Another knock-off band on the turntable tonight - this time it's the Japanese Bad Brains, Fearless Vampire Killers. Not quite up to the standard of their inspiration, especially in the vocal department, this is nonetheless a raging buzzsaw of hyperactive punk fast enough to sand the zits off your face.
Another heap of Japanese strangeness on the slab today, children! Far East Family Band, the OG spacerock band of the land of the rising sun, released this wild album in 1975, and it has become arguably the peak album of the genre. Heavier than Hawkwind, more hypnotic than Tangerine Dream, more soulful than, uh, Pink Floyd - all wrapped up in some esoteric philosophy and tons of flange. Koto and bamboo flute give it an exotic sheen, but the wild rock is a universal tongue.
Here's a bluesy, stoned psych record from Japan's Helpful Soul, who would go on to a wilder sound and change their name to Too Much. Notable is the ten-minute freakout "Peace for Fools" and the 14 minute cover of "Spoonful."
I return, wee ones, and I've got a batshit crazy pile of weirdness for you under my tentacle! Japanese film and live theater composer Julius Arnest Caesar's score to the wild Shin Toku Maru (Poison Body Circle) is a hybrid of traditional styles and wild, thunderous psych rock, swerving wildly between woodwind passages and spoken word to cacophonous noise. Poison Body Circle is the story of an motherless boy who returns to his cruel father and stepmother wearing his death mother's grave clothes and makeup and exacts brutal revenge. Think Psycho: The Musical as performed by Flower Travellin' Band.
Fusing the sounds of the wildest prog with the burgeoning movement that would become known as heavy metal, Japan's young quartet Yonin Bayashi would carve out a strange niche for themselves on the fringes of the music world. By turns melancholy or thunderous, Isshoku Sokuhatsu is their first and strongest album and flows from my speakers like warm sake. Stare into the eyes of the hypno-sloth:
Perhaps it's a bit lazy to post two Japanese psych-freak bands in a row, but suppress your internet-bred automatic scorn response and just listen to this fucking thing. Contemporaries with luminary ronin like Guitar Wolf and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, DMBQ are as gnarly and crazy as either of those bands without sounding anything like them. Heavier than a subway tube full of sarin gas, and wilder than a sake-drunk Godzilla staggering home and farting fire, this album is a hybrid of a more abstract MC5/BellRays joint and a lucid mid-period Boredoms record. Pound pound, scream, pound pound, scream, freak out, wah wah, scream scream, pound. Just like that, the album whirls like a massive wheel, threatening to hop the rail and crash directly into your forehead. Brace yourself.
Japanese guitar mutant Shinki Chen has appeared here before with his band Speed, Glue, and Shinki, but this is his first album, recorded under his own name while he was working on a Japanese production of the musical "Hair" (think about that for a second) with some help from his colleagues and associates. The opening number is a bit of a tease, an ambient drone number that could've been an Earth b-side; after this the album fully lurches into motion, rattling out of the speakers like a transmission from a lost colony of funky, acid-fried androids driven mad from an eternity drifting in a derelict space helmet with nothing but Hendrix records and millions of cigarettes to pass the time. Look into his eyes, people - do those crimson orbs look like windows into sanity?
This is a nice cross-section of what was bubbling up in the Japanese psych underground during the nineties. I know little about most of these bands, aside from the dependably weird Ghost and noise maestro Keiji Haino, a real lifer in the scene. A nice discovery for me on this one was White Heaven, an early project from Michio Kurihara, a Zorn-type character who later became part of YBO2. Other names include the long-running High Rise, Marble Sheep, Verzerk, and the awesome Fushitsusha. Brace yourself for a psychedelic shitstorm of Old Testament proportions and
Here is a wacko Roiobison, Backstreet Boys, Sham 69 to Sesame Street, songs ranging from Black Sabbath in Exodus, an album of covers from this Japanese hardcore band freak. Really strange, more diverse and more fun than it has a right to. These "Japan only" One can guess, I can do something worth less than this it?
I'm posting on a quick break from other realms with but precious minutes to spare, which is probably what made me think of this, the pinnacle achievement of powerviolence-mongers Slap-A-Ham. 84 songs in 12 minutes: grind, noise, sludge, poop.
This seminal first album by Swamp heroes Guitar Wolf is the only thing that can soothe my aching, addled head right now, paradoxically. This is garage rock at its noisiest, tinniest, ugliest, sweatiest, raunchiest, smelliest, meanest, drunkest, and weirdest. In other words, it's perfect for tonight.
Behold, little one, it snows in the Swamp! As I huddle next to my tiny space heater and type with frostbitten tendrils, my sluggish brain refuses to spin in its skull. Perhaps the only answer is to post an album as glacial and frigid as my mind: El Mundo Frio. Japanese doom-mongers Corrupted released this master opus in 2005 - one seventy minute song, sung mostly in Spanish, concerning the coming of another ice age and the annihilation of all life on earth. Long instrumental passages of great beauty frame chunks of ugly squealing and thunderous cacophony, only to ebb back into near silence over time. Unlike many obscenely lengthy songs by similar bands, this is thoroughly through-composed, only repetitive in a broader, more abstract sense, and never boring. A remarkable, moving work, and an omen of things to come.
