Asobi Seksu’s Transparence

5 October 2009 at 1:13 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged , , ,

TransparenceTransparence, Asobi Seksu’s new 10″, showed up on eMusic a few weeks back, settling my fears that it would be a vinyl-only release.  I’ve been listening to it a fair amount, and it’s pretty enjoyable, though nothing earth-shaking.

The title track, which appeared on Hush earlier this year, is given a brief new intro, galloping drums in place of the original rather ambient fade-in, which makes the song sound marginally more rock n’ roll, and works well in the context of an opening track.  It’s a decent — but not fantastic — song, with some excellent parts that unfortunately don’t quite pull together correctly, and suffering (like the rest of Hush) from a lack of dynamics.  The EP also has a remix of the song by Aa, which pushes the tribal drumming up a bit and otherwise cuts the song up a bit and makes it rather annoying.

The other two tracks — both Hush outtakes, apparently — are both pretty good, though.  “Miniature Cities” is another slow, minimalist dream pop number, in the style of much of Hush, but it works pretty well, and probably benefits from being separated from its similar-sounding brethren.  It builds to a nice crescendo around the four minute mark, when the sound thickens considerably into a dense, swirling soundscape.  That said, it would have worked better in the “classic” Asobi Seksu style, with said crescendo slathered in layers of big guitars.

My favorite track is “Urasai Tori”, a goofy little pop song with a shifty rhythm, a rather mournful harmonica, and rapid-fire woodpecking as a percussive backdrop.  It’s lightweight but rather pretty, and while I can see how it wouldn’t have fit onto Hush that well, it seems a shame to leave it buried as a b-side.

RewolfMeanwhile, Asobi Seksu has another record coming out, on Polyvinyl on October 30th.  Called Rewolf, it’s a collection of acoustic re-recordings of songs from the band’s catalog (along with a few covers), recorded at Olympic Studios in London.  There’s an MP3 of their cover of Hope Sandoval’s “Suzanne” here — very nice, with a heavy 60’s vibe courtesy of the fairly ornate production involving chimes and flute as well as strings.  If the rest of the record sounds like this, I think it will be quite good.  (If nothing else, it has the best cover art on an Asobi Seksu release since the “Stay Awake” single in 2007.)

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Loud Cut

22 September 2009 at 12:32 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged , , ,

Loud CutI was surprised last week to find out that Swinging Popsicle has a new album out, called Loud Cut.  It appears to be not so much a proper album as a hodge-podge of random cuts:  video game themes, a cover or two, a few tracks off previous albums.  Perhaps as a result of this, it doesn’t hold together as well as it could, but there’s still some good stuff here.

Bassist Hironobu Hirata was in charge of the background music to the video game Sumaga, and a lot of the material here originates from that project.  Album openers “Perfect Loop” and “(a) SLOW STAR” were both theme songs to the game, and three other songs (“Meet U”, “UN-K.O. ~Our Day Will Come~”, and “Good Time”) are vocal versions of background music tracks from the game.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other stuff here is also from Sumaga (I don’t have the game or its soundtracks);  certainly, the creepy instrumental “Tragedy In Your Brain” sounds like a video game background track.

Beyond the soundtrack stuff, there’s also an Auroranote cover (“Seijyaku to Ryuusei”), two tracks apiece from the last two Popsicle albums (Transit and Go On), and two of the bands’ early b-sides, apparently re-recorded (I’ve never heard the original versions, but Georide marks both セルフカバー, “self-cover”).  If you’re keeping track, that accounts for thirteen of the albums’ fourteen tracks — the fourteenth, “Kururi Sakura Hirari”, is listed as “Swinging Popsicle Ver.”, so maybe it’s a cover too?

There’s nothing wrong with odds-and-ends compilations, of course.  The four Transit and Go On tracks at the end of the album seem like bizarre padding, but if you disregard them, you still have a 10-song mini-album, and a not bad one at that.  Certainly, I’ve raved about “(a) SLOW STAR” before, and “Perfect Loop” is quite good too, continuing the band’s recent experiments adding subtle electronic elements to their music.  “UN-K.O.” is also quite good, a big guitar song that comes up a bit short in the chorus department, but still rocks.  Those are the main highlights, but the pleasant samba cut “Good Time”, the mid-tempo “Kururi Sakura Hirari”, and the Auroranote cover are all pretty good too.  The low points are the rather pointless “Tragedy In Your Brain” and the overly dramatic piano ballad “Let Me Fly”.

