Chara: Caramel Milk (2000)

Caramel Milk is a compilation of the second phase of Chara's career, after her hit "Swallowtail Butterfly" revitalized her career. That single, from a 1996 film of the same name and credited to Yen Town Band, a fictional band featured in the film (it's a great film, by the way, set in a polyglot dystopian/utopian near-future Tokyo), is the best thing on the album. A lullaby-like ballad sung by Chara in her most blissed-out baby-doll goo-goo voice, it rises to prom-night intensity on the refrain, where the singer bursts unexpectedly into soulful wailing. Add strings and sitar noises and you've got yourself a perfect late-'90s J-pop record.

Unfortunately, it's, as I say, the best thing on the disc. In fact, it might be the only listenable thing on the disc. Chara's one of those artists whose look and sound are memorable enough that if you spent enough time in Japan in the '90s and early '00s you'd know who she was even if you were as half-hearted in your interest in J-pop as I was. Meaning, I knew who she was, and liked the aforementioned song well enough to, eventually, getting around to buying a compilation that included it. And, eventually, listening to it with full attention.

The other songs on here were recorded in the wake of "Swallowtail Butterfly," and they sound like it: similarly intricate musical settings, gesturing toward sunshine pop, soul, dance music, and the typical Sunday-morning chiffon-curtain J-pop ballad. But whereas "Swallowtail Butterfly" sounds effortless and inevitable, the rest here sound overthought: every sound is not just carefully chosen, but intricately shaped and processed and spun. The recordings are full of detail, and no doubt a full connoisseurial accounting of them would prove the good taste of artist and producer - but this kind of thing can be awfully tiring. And here it's not balanced by particularly memorable melodies.

Above all, it turns out that I find Chara's singing style positively irritating. It turns out I have very little patience for blissed-out baby-doll goo-goo vocals.

So why write about it? Why, out of the blue, pick on poor Chara? Because listening to the dozen or so really unbearable songs on this record gave me a new appreciation for just how good the good song is. Like, suddenly the effortlessness of it sounds like a massive achievement; suddenly I understand that the producer, Kobayashi Takeshi, about whom I know nothing, did wonders in coaxing that kind of a vocal out of Chara. I'm not quite a poptimist, but I do try to cultivate a healthy appreciation for what goes into making a good pop record, to balance out my reflexive rockism.

Bye-bye HMV Shibuya, 'kay?

David Marx at Néojaponisme has an informative lament up about the closing of HMV's Shibuya branch, complete with a run-down of the store's cultural significance. (Short version: it helped foster Shibuya-kei bands, including one or two I absolutely love.)

I never spent as much time or money at HMV as I have at tower, but I spent enough. And at Wave, which he also mentions; Wave in Roppongi was my first brush with Japanese music-store nirvana, so I always had a soft spot for that chain, too. ...I rather think HMV's financial problems might have been entirely due to me moving back to the States. Like Willie Dixon says, "I never said I was a millionaire - I said I spent more money than a millionaire."

Kuwata Keisuke's recent work

Kuwata Keisuke is one of the few Japanese pop stars who I really follow. Both in his solo work and in the context of his erstwhile band Southern All Stars, he's probably the only certifiable pop genius I've come across in Japan. As a songwriter he's trying to combine the mainstream J-pop hitmaking lyrical sensibility of Aku Yû with the poetic inventiveness of Bob Dylan and the pornographic cleverness of Prince (sometimes Kuwata makes Prince sound like the Church Lady), set to the unassailable tunefulness of Paul McCartney; as a performer he's equal parts McCartney and Mick Jagger. In other words, he's one of the few interesting lyricists in mainstream J-pop, one of the most consistently catchy songwriters around, and an always compelling performer.

His main flaw as an artist is that he's too prolific. It's just not summer in Japan without a new Kuwata Keisuke/SAS beach song, and it's just not Christmas without a new KK/SAS romantic ballad. Most years he obliges, but there are only so many variations he can wring out of these templates, and so his songs, brilliant as as they usually are individually, often tend to blend together.

Then again, sometimes he'll come up with something astounding, something that only he could come up with.

Take, for example, his work in the last year or so. This consists of:

1) a Kuwata Keisuke solo single called "Kimi ni sayonara." Three songs.

2) a Hara Yûko solo single called "Yume o arigatô." Two new songs. Hara Yûko is Kuwata's wife, also a member of SAS, and a solo artist in her own right; often her records are written, arranged, and produced by KK himself, which is the case here.

3) another Hara song, written and produced by KK, on a Hara Yûko collection released just last week.

Altogether, that's six new songs released on CD, but since one of these is eighteen minutes long, it all equals a whole album, at least of the vinyl variety. Considering that Kuwata has done more or less this amount of work every for the last thirty, it's a pretty good output for a guy in his fifties.

