One Musician’s Opinion on AKB48 as an Instrument-Wielding Pop-Rock Band…
AKB48′s self-played performance of their forthcoming single “Give Me Five” under the assumed name/side project Baby Blossom is getting a lot of attention in the J-Pop blogosphere. Despite the raw playing and the questionable sound reinforcement (the result of either no proper soundcheck the day of the performance, or the soundman not taking into consideration how different the room was going to sound with an audience full of people as compared to when the only people in the building were AKB48 and their road crew), they still made quite an impression on me. As someone that has been playing a variety of instruments his whole life, I definitely want to critique and give some serious suggestions to the girls because there’s a lot of room for improvement.
For those that don’t know, I’m a trained musician. I play several different instruments (guitar is my main one, and I presently own five that are all named after J-Pop singers) and there’s a bunch more that I’ve tried but could never get a good enough handle on (trying to teach myself alto sax at age 19 resulted in way too many references to Horatio Hornblower and goat calling from my otherwise supportive parental units) and I’ve played in several different bands for over a decade after my graduation for high school – in fact, it ended up being my main income during the waning years of Reagan America when the only other place that was offering steady employment was the Armed Forces (who had already turned me off when they were relentlessly trying to recruit myself and my other classmates during my junior and senior years of high school and then for months afterward). It’s this musical background that has been a blessing to my activities as a writer and blogger, especially since, as essential brother Ray Mescallado said once, I “aspire to quality music writing” (one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten on my work – thanks again, man.)
Anyway, having watched and listened to the live performance of the song, here’s my notes:
The four girls playing horns were basically the weakest link in the chain. With only a few months of experience on their instruments, they sounded not much different than the brass players in your average junior high or high school marching band. That having been said, brass and woodwind instruments are not the easiest instruments to learn. I attempted to learn trumpet in 6th grade, as well as my aforementioned attempt to try alto sax almost a decade later, and only realized one thing – I didn’t have the lung power to get away with playing a horn properly.
The keyboardists and percussionists involved were a bit inaudible, but I blame the soundman for that, and in all fairness, I won’t critique them.
Yuki Kashwagi did a very impressive job behind the drum kit – I don’t think she even missed a beat. If she found herself in a working rock band after graduating AKB48, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Minami Takahashi did fine playing lead guitar, but her silence for the last few bars of the second chorus before the solo was typical of the beginner. There was a couple of obvious missed notes, but the only thing that grated on me with her playing was her rather bizarre and uncomfortable/unnatural-looking left hand fretting technique. Continued woodshedding and a bit of study with some good guitar instructional videos would help tremendously – they certainly did when I picked the guitar back up after a couple of years of hardly touching it!
Yuko Oshima fluctuated a couple of times on bass but she held her own very well, while Atsuko Maeda showed a lot of confidence playing rhythm guitar.
It’s being openly hoped by AKB48 fans that the AKB48 members involved will continue with this Baby Blossom side project in live performance and maybe even in the studio, and I share those hopes. Quite frankly, it would suck if they stopped playing after pulling off what they did the other night!
BEST ALBUMS OF 2011: #2: MORNING MUSUME “Fantasy! Juuichi” and “12, Smart”
Fantasy Juuichi
(Zetima)
Available on CD, CD/DVD combo, and iTunes
12, Smart
12, Smart
(Zetima)
Available on CD, CD/DVD combo, and iTunes Japan
Looking back, both of these albums represent two parts of a transitional period for the band. Eri Kamei, Qian Lin and Li Chun were about to depart the band when Fantasy! Juuichi dropped, while Ai Takahashi had already taken her bows before 12, Smart‘s release. The next album and the singles that precede it with the tenth generation involved should prove interesting, even if that first single A-side is too much of an anime theme for most people’s likings.
By the way, this ranking isn’t any kind of slur on Morning Musume – far from it. It’s just there’s one album that seemed to get played just a little more than both of these… Which album was that? Check in after midnight…
BEST ALBUMS OF 2011: #3: KYARY PAMYU PAMYU “Moshi Moshi Harajuku”
Moshi Moshi Harajuku
(Warner Bros.)