At any rate, this album hardly supplants Go On as my go-to Swinging Popsicle album (despite the inclusion of that album’s brilliant title track), but it’s not a bad record to have around, particularly for the first six tracks.  I’d say it’s not worth the import price for the physical CD, but for $10 off JapanFiles for the MP3, it’s well worth it.

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eMusic, one year in

15 September 2009 at 1:08 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged

Has it already been a year since I signed up for eMusic?  Apparently so.  They gave me 25 free downloads to celebrate my anniversary last week, so I thought I’d write a little follow-up on how the service is working for me.

If I’d been writing this post back in April or May, the answer would have been simple, because eMusic has really served me well.  The website works pretty well in terms of enabling exploration and discovery, and I find that having a certain number of downloads each month tends to keep me looking for new things to buy (useful now that I’m married and don’t slip off to the CD store every weekend).  I do occasionally find myself burning through an entire month’s credit allotment on a whim (“I feel like disco this week!”) and then having no interest in that genre a week later.  But that used to happen at the CD store, too.

However, things have changed a lot since the start of summer, when eMusic announced that they had inked a deal with Sony, the first major label to agree to put their catalog on eMusic.  Along with this, they introduced album pricing and (sigh) a significant price increase.  Needless to say, this has been controversial — eMusic has spent years marketing themselves to fans of indie rock and other niche groups, and many of them are now grumbling about having to pay higher prices in return for selections from a major label that they’re not interested in.  I suspect eMusic has seen a fair amount of churn in their user base as a result.

My own feelings have been pretty mixed, and have see-sawed back and forth as more details came out.  The price increase — from around 25¢ to around 40¢ a track — was painful, not because 40¢ is a lot per se (it puts an average album between four and five dollars), but because it makes taking chances and downloading albums on a whim less appealing.  More annoying, the album pricing (topping out the price of some albums at 12 download credits, e.g. $4.80) — which was promoted as a straight win for the consumer — actually turned out to be a lot more complicated, because some songs could only be downloaded with the album, forcing you to use 12 credits to get some 8- or 9-track albums.

That said, I’ve largely made peace with the changes.  I wasn’t really interested in the Sony catalog at first — outside of Cheap Trick, I wasn’t really sure what I’d find worthwhile (I already have all the Clash albums, and I have no interest in the Byrds or Bruce Springsteen), but I’ve since discovered a lot of other good stuff — Mott the Hoople, the Only Ones, Sly & The Family Stone.  And I’ve been replacing a fair amount of proto-alternative-rock albums (Midnight Oil, Fishbone, Living Colour) that I had on CD back in the day but have long since sold off.

Anyway, I intend to stick with eMusic at least a while longer.  Even with the higher prices, it’s still a pretty good deal, if not quite the steal it used to be.

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We is one year old!

28 August 2009 at 11:19 pm · Filed under Nonsense

Just noticed that this past Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of this blog!  That would admittedly be more impressive if posting hadn’t slowed down to the rate of one a month, but — you know, whatever.  Here’s to twelve more useless posts in our second year!

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New Scandal video: BEAUTeen

27 August 2009 at 11:11 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged , ,

Scandal has put out another video,”BEAUTeen!!”:

It’s apparently (well, quite obviously) a product promo for Pocari Sweat, presumably a refreshing beverage of some sort.  I like this video better than the “Shōjo S” video, as it seems to back off a bit on the “sexy schoolgirls!” schtick and move back towards a more innocent/fun look (at least I reached middle age without that particular creepy hang-up).

As for the song, it’s pretty standard Scandal, not as catchy as their best stuff but pretty good.  According to Metanorn the single is out on October 14th.

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Cheap Trick

24 July 2009 at 1:30 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged , , , , ,

RockfordI’ve been listening to a ton of Cheap Trick the past week.  It started when I picked up their 2006 album Rockford off of eMusic a couple weeks back, and couldn’t stop listening to it.  I’d never previously ventured past Cheap Trick’s 70’s albums before (unless you count a copy of power ballad “The Flame” that I had on 45 when I was 15), since the general consensus seems to be that the quality of the band’s output dipped sharply in the 80’s.  There have been a couple of hyped “comeback” records over the years — 1997’s Cheap Trick comes to mind — but I never checked any of them out, either.