What's it all add up to? The lead Hara Yûko song is expert fluff, a bouncy pop number that sounds like it's meant to play in a video arcade; her already slightly surreal voice sounds like it might be auto-tuned, which would be typical of KK. The new song on the b-side, and two of the three songs on KK's single, are kind of forgettable.

But the bonus song on her anthology, also a KK production, is brilliant. "Kyoto monogatari," it's called, "Kyoto story," and the lyrics are essentially a bunch of Kyoto place names and catch words strung together. Musically it's a pastiche of mid-20th century pop, pre-rock, with some self-orientalizing musical color: there's a koto mixed in there with the horns, the strings, and the harpsichord. The whole thing is as rich and delicate and subtle as a piece of wagashi, which is to say it's a perfect pop confection.

In a very different way, the third song on KK's single is also a masterpiece. Called "Koe ni dashite utaitai Nihon bungaku" (Japanese literature I want to sing out loud), it's a medley of passages from modern Japanese literary classics set to music. The complete list is here (in Japanese) for those who are interested. As for the song itself, here's part one and here's part two. Musically, as well as lyrically, it's quite amazing: the melodies and arrangements are catchy, and each builds interestingly on the last; they're witty, too, with Akutagawa's Buddhist parable "The Spider's Thread" being given a raga-rock setting and Soseki's "I Am A Cat" turning into a thrashy funk stomp.

This is, I think, Kuwata's answer to the second side of Abbey Road. It's plain he's been thinking about Abbey Road lately. The cover to SAS's last album (in 2005), shown above, is an homage to Abbey Road's. And last year Kuwata gave a show in which he performed Abbey Road in its entirety - as mondegreens. That is, he wrote nonsense Japanese lyrics to all the song that approximated, soundwise, the way the English lyrics sound to Japanese ears.

The Abbey Road concert and the J-lit song were both part of a half-year miniseries Kuwata did on Japanese tv last year (I'm sorry I missed it; it's out on DVD, but way too expensive for me, and it leaves out the Abbey Road show) called Music Tiger (Ongaku tora-san), a reference to the famous Tora-san movies. The import of the title seems to have been not only that putting Kuwata in your iPod is like putting a tiger in your tank, but that he's also a roving lovable musical scoundrel - appropriately, the program found him covering an incredible range of tunes both Western and Japanese, both old and new, as well as a lot of new stuff and a broad swathe of his back catalog.

In other words, it's been a busy couple of years for Mr. Kuwata. And he has a new album coming out in October...

United Future Organization: "Listen Love" (2002)

I don't know how to describe United Future Organization. Their music I can describe: acid jazz, i.e. jazz crossed with club music; cool, baby, cool. But are they a band? Are they musicians? They were a trio of DJs, two Japanese and one French, and they were probably the most musical, not to mention musically satisfying, of the whole mid-'90s acid jazz thing. A thing I liked a lot, incidentally. But whence the music? I saw them once, in a club in Roppongi called Yellow, in '97 or '98, and yes, they were DJs. I was never enough of a club habitué or aficionado of club music to know precisely how records by this kind of outfit are constructed. I know they use samples, but is it all samples?

Take this masterpiece, for example. From their fifth and last album, V, released in 2002; they were past it, just as the whole acid jazz thing had been left behind by the ever-fickle club music scene; the album wasn't their greatest, although it did have a spellbinding cover by Yamaguchi Akira.

"Listen Love" was composed by Jon Lucien, and I've never heard his version but this isn't just a remix of that, because the credits list Jeffery Smith on vocals. I can't find a recording of it on any of Smith's albums (that I can find online; and Amazon really ought to spell his name right), so this is probably a recording original to UFOV. Then why are there no credits for anything other than vocals and piano? Are Messrs. Matsuura, Yabe, and Sebbag actually playing those other instruments?

No matter. The record's a, like I say, masterpiece. Smith's vocal is as lush and romantic, as many-facetedly romantic, as you could wish for. The beat, the groove, is seductive. And the piano - by demigod Yamashita Yôsuke (I saw him once, too, at a fireworks display, of all things, in Ôgaki, of all places, in 1994)(I mention these things because it's so rare that I actually go hear live music that I can remember each one, basically) - well, just listen to it. It's romantic, yes, but not in a soft, sweet way. His piano is a nervous but expert lover, touching you in all the right places, but so fast and unexpectedly that you're not ready for it. It's an eloquence, an insistence, that makes his need and yours plain to feel, combined with an assurance and a knowledge that enable him to fill those needs almost in the moment that you become conscious of them...