Available on CD and iTunes
It’s warped, it’s ridiculously sugar-coated and electrionic-heavy… and it’s one hell of a guilty pleasure. And it’s not annoying from the second play onward like most of the American female pop singers foisted on us in recent years…
BEST ALBUMS OF 2011: #4: SCANDAL “Baby Action”
Baby Action
(Epic/Sony Japan)
Available on CD, CD/DVD, and iTunes
The Osaka Four are still unstoppable. This album is just more proof of why that is so. And the whole SCANDAL album catalog is on US iTunes now? No more excuses, folks – pay your $9.99 apiece and see what I’ve been raving about for the past four years!
Perfume Doesn’t Like You, Get Over It!
This is something I originally let pass without comment, but since it cropped up to the top of my Flipboard and on my Twitter feed almost out of the blue today after two months, the situation is getting even more annoying and pathetic and thus, I’m going to speak up.
Most of us in the J-Pop Blogosphere know the story of an old, rather creepy fan of the trio Perfume, screennamed Perfume444, who used to post video blogs on YouTube, spurred on by his love of the group. I hadn’t heard of the guy until this article was posted on International Wota, so he was nowhere on my radar until that particular post, and only for a few minutes. He openly declared, according to IW, that since the objects of his, um, interest, basically blew him off after a token few minutes at the Cars 2 premiere in L.A., he was done doing videos.
That was two months ago. Since he saw fit to comment almost randomly on the IW post again, he’s apparently not done whining.
What is especially disturbing is one of his claims as to why he did the video blogs in the first place – to get more attention for his favorite group. It disturbs me because one of the reasons I do this music blog is to do the same for Morning Musume and other Japanese bands.
The difference is plain: I go about the goal by writing about the music, and writing about it on the same level playing field as any other music I write about. What this Frank dude does… yeesh! It definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the music, far as I can tell. The fact that he has bitched about the lack of attention Perfume and their management gave him says volumes.
Perfume444′s goals, then and now, are selfish. He wants the focus to be around him, not his favorite band, even though he claims otherwise. Perfume and their management apparently know this and, without a doubt, their private policy is described as succinctly as, “Forget that loser.”
I want to see Morning Musume and other groups get a better profile in the States and elsewhere. That’s a rather generous intention. Would I love to meet them? Of course, but I’m not going to go about it the wrong way and it’s not my primary motivation for supporting them and groups like them in this blog – meeting them would be a bonus.
Stop! Kyary Time!
I’ve been rather ambivalent about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and her seemingly overnight success with her first single, the admittedly infectious “PONPONPON”, but I won’t lie: both of her singles, the aforementioned piece of ear candy and the recent follow-up “Jelly” are on my iPod and have been getting regular spins of late. And I’m looking forward to my digital pre-order from iTunes landing on my hard drive and in my iPad later tonight as I write this. Even more so when I discovered the following news item from last week, via the social music chart site Last.fm:
At #1 it’s J-Pop phenomenon (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu). The teenage singer has seen her audience climb by 1,127% in the last week, fueled by the success of single “PONPONPON”, as she gears up for the release of debut ‘mini’ album Moshi Moshi Harajuku later this month.
Now, I’m a twinge edgy about this because I have strongly believed for years that J-Pop has more than a good chance to be more than a cult favorite genre here in the Western world, and like a lot of my fellow serious fans of Japanese pop and rock music, I don’t want the mainstream media to lump the likes of Morning Musume, Dir en grey, SCANDAL, AKB48, etc. under the “LOL Japan” category after seeing someone like Kyary. That ad campaign involving a virtual idol digitally created from bits of various popular AKB48 members probably didn’t help matters. But the more I listen to Kyary’s two singles of late, the more I feel that even though artistically I can’t take her as completely seriously as I do Morning Musume or any other J-Pop artist that I’ve reviewed here at TGML, or at this blog’s predecessor, I can still concede that even Kyary, despite the too-obvious presence of AutoTune vocoder effects on her vocals (hey, it fits the arrangement of the songs, so why complain?), could eat someone of lesser-to-no-talent like Katy Perry alive and shit out Rebecca Black.
