predominantly live instrumentation (acoustic and clean electric guitars, bass, drums, and string section) on the latter.
“Bambi” is the album’s weakest song, a ridiculous rip-off of Shania Twain’s dated crossover pop-country hits. The only thing saving the song is the fact that Koda Kumi is a stronger singer than Shania ever was. Also fortunately, the closing track “I Don’t Love You!??” – a classic Kuu-chin urban-pop track that would have fit perfectly on either of her first two single anthologies – comes in to remove the questionable taste of the preceding track out of listeners’s brains.
Dejavu is typical Koda Kumi and save for the penultimate track, the album should satisfy both longtime fans and newcomers. Four and a half out of five stars.
REVIEW: BERRYZ KOUBOU “5 (FIVE)”
BERRYZ KOUBOU
5 (FIVE)
(Piccolo Town/King)
Available on CD, CD/DVD, and iTunes Japan
Rating:
Five albums. That’s how long Berryz Koubou has been with us so far. OK, technically, one of those “albums”, 3 Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz, was actually a six-song mini-album, but it was numbered not much differently than a full-length release), but that makes then the only Hello! Project group other than Morning Musume to have more than four studio albums in their discography, and ties them with Aya Matsuura for number of studio releases released in their career to date – only Ayaya has been in the music business for a few years longer than Berryz, who only started making records in early 2004.
Berryz Koubou albums have been enjoyable yet imperfect affairs. Their debut long-player, 1st Cho Berryz (the only Berryz album to have the original 8-nin lineup) was a very good start, but their sophomore release, Dai 2 Seichouki didn’t have much memorable material besides its five previously released A-sides, all of which were recorded after founding member Mahia Ishimura left the group. The aforementioned 3 Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz, despite the inclusion of the band’s first mature-sounding single “Jiriri Kiteru”, is more notable for the three covers of summer-themed Hello! Project songs by various subclusters of the group (including fan favorite Risako Sugaya doing a fine solo turn on Aya Matsuura’s “Yeah! Meccha Holiday”). Last year’s 4th Ai no Nanchara Shisu was their best long-player since their debut, although I have to admit that the album’s closing two tracks, while OK, seem anti-climactic.
Thirteen months to the day their last album came out, Berryz Koubou released 5 (FIVE), and with it they manage to maintain the personal best they established on 4th Ai and then some.
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