the future is in plastics
Written: Sep 28 '03 (Updated Sep 28 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Melody, enthusiastic pretty singing, glistening production, craft, hooks hooks hooks, just a smidge of eccentricity.
Cons: Japanese lyrics, total lack of indie cred.
The Bottom Line: There is a whole world of pop music that Americans and Europeans don't know about, and it turns out to be much more fun than the one we do.
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| voxpoptart's Full Review: True Song - Do As Infinity Movies |
So maybe you’re already a fan of glossy, mainstream Japanese mall-pop. I'll start with three paragraphs just for you. Do As Infinity nestle snugly, in style terms, between Every Little Thing and Nanase Aikawa. Relative to Every Little Thing, they’re a little more energetic and rocking; and while Tomiko Van’s high chirpy voice sounds quite a bit like E.L.T.’s Kaori Mochida, Van’s is a bit stronger, and more likely to soar where Mochida would coo or tail off. Do As Infinity also branch out in more surprising ways: I have no idea why “Ai no Uta” ends the album with a jolly Irish jig (sung in the usual Japanese), but it’s a wonderful jig, so who cares? On the other hand, their rocking tendencies don’t lead to Nanase Aikawa’s embraces of hair-metal guitar and churning industrial rhythms – with the payoff being that Do As Infinity’s ballady songs are quirkier than Aikawa’s, both more interesting and more natural.
(Less-precise comparisons in case someone needs them: Do As Infinity are glossier and more forceful than Glay. They’re like a less rocking Feel So Bad without the wacked-out edge. They’re like Ayumi Hamasaki if “Unite!” and “Never Ever” weren’t flukes, or Kyoko Fukada with fewer New Order keyboards and more Guns’n’Roses guitar. Hitomi Yaida is probably smarter, but not dramatically so, and Do As Infinity make up the difference with happy extroversion.)
True Song is Do As Infinity’s first album since their best-of. I actually prefer it to Do the Best, although both albums are excellent: Van has become a better singer, so that while jolly rave-ups on the best-of (e.g. “Summer Days”) were marred by a squawking edge to her voice, new riff-rockers like “One or Eight” race along smoothly. For career value, Nanase Aikawa is my favorite Japanese pop star, but True Song is my new favorite album of the genre, and I don’t rule out it being my favorite album of 2003.
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I know I spend a lot of time writing about bizarre underground music. Well, sure, somebody should stand up for these bands, which Alanis Morissette doesn’t need from me. Which doesn’t explain why atchesonate defined my mix CD for him (from which he enjoys 12 of the 15 songs, yay!) as centered on “nutty instrumentation, often atonal, with wacky preferably-female vocals”. That can only mean I love such stuff, which might seem to go poorly with Japanese mall-pop.
Nate left one clue: manufactured Japanese chart-pop usually has female vocals. But also, I love pop music, the concept. I love tunes and energy and vocals mixed to the front: nutty tunes or normal ones, as long as they're good. I love the three or four times a year when I’m in a car or a bar with friends whose radio or jukebox is tuned to Eighties’ nostalgia, even though I was mostly oblivious to Eighties’ music during its home decade.
True, those stations pretend that the Pet Shop Boys and Asia and a-ha had more real-life audience than they did at the time. I thought I didn’t care about the 80’s of Debbie Gibson and Tiffany and New Kids on the Block on principle, and that the same principle extended now to Christina Aguilera. But now I know that was wrong. My objection to the Britney Spears generation of American music is not that it’s pop, or even that it's plastic, but that I think it’s _bad_ plastic pop. If you disagree with me, I'm sorry; probably I’m being an ignorant jerk, it happens. Skip the next section and go to the song descriptions, while I try to make Do As Infinity a convert or two from the people with indie cred to lose.
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Start, o fellow indie geeks, by admitting that Kelly Clarkson, the American Idol winner, has one hell of a strong, flexible voice. Avril Lavigne's voice is untutored, but she brings an urgency and passion to her erratic squawling, as well as a good sense of rhythm. Justin Timberlake has shared enough songwriting credits, with enough people who don't write tunes, to prove that Justin himself writes inventive vocal arrangements. The Backstreet Boys have pretty voices. Timbaland and the Neptunes craft weird squelching sounds and turn them into clever beats.
This merits respect. Not in a condescending way, either: rock critics fall all over themselves praising strong flexible vocals when they belong to Neko Case, urgency and passion in the erratic squallings of Sleater-Kinney, the pretty voice of Thom Yorke, the clever beats Beck used to craft. True, I can't remember critics ever going ape over inventive vocal arrangements, but that's to their discredit, and I hereby sentence them all to listen to the Rheostatics til they repent by admitting that they’re having a wonderful time.
From the albums I’ve ordered so far, plastic Japanese pop songs can be just as wonderful as exploratory music. The reason I find British and American mall-pop to be disposable is that it tends to be lazy: four-minute songs stretched over one or occasionally two good ideas, tossed into the stores with a casual contempt for the buyers’ judgment. That contempt is a choice, not a requirement.
Kelly Clarkson can sing, and she and/or her producers have clever sonic ideas that remind me of Garbage at times, but to me “Miss Independent” is the only one of her singles so far with a real structure, a genuine chorus payoff where the others trudge aimlessly til the songs end. Justin Timberlake writes vocal harmonies that would be amazing if, say, Kelly Clarkson sang them; but his own voice, while accurate (and thus a huge improvement on _my_ voice), is thin and, to me, drab. Timbaland and the Neptunes have so many clients that they’re terrified to waste more than one ingenious beat on any of them at a time. Avril Lavigne’s lyrics show talent, but they’re often crabby, which I think misses the point of shiny disposable plastic.