Since Kyary’s been gaining a good amount of worldwide visibility through a combination of both word of mouth and Warner Japan’s being foresighted enough to make her easily available to anyone in the world with an iTunes account, I can’t help but parallel her current visibility with that of pop-rap icons of the early 90′s like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Both artists left behind a couple of indelible marks on pop charts with a couple of ridiculously popular singles before basically becoming near-laughing-stock pop culture survivors of a sort that you still can’t help but tap your toes to, but in the process they made mainstream TV and radio, and the people who get most of their culture from those outlets, more open to the rest (and best) of what hip-hop had to offer. Despite the fact that both Hammer and Vanilla Ice are easy targets to anyone who takes their rap music seriously, everyone from N.W.A. to Wu-Tang Clan to Lil Wayne to Odd Future owes at least some thanks to Hammer and Vanilla Ice for kicking those doors down in the first place. By that same token, even though Kyary can be an easy target for mainstream media at their laziest (see “silly” Japanese phenomenom, do thirty-second fill-in piece with “LOL Japan” angle at tail-end of news broadcast), there’s still those that will get a good ear-whiff of “POMPOMPOM”, “Jelly”, or whatever else she drops, get hooked, and start to dig further on the premise of, “OK, this is cool… but I’m sure there’s even better stuff coming out of Japan that most people might not have heard of, and I’m going to look for it!” And if her success means that American record labels (for the most part, preferably the independent ones that prefer to work with career artists – I still don’t trust the major labels and their throw-it-against-the-wall mentality with what Japan has to offer) are going to take a chance on a Koda Kumi or a MoMusu, so be it.
If the end result of that means that a year from now, I can go buy Morning Musume’s and SCANDAL’s 2012 album releases in my local indy record store or at Best Buy, rather than having to just pre-order them from CDJapan, then I’m all for it.
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.
…And Gomaki’s Career Takes Another Odd Turn…
Maki Goto’s singing career has been on rather uneven footing since she abruptly announced her then-impending departure from her original agency Up-Front Works and the label that released her solo albums, Piccolo Town/King on the closing night of her tour behind her fourth solo album How To Use Sexy.
After a short period of inactivity, Maki reopened her blog and revealed that she was in Los Angeles, undergoing vocal and dance training. The mere fact that she was in L.A. had myself and others wondering how on the money I was about predicting that she had left UFW because she wanted to break out of just being a Japanese pop singer and go for an international market.
Six months after that, she signed to Avex Trax, and in her initial promo shots released in the wake of her signing announcement, it appeared that she would be sharing a music path (and a stylist) not dissimilar to Kumi Koda’s. A year later we finally got the first new music from Maki since her signing, the urban-oriented Sweet Black with Maki Goto mini-album. Her two EPs that I’ve heard since then, ONE and Gloria (she’s released a third, LOVE, very recently but I haven’t heard it yet) had her changing styles with every release. (And the way she was dressed and made up on the ONE cover? Don’t even get me started on how much she looked like an aging call girl…).
Now, this morning, Maki released a handwritten statement (translated here) announcing that she was taking a hiatus starting in January of next year. The whole statement seems somewhat vague – she does make a reference to her mother’s sudden death, which police have yet to publicly rule whether it was accidental or not. Is she just taking a hiatus, or is she quitting the business entirely?
Or… is she considering leaving Avex after finishing her current contractual obligations? She does mention a single coming out in July and a full-length album coming out later in the year. And in an interview to promote her current EP, she did mention that she had nothing but good things to say about her time with Up-Front Works, centering especially on working with Tsunku. I hate to speculate, but I’m sure I’m not the only one in the blogosphere thinking the same thing.
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.
NEW MUSIC: MORNING MUSUME “Only You”
A full HQ copy of Morning Musume’s forthcoming single “Only You” (out 6/15) has already surfaced. The band is back to the mature sound of “Nanchatte Renai”, “Naichao Kamo” and “Onna ga Medatte Naze Ikenai” after kicking off 2011 and their 9th-generation period with this past spring’s much needed dose of sunshine known as “Maji Desu Ka Ska”. And Takitty and Reina, the two best vocalists in the band, are right up front as they very well should be. Loving it already… how could I not? How could you not? Summer’s already starting to sound good and it’s not even Memorial Day yet…
ETA 5.20.11: Sorry – I wasn’t aware that the original stream had been removed – here’s a replacement.
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