Issue #77: Naive
Discussing the new rowbai and ZARD's "Makenaide," plus recommendations from friends of the newsletter
Hi! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter on Japanese music, new and old. You can check out previous issues here.
It was a simple idea that came to my mind one night while I was out drinking: why don’t I invite other people to recommend us their favorite new Japanese releases on This Side of Japan? Getting top 10 lists from other folks is my favorite thing to do at the end of an year, and it’s a good time whenever I get outside writers to write about their song of choice for the Flipped issues. Whoever I get on, they always bring on something that would have not been on the newsletters otherwise. So here’s the first edition of this idea—welcome to Friends Recommends.
We already got a great round of singles from my friends, some of whom you may recognize as past contributors. With it still being pretty early in the year—I asked them if they want to contribute on the second week of 2024—I opened it up to music from 2023 as well. Take it as a moment to also catch up on what you’ve missed.
I want to make this a recurring section going forward. I already have names I want to tap for the next one. And I’m open for my readers to contribute as well if they are interested. I have not figured out how to let my readers reach out exactly for this… Maybe you can like or comment on this post? We’ll figure something out.
Anyway, here are four recommendations from our dear friends of This Side of Japan.
Dorian recommends…
“Inner Child” by Maika Loubté [WATER, 2023]
Even at her most euphoric, and “Inner Child” is about as euphoric as she gets, there's an undercurrent of melancholy to Maika Loubté's music. Part of it, here, is the cavernous reverb in the production, which makes her voice feel remote in the most literal sense. Part of it is the decidedly bittersweet lyrics—this is very much a song about finding one’s way through the dark. But for my money, the biggest factor, and one of the greatest strengths of her work overall, is her juxtaposition of overtly electronic, dance-y production with achingly human vocal performance.
Loubté's production style is one I typically associate with a highly-polished, highly-technical, and ultimately somewhat anonymous vocal track. And certainly the vocals in “Inner Child” are meticulously multi-tracked, clipped and panned; there's nothing off-the-cuff about them. But any individual vocal line feels spontaneous and roughly hewn, like something you’d hear from a singer at a coffeehouse. It’s an unusual combination, and one she’s been employing to great effect for years. —Dorian
mani mani is out now. Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp.
Dorian has previously wrote about FictionJunction YUUKA for This Side of Japan (Flipped) issue #35.
Cal recommends…
“Yakudou” by GANG PARADE [Warner Music Japan]
When WACK began to shift away sonically from the SCRAMBLES studio sound, many fans were unsure of what this would mean for a lot of their favourite groups. Most of all for GANG PARADE, ever the chaotic mishmash yet with an underlying familiarity that’s a calm in that storm. “Yakudou” is the perfect example of this new era: shoving something new right at you, but with the same 13 faces there to remind you that this is still the same group. Sure, older fans might not have expected something like future bass from them, though honestly, what’s more GANG PARADE than Yui Ga Dockson inviting you to dance to a song that could realistically be described as “Murasaki Shikibu’s twerk anthem”? —Cal
Listen to it on Spotify.
Cal has previously wrote about Yukiko Okada for Idol Watch #9.
poteto recommends…
“EGO” by LiVS [self-released, 2023]
If you were given 20 million yen to start an idol group, how would you do it? Somewhere in Tokyo, a teenage girl was asked this very question, and the results have been impossible to look away from.
When news broke last year that WACK’s infamous producer Junnosuke Watanabe had given 20 million yen to a high-school girl who had passed his producer course, many idol fans were rightfully skeptical. Is this a joke? Another controversy for the sake of making headlines? But with this investment, recipient Suzuki created THE LAST CHANCE PROJECT, an idol-group audition where the participants vowed that if they failed, they would completely give up on their dreams of becoming an idol. Her reasoning behind this make-or-break style audition was simple: She wanted to see what possibilities arose from a group that truly believed “this is my last chance.”
During the four-day audition camp held last spring, the auditionees were introduced to a song with a strong city-pop feel called “EGO.” Suzuki had told the song’s composer, Kosei Nishiyama, about her feelings behind THE LAST CHANCE PROJECT, and his songwriting does an excellent job at reflecting it. Synths, electric piano, and the moving guitar and bass parts paint the ever-vivid picture of youth in motion. While the verses give us a sense of uncertainty, nebulous with only the outlines of the chord progression, the chorus answers these feelings with driving words of self affirmation: “I definitely want to change / I don’t want to give in / This feeling is EGO / Resonate EGO / Let’s keep on singing / Embrace me as I am.”