Britney can’t sing or hire decent musicians or decide which breasts she wants to buy, and her best song (“Baby One More Time”) would be five times better if it just gave in to the temptation to become “Like a Prayer”. And I needed Al Yankovic to rewrite the Backstreet Boys before I noticed how supple and beautiful “I Want It That Way” is. That's not because Weird Al’s “Bought It on e-Bay” is especially clever (it’s alright), but because his words are negative space, where there’s no protestations of heartache disguising a video that’s a dummkopf leer.
But Do As Infinity are pop, and they are Japanese, and they are fun. Their image is as prefab as that of any American pop star, but that doesn’t make them lazy about their music. They sell millions of albums in Japan, and they treat these sales as a sacred trust. True, their songs are co-arranged by an industry hired-gun named Senji Kameda; but Radiohead’s songs are co-arranged by an art-house hired gun named Nigel Godrich, and the total authorship of Do As Infinity’s music is divisible among only four people, versus Radiohead’s six.
I could specify that Radiohead are “art” and Do As Infinity are merely “entertainment”. But as soon as a record is made with more care and skill than the sales receipts would require, the wall between the two starts to crumble. Britney Spears is what the record companies can get away with. Do As Infinity are what happens despite that. The attention to detail on every level of True Song, no matter how mainstream in intent, _is_ art: slightly quirkier art than you’d think.
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“Kuusou Ryodan” starts the album with oscillating bowed strings and delicate keyboard, setting a graceful mood. It remains undisturbed when the drums start to pound, the cymbals start to keep the beat like agitated crickets, the guitars start to solo Van Halen-ishly, and the woodwinds add a version of gentle reflection. “Under the Sun”’s verses are for fast-pulsing minor-key club dancing, with Van’s vocals used for a nagging rhythmic undercurrent, but the chorus is a resounding and happy catharsis. “Good for You” is loaded with hooks: on whistly sci-fi synthesizer, on a Cure-like flurry of guitar, on hard-rock power chords, and especially in Van’s vocals. She climbs erratically up an octave and a half to a chorus that would have justified Starship’s betrayal of their origins as Jefferson Airplane, if they’d thought of it first.
“I Can’t Be Myself” sets its best hook, airy like a timid young teakettle, in direct counterpoint to the momentum of the verse melody. Its best chorus hook is also a running contrast to the vocals, and a dark, fierce-but-polished guitar solo serves as a bridge between the last two repetitions of the chorus. “Perfect Lady” gets me into its cocky sing-song and joyously fake drums and beeping guitar with – of all things – a slide-guitar, calling plaintively to the movie Western that left it behind. “Shinjitsu no Uta” is airy synth-dance built from woodwindy Japanese folk music: an unexpected and keening tribute to Old Japan.
But “One or Eight”’s sidewinding riff and vocals, rat-a-tat snare drums, and foursquare chorus make the case that I’d’ve liked the Ramones, the Minutemen, and Pat Benatar each a lot better if they’d worked together and learned from each other. And “Grateful Journey”, despite its airbrushed gleam, is a girlpunk sprint, Bratmobile being chased by a yapping pack of midget Huey Lewises with zapguns. “Sense of Life”, a pretty ballad, is the closest thing to U.S. chart material: a sadly bouncing vocal melody that rarely leaves a 3-note range, a simple drum loop, glowing guitar. But the echoes of distant hammering don’t fit any formula, and the tremolo-and-delay effects on the guitar’s feedback are dreamy and distinctive.
“Wadachi” is even prettier, its winding melody reminding me of both the Beatles (in its subtle complexity) and Seal (in its refined presentation); there’s also a xylophone hook, and background whirrings like a kindly Trent Reznor recording lullabyes for toddlers he didn’t want to scare. Lastly there’s that Irish jig, with fiddle and handclaps and hard-rock drumming.
Are the lyrics any better than the crude temptress act of Christina Aguilera? I hope so: Do As Infinity’s moonlit, natural-settings album photography projects a maturer image. But see, I don’t know what they’re singing, and that’s fine. With practice, I’m still learning to sing along: Japanese has easy vowels and consonants, and the articulation is clear.
It’s true that if I knew what Tomiko Van was singing and I actively liked it, the way I like Nina Gordon’s lyrics on her very mainstream Tonight and the Rest of My Life, then True Song would be that much greater to me. But if I don’t know, at least I don’t cringe. If I don’t hear offensively bland rejections of art in the words, I can hear the embrace of art in the music. I can also hear the shiny, pretty, bouncy things, the glittering riffs and pounding drums and shimmering keyboards, which I love for exactly the same reasons why a hundred million other Americans love them. I don’t hear them nearly as often as I should in this, my (and pop’s) country of origin. Hearing them from Japan, then, makes me very happy.
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(PURCHASE INFO: For newcomers to Japanese pop, I have three recommendations:
1. You might wanna start by trading me for a J-pop mix CD. You could also explore Kazaa: most of the artists I’ve mentioned are stars, so sampling two songs by any would be easy and fair.
2. You can buy CD’s from CDJapan: http://www.cdjapan.co.jp . This is expensive. Personally, if anyone’s scared by prices approaching $30 per disc, I’d recommend buying discs as a team of two: one person keeps the disc, another gets a copy. That brings the price to an American level while still rewarding the artist.
3. You can also find still-sealed CD’s on e-Bay that claim to be legitimate, rather than pirated, and are usually available in the $15-20 range, or cheaper used. Proceed at your own pace. Good luck!)
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
voxpoptart
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Brian Block
Location: Greensboro, NC
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 280 members
About Me:
Let's give a big Earth welcome to Everett Block, born 10-26-08. Daddy shall return shortly.
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