But Rockford is really, truly excellent — from the moment the drums and guitars kick in 12 seconds into opener “Welcome To The World”, the band doesn’t let up.  They sound energetic and aggressive, and Robin Zander is in great voice.  But what really makes the album great are the songs.  “If It Takes A Lifetime” and “Dream The Night Away” are incredibly catchy, slick power pop, “Give It Away” is a gritty rocker, and closer “Decaf” is heavy and ferocious.  Oddly, two of the song names hint at tracks from 1977’s In Color, “O Claire” (think “Oh Caroline”) and “Come On Come On Come On” (versus “Come On, Come On”).  Neither song sounds much like its predecessor, though — “O Claire” is Beatlesque pop, and “Come On Come On Come On” is probably the most pummeling song on the album.  Pretty much everything is first rate.

Poking around online for information on what the band’s been up to the past few decades, I came on a bootleg copy of the aborted 1997 re-recordings of In Color that the band did with Steve Albini (the band, reportedly, was never happy with the slick, clean sound on the original album) .  I don’t know why the ‘97 sessions were never completed — the songs are pretty much finished, just missing some overdubs — but it’s a fun listen if you’re already familiar with the original LP.  The band doesn’t stray very far from the original arrangements (other than some saxophones added to “Hello There”, and “I Want You To Want Me” sounding much more like the Budokan version), but these recordings are significantly more aggressive.  This works especially on “Big Eyes”, which always came off to me as a goofy novelty on the original LP but rocks here.  A few songs, like “Oh Caroline” and “Southern Girls”, sound like they haven’t had all their harmony vocals laid down, and suffer as a result, but other than that, this is a really cool listen.

The LatestThen I found out that the band actually just put out another album, The Latest, a couple weeks ago.  I was somewhat underwhelmed the first time I listened to the samples on Amazon — there seemed to be an awful lot of balladry on the album — but the samples grew on me with repeated listens, and I downloaded it tonight.  Sounds pretty good so far!  Not as good as Rockford, but still quite solid.

Man, that’s a lot of Cheap Trick.  I’m overwhelmed.

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Asobi Seksu limited edition 10″ out next month

5 July 2009 at 1:05 pm · Filed under Music ·Tagged , ,

Transparence

I haven’t been paying much attention to Asobi Seksu since Hush came out (it kind of bummed me out).  But I noticed today that they have a limited edition 10″ coming out on Polyvinyl next month, featuring two versions of the Hush cut “Transparence” (the album version and a remix), and two Hush outtakes, “Urusai Tori” (which my bad Japanese translates to “noisy bird”) and “Minature Cities”.  Like much of Hush, “Transparence” isn’t a bad song, but it never quite regains consciousness from the murky production and lack of dynamics.  So maybe the remix will be an improvement?

Anyway, you can pre-order the record here.  I’m hoping that it will be available digitally at some point, because I haven’t had a record player in years, and anyway that album art is hideous (what happened to these guys? they used to have awesome album art).

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Late review: The Church @ Slim’s, June 12, 2009

29 June 2009 at 12:31 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged , ,

The ChurchI’ve been listening to the Church for twenty years — including a fairly fanatical period in the late 80’s and early 90’s — so it’s a little pathetic that this was my first time seeing them live.  Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect:  on the one hand, it’s been twenty years since “Under The Milky Way”, the band’s lone Top 40 hit, and fifteen years since their last major label release.  On the other hand, they never stopped working or recording, and have produced a large body of good-to-great albums since then.  So I didn’t know if I was going to see a nostalgia act or a working band promoting their new album.

As it turned out, they opted for a middle route, drawing equally from both their classic 80’s run of albums (nine songs) and their more recent material (eight).  Oddly, twelve of the seventeen songs came off of just three albums — this year’s Untitled #23, 1988’s Starfish, and 1982’s The Blurred Crusade.  And sadly, there was nothing at all from their 90’s albums, not even 1992’s Priest = Aura, arguably their best album.  (Looking at the band’s setlists over the years here, it looks like the band radically changes their setlists from tour to tour, and it doesn’t appear that they have any particular grudge against the 90’s.)