We've got another squirmy bit of Japanese metal on the plate tonight, and no matter how many times you stab this one with a fork, it won't stop wriggling! Mysterious tech-death savants Vortex paint hallucinatory hell-scapes with their music, an elaborate calligraphy of brutality writ larger than can easily be comprehended. This one's a real brain-twister, the total opposite of yesterday's cock-puncher; it rarely settles into a riff or idea for long, preferring to twist and twine inward in impossibly complex knots, before occasionally unraveling out into the beyond and back. I suppose that eye-singeing awful cover is an attempt to render the alien hues from "The Colour Out of Space," which the title of this album mangles wonderfully, but there's a lot going on below the skin besides your standard Lovecraftianism: the first song references Japanese Noh playwright Zeati Motokiyo, Egyptian god of air Shu, and satellite surveillance (and briefly slips from ESL into German). The odds are good that this is a concept album of some sort, but I can find little trace of this band's existence, let alone a manifesto, so who knows? Make up your own.
This is another 70's psych/blues joint from Japan, containing members of the more famous and more proggish Flied Egg. I haven't much to say about this one except that I've been listening to it every day for a couple of weeks, sometimes more than once. It's really, really good and despite the psychedelic elements is more whiskey than weed (well, except for "Mary Jane on My Mind").
Speed, Glue, & Shinki was a heavy power trio led by guitar wizard and drug enthusiast Shinki Chen, the so-called "Japanese Jimi Hendrix," and rounded out by American drummer/vocalist Speed and Japanese bassist/inhalant expert Glue. Three of the seven songs here are boldy pro-intoxication and the remaining four have a wicked contact high just from the hazy ambiance. Shinki had put out a solo album prior to the formation of this combo, but as a group this was their only legitimate release. Apparently Speed's lifestyle and unsavory personality were enough that the two Japanese gentlemen wanted nothing more to do with him. Post facto, Speed released an album under the group's name, but this was a strange Frankenstein of an album, with him playing and singing over Shinki's discarded tapes. Nonetheless, all three of these albums are classic, full of exuberant psychedelia and gritty tales of the day-to-day street life of a thuggish burnout with poetry in his black little heart. Surely these other two records will surface in the Swamp at some point, but this is without a doubt the strongest, most focused, and most essential.
This, wee one, is the first LP by Japan's Sabotage Organized Barbarian. One of Japan's first practitioners of grind, S.O.B. perfected a unique thrashy sound replete with stop-on-a-dime spazzouts, mid-tempo creeping, and nigh-unintelligible shout-along choruses. In addition, some of their records featured guest spots by such grind luminaries as Lee Dorrian and Shane Embury - a fine pedigree for any band playing this style. Sadly, original vocalist Tottsuan became one of a long line of Japanese subway suicides in 1995. S.O.B. continued without him into strange experimental directions, but in my mind this LP perfectly sums up their early sound and radiates personality, humor, and rage in equal parts.
Named after a can of tinned peaches, Japanese all-girl psych outfit Angel'in Heavy Syrup pull back the tab on some sugary sweet psych pop that leaves a strange metallic aftertaste, as the dark undercurrents and desperate wailing sink deep into the psyche. This, obviously, is their second LP, a scaling back of the full-on fuzz spasm of their first and less featherweight than their future work. It twinkles and sparkles in my headphones, lulling me siren-like into Stygian resinous repose.
Sometimes you get exactly what it says on the box. This is super-noisy Japanese garage skronk with impenetrably thick fuzz, brown acid bad trip vibes, incomprehensible bellowed vocals that sound like they're coming over a CB radio, bone-rattling haunted house Farfisa organ, and some choice ESL song titles (and, presumably, lyrics, but who knows). Members of legendary Japanese scumbags Masonna, Angel'in Heavy Syrup, and Christine 23 Onna.
Although I have scant idea as to what they're singing about beyond the illimitable depths of their country's mythology, Japan's Gonin-Ish embody several Lovecraftian ideals for me. Aside from the tentacle porn cover, there is the chaotic but cinematic prog-death blasting out of my speakers as I type, filling my little room with shrieks and trails of mucus. Furthermore, there is the inscrutable personal philosophy uniting the band, explained thusly: "“Invisible awe” can be a one of the keywords. We thought that a flood of messages can create an “invisible awe” which can never be realized simply. Regarding this, for us to express this concept to our listeners, we have placed many messages and emphasis into the artwork, our costumes, the kanji-characters that we use, our lyrics, and our entire songs." Following the advice of the band, I recommend you listen to this with your eyes closed in the dark, and allow the music to speak to you mystically and form a terrifying picture in your mind.
Wacky and terrifying at the same time, the way only the Japanese can do. Nyarlathotep (not to be confused with this Nyarlathotep) play abstract and echo-laden doom that sounds like four people in separate wings of an asylum, pounding on radiator pipes and hollering down the toilet bowl. Gnome spins some sinister high-pitched black metal that, though strangely melodic, manages to chill the blood with its inescapable suffocating claustrophobia. The singer sounds absolutely bonkers, like a schoolgirl with a horse skull where her head should be.