Barbee Boys

In many ways the Barbee Boys are my quintessential '80s band, even though I didn't discover them until the early '90s. They took so many musical clichés of that decade - the Police-style production, the Men at Work-style soprano sax, the Edge-style screaming guitar, the Fixx-style angry white funk - and made them all work. There's just too much to love about them.

About that Police sound. Everybody was under the Police's spell in the early '80s, every musician at least who was at all interested in making their peace with the new decade; their clean, bright, uncluttered sound offered a way out of punk's angry mess and mainstream rock's orchestral stodge, and their unabashed chops offered hope that, despite what the rock press was eager to proclaim, there was still a place for musicianship in rock. Barbee Boys take that all to heart, too, but they pack that tight sound even tighter with the anger of their songs. The bright clean space of the Police becomes the harsh glare of a dance-floor strobe for the Barbees.

Those songs: at their best the Barbees' lyrics explored the hot, jagged edges of romance in the pumped-tight, coked-up, fucked-up '80s. Edgy, agitated, nervous lyrics, delivered with angry aplomb by their two lead vocalists: Konta and Kyoko. Yes, that's a boy and a girl. This was their secret weapon. Sometimes one or the other would take over for a whole song, but at their best they were singing against each other, giving you a lover's argument or treacherous flirtation in song. Their voices and deliveries were perfect for this: Konta the intellectual, shrill male (think Elvis Costello with a sweeter voice and less of a sense of humor), Kyoko the husky-voiced female, equally capable of crooning seductively and belting angrily. (I don't think I've ever heard a sexier singer than Kyoko. Maybe, in a completely different vein, Astrud.)

It was a stunningly effective formula, and they managed to come up with enough variations on it - ska interludes here, big-echo power-rock there, almost-tender ballads occasionally - to keep it interesting without losing their punch.

Here's their first single.

Pizzicato Five: Darlin' Of Discothéque (1999)

Something happened, and now this record is ten years old. W, as the kids say, TF?

The version in the video is the short version, from the album known in Japan as either pizzicato five or perfect world and internationally as either pizzicato five tm or the fifth release from matador. (P5's discography is nearly impossible to truly understand. Take a stab at it here or here.) A longer version was released on an ep, and it's worth seeking out.

The song - well, you have to use that term loosely when dealing with Pizzicato, because their big weakness, especially after Takanami Keitaro left, was that they were short on melodies. They disguised this (or made it work for them, depending on how you view it) by reusing the same melodies over and over, tweaking them slightly, and making their genericness part of the overall texture of their art, just another element to be endlessly recombined and reframed. All of which is by way of saying that the tune here isn't too memorable (okay, the bridge is striking, and the "darlin, darlin, darlin discotheque" part is hooky). But that it doesn't matter, because Konishi has dressed it up in such an alluring mix of '60s British psyche, frantic breakbeats, Italian spy movie theme music, heavy metal guitar, and Bollywood that you hardly notice the melody. It's the total package that matters: and in that connection let's not forget the chameleonic Nomiya Maki, without whose ability to inhabit absolutely any style or image of the last fifty years Konishi would have been lost at sea.

For me the best moment is the harpsichord break.

Puffy AmiYumi: Boogie Woogie No. 5 etc.

Last time the Tanuki was in Japan he rented some CDs by a duo called Puffy and sweated them down into a disc of their best singles. If you don't know Puffy, you really should. If you spent any time in Japan in the late '90s, they were inescapable, but they're still around and doing good work today. In fact, I'd venture to say that in the ten years since their debut in 1996 they put out one of the best strings of singles I'm aware of anybody anywhere ever putting out. Just one perfect pop record after another.

It helps that they're backed by one of J-pop's reigning geniuses, Okuda Tamio. His group Unicorn was big in the '80s, and he's had a decent solo career going ever since, but Puffy is how he's really left his mark. He writes many of their best tunes and oversees a lot of the production, and the result is like two girls in the candy store of pop. You can pick out elements of the Beatles, the Who, ELO, and countless others in their songs - in addition to bits of things like rhumbas, boogie-woogies, and other song forms that survived in '60s Japanese pop after they'd been eradicated by rock in the west.

All of which makes it sound like pastiche, but it's saved from being just a poppier Pizzicato Five by the fact that Okuda writes really good songs, and Puffy make really good records. Like, the melodies are always well-developed, the arrangements are always creative and incisive, and the singing - well, the girls themselves aren't excellent singers, but they're incredibly friendly- sounding. Unlike, say, P-5 or some Western pop magpies I could think of, they never disappear up the wazoo of their pop culture obsessions, and they never let themselves get dragged down by the irony of the music nerd. It's pure pop in the best sense, like a sunny afternoon in the park.