It's Valentine's Day, So Why Not?

Clever vid featuring the j-pop/rock band Base Ball Bear. The bassist, Shiori Sekine, is the bassist in the movie, Linda Linda Linda (which is sick!). Subtitles rule:

Dummy!

I'm really lucky to have the friends I've got because it means I have an ever-present source of music-related news to consume and (sometimes) slowly digest. As a result, I don't travel very deep into the realm of the blogo-music-sphere. In fact, it's not uncommon for me to miss shit by months or years. And unfortunately, I have lots of facepalm moments where I am introduced or stumble across a sick act that I then realize I had heard about and passed up just months earlier, or sometimes years earlier. So yeah, this post is about Andrew W.K.

Well, I guess it's not totally about him. It's about how his first album, I Get Wet scared me away with its drippiness and I only just last week started to regret it. I kind of started to get a clue that all was not as it (bloody) seemed when I went to see Ted Leo & Rx's karaoke night and a super down-to-earth and all around nice guy Andrew W.K. was emceeing the event. Then the awesome Disgrasian blog posted about an album of j-pop cover songs. I should go ahead and just quote the man from his website:

I had never really heard music like this… At first it was hard for me to believe that these were the biggest hit songs in Japan - they sound so different from hit songs in the western world. But as I learned the songs and translated the lyrics, I fell in love with them and understood their appeal.

The album? It's effing awesome. Produced for the Japanese market, the thing unfortunately doesn't have distribution stateside. However, with some digging, you may be able to find it. And when you do, you'll find that j-pop standards translate super well into Andrew W.K.'s brand of party-metal. And once you've finished listening to the thing on repeat for a day or two, you may find like I did, that you have an itch to search out the source material. Which brings me to part 2 of this post: The Blue Hearts, who's track, Linda Linda, is included on AWK's cover album.


Debuting with their self-titled album in 1987, these guys apparently enjoyed some pretty mainstream success, with a couple of their songs even becoming classics (read: karaoke staples). Being a relative late-comer to the punk genre, I'll admit right here that I haven't got a very comprehensive understanding of punk history... but I can tell you that these guys are sick as hell. Lasting for 8 years and 7 albums has to count for something, right? There's also something to be said about having a movie written about a group of school girls learning to play covers of your punk songs. Anyway, on to the obligatory youtube embed:

Did you think I'd leave you without a tangible (audible?) sample of The Blue Hearts awesomeness? You were wrong.

Linda Linda - Andrew W.K.
Linda Linda - The Blue Hearts

A. Pop

I may have found myself back in the west, but my head is still in the east. I've got a couple bands on repeat right now. One is a three woman outfit out of Japan called Chatmonchy. Don't ask me what their name's supposed to mean. The only Japanese I learned in my three years as their neighbor was gleaned from fansubbed Naruto cartoons.

But back to Chatmonchy, we're talking about kickassness on so multiple levels. For one thing, they are a band. Drummer, bassist, and vocal/guitar. With melodies and hooks reminiscent of the J Pop superstar, Ai Otsuka, this group befits from a rock sensibility maybe borrowed from heavyweight veterans Puffy Amiyumi. Quite frankly, I wish I was in this band. This song is off their 2006 full length release, Minimari, and one of my favorites:

Chatmonchy - Koi no Kemuri

You can also find their music vids (called PVs in Japan) in their grainy, incomprehensible glory on youtube. Here's one of their most popular tracks to date:

Chatmonchy - Shangrila

P. Amiyumi

How much music do you have to like from a certain genre in order to be considered a fan of that genre? What if it's only a couple artists? Can I still sign up? No? Oh well.

Anyway, while I may not be a big fan of the genre as a whole, the J-Pop group known as Puffy Amiyumi in the west (and simply "Puffy" here in Asia), is one of my favorite groups. In fact, after Jamiroquai, Puffy holds the most real estate on my CD shelf. I guess that has to do with three things, mainly: the largely US-based (at the time) P2P community that significantly hindered attempts to grab tracks for free, a trip to Taiwan in the summer of 2002 (blowing new taiwan dollars on CDs), and the wonder that is the SF Amoeba.

Puffy is Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura. 2006 marks their 10th anniversary. Here in Taiwan, they've long since been marked with one-hit wonder status and relegated to a forgotten decade (the 90s). In its (Taiwan's collective subconscious) defense, it is pretty hard to keep track of all the Taiwanese, HK, Japanese, and Korean - Pop acts arriving and departing from the shelves of the local record stores. You'd have to be super oldschool (like Teresa Teng) or super white (Rod Stewart) to really have staying power.

The two thirty-something j-pop stars have been doing a pretty decent job of putting out music that's fresh and different from album to album. I guess it could be the clever shenanigans of some behind-the-scenes producer to breath new life into a Puffy that is loosing steam in their native Japan... But it's also cool to give the two women the benefit of the doubt and speculate that they are maturing and evolving as a group. The past couple albums (Nice from 2002, and the new Splurge) have done a nice job keeping off the saccharine synth/midi drum loops in favor of some tasty guitars and drumkit. And while the 2004 album, 59, slipped under my radar, I'll be getting that soon.

Off of Splurge:
"Tokyo I'm On My Way" (music and words by Dexter Holland of The Offspring)
"Basket Case" (the bonus track on the asian release of the album is this Green Day cover)