Tour PosterThe set started with a muscular rendition of “Tantalized”, a big rocker off 1985’s Heyday.  By the time they got to Starfish’s “North, South, East and West” four songs in, it was clear that live, the band still liked to rock, no matter how cerebral and spacey their studio output has become.  The new material seemed to work well live, although I wasn’t very familiar with it — I’d only picked up Untitled #23 a week before the show and hadn’t really gotten to know the songs yet (although “Space Saviour”, which had made the strongest impression on me on the album due to an unusually forceful vocal by Steve Kilbey, also caught my ear live).  Likewise the two songs off 2006’s Uninvited, Like the Clouds — one of the gaps in my collection — sounded good if a bit indistinct, but it was hard to judge when they were sandwiched between songs that I’ve owned since I was 17 and have listened to hundreds of times.  The only other recent track in the set was actually the show’s highlight for me, a fantastic rendition of “After Everything” off 2002’s After Everything Now This(possibly my favorite Church album, and certainly in my Top 3).

The older material sounded good too, and the band seemed to be having fun (hmm, well I’m not sure about Peter Koppes, he looked pretty dour the whole show).  They obviously didn’t hit all my favorites from the era (it would have hardly been possible), but they hit enough of them:  “Almost With You”, “A Month Of Sundays”, the afore-mentioned “North, South, East, and West”.  I particularly appreciated the fact that Kilbey seemed to be giving the vocals his all and not goofing up or trivializing them, something you often see when a guy is singing a song that he’s played live a thousand times and is just sick to death of (he did tend to over-project in his singing at points, losing that pleasingly smooth, almost somnolent, quality that he gets on the records, but why quibble?).  I’d expected Kilbey to be much more spacey, based on a couple visits to his blog, but he was actually quite engaging and funny — though a fifteen minute delay caused by technical issues did stretch the banter to the breaking point.

Anyway:  awesome show, and it fills me with shame that I waited so long to see these guys.

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New Scandal single out in Japan today

18 June 2009 at 12:47 am · Filed under Music ·Tagged , ,

The new single by all-girl Japanese rock band Scandal is out today.  The song is called “Shōjo S” and is an opening theme for the anime Bleach. There are several versions being released, a “normal” 3-track version and two “special edition” versions with different covers and track listings:

Normal Edition

Scandal

Scandal

  1. 少女Ｓ [Shōjo S] (3′11)
  2. ナツネイロ [Natsuneiro] (4′33)
  3. ＦＵＴＵＲＥ (3′36)

Special Edition A

  1. 少女Ｓ (3′11)
  2. ナツネイロ (4′33)
  3. ＳＯ　ＥＡＳＹ (3′23)
  4. 少女Ｓ（Ｉｎｓｔｒｕｍｅｎｔａｌ） (3′11)

Special Edition B

  1. 少女Ｓ (3′11)
  2. ナツネイロ (4′33)
  3. ＦＵＴＵＲＥ (3′36)
  4. 少女Ｓ（Ｉｎｓｔｒｕｍｅｎｔａｌ） (3′11)

To be honest, I don’t like this nearly as much as their last single, the fantastic “Sakura Goodbye”.  There’s a lot to like here — the sinewy guitar intro, the vocal interplay on the chorus, the subdued backing “oohs” on the second verse — but the pieces somehow don’t quite click together for me (though something about the chorus makes me suspect that there’s potential in there for a kick-ass dance remix).

Anyway, judge for yourself, here’s the video:

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(a) Slow Star, revisited

8 June 2009 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Music ·Tagged , ,

Cover of "Star Mine Gig"Pretty much my first ever blog post was about a then-new Swinging Popsicle track “(a) Slow Star”.  At the time I was frustrated that it seemed unlikely that I’d be able to get a copy of the song (at least not without buying a soundtrack to a game I otherwise had no interest in) , so I thought I should throw up a quick post to mention that you can finally got a copy of the song off JapanFiles.  Frustratingly, they don’t link to it off the Swinging Popsicle page, they only list it on the page for the aforementioned Sumaga soundtrack — and make sure you grab the 3 minute 24 second version from Sumaga Music Galaxy disc 3, not the shorter version off Star Mine Gig!

The song still sounds awesome, with a super catchy circular guitar lead and a driving beat.  On the most recent Swinging Popsicle albums, I’ve actually enjoyed their dabblings in electronic pop more than their straight guitar pop tracks, but this song is one of the best things I’ve ever heard from the band.  Thanks, JapanFiles!

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