Some could say this level of egotism from an underground idol is arrogance, but to wholeheartedly take on a challenge where failure meant the end of your dreams is courageous. I think a little ego is warranted for coming out on top under these circumstances. This past January gave us another audition camp to find a seventh member. While they were able to find a new one, they had nearly lost one of their original members in the process. With their resolve renewed, will they achieve their goals? Will Suzuki’s miracle come to fruition? Personally, I believe LiVS is going to be one of the groups to really watch out for in the future. チェックYOLO。—poteto
NEW ERROR is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
You can find poteto on Twitter.
Michael recommends…
“Bad Days on Fire” by Mom [ClubDetox, 2023]
Across his sprawling sixth album, pop wunderkind Mom continues to resist the confines of genre. Two-thirds into opener “Gomen ne,” he switches from gracefully finger-plucked guitar and airy whistles to static haze; “Jikken” places his gawky rapping behind pounding drums and pterodactyl screams. Kanashi Dekigoto -The Overkill- is built on these fragments—of spliced together recording and volatile hooks, blown-out drums and vocals bathed in feedback—to form a genre-hopping collection of what the artist describes as “a record of sad days no one knows.”
“Bad Days on Fire” best represents the album’s need to move through. Mom clumsily attempts to describe empty feelings as he walks across the bass tremors, sighing “the days I failed to burn are replayed on loop.” Peppered with whoops and pressurized whistles, the quiet “on fire” tacked on to the end of his hum is an embrace of the reality and a combustion of the memory that comes with it. But nestled in the destruction is a tenderhearted optimist. Mom pauses for a second: “one day I’ll love someone.” “But for now, now, bad days,” he sings, staring down as he sways back and forth, illuminated by flashing red lights. And for the rest of the music video, he resists facing the camera. That’s how we get through: we look forward with optimism but rage through the bad days. —Michael
Kanashi Dekigoto -The Overkill- is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
Michael writes about Mandopop on his Substack The Mando Gap. He previously collaborated with me on Not So Foreign: A Conversation on Writing About Non-Western Music for This Side of Japan issue #27.
Hope my friends introduced you to something new. And there’s more of the new from me down below, from bedroom hip hop to dubstep, plus something about marathons. Enjoy!
Album of the Week
Naive by rowbai [self-released]
*Recommended track: “sign” | Listen to it on Spotify
For the next direction in which to take her music, rowbai found a hint from a post seen on her social media feed. “Kato from [live event series] K/A/T/O MASSACRE came out to my show, and I saw him tweet ‘rowbai put on a super naive show, and it was amazing,’” the singer-songwriter shared to Soundmain Blog in 2022. “Since then, the word ‘naive’ has really stuck with me as a form of expression.” She threw that keyword as being synonymous with “delicate and uncertain,” her chosen description of herself on stage as she sing-raps verses over noisy, self-produced beats. She wanted to be open about her vulnerable side for this new album titled, of course, Naive.
In the resulting album, rowbai remains as lyrically honest in her tracks as she intended yet “delicate and uncertain” doesn’t befit the collected individual heard on record. If anything, the project makes a clean break from the emotional heaviness displayed through the damaged beats and frank lyrics of 2021's Dukkha, inspired by the Buddhist term for “suffering.” As a beat-maker, she has historically favored warped, crunchy electronic sounds since her debut in 2018; she’s seen listing artists like Arca, James Blake and FKA twigs as early influences. But the inherent darkness went beyond stark synths in Dukkha with it felt legibly through her depressive lyrics: “I don’t feel anything,” she sang over despondent electronica in “Brain Fog” from her previous release. “My body is heavy / It’s like I’m not myself.”
Unnamed demons still haunt the music of rowbai. “Signs” from Naive lays bare the shadowboxing as if she’s confronting arising conflicts in real time. Yet it showcases a seasoned fighter who’ve weathered enough shots to the point the fight is almost an everyday matter to her. “I’m worrying about something else again / you’ll forget it a year from now,” she sings to herself with a fast-footed rap cadence, the wonky synth beat moving just as limber. Depression is not insignificant in the lyrics of “Signs”; it’s still acknowledged as the source of the singer-songwriter’s overall creative inspiration. But the song draws up a life in which she’s figured out the movement of the waves, confident in the fact it’ll ride out eventually.
This resilience can be found in tracks seemingly subsumed in the deepest of melancholy. As forlorn keys cast over steady drum breaks in “In the dark” like a gloomy rain cloud, rowbai hangs on to a memory of a brighter day as if it’s a reminder of what lies ahead after it all subsides: “My vision does not work / but I can hear something / There is a sound / reaches my heart through my skin.” The creaky boom-bap beat of “nasake” (Pity) sets up a mood that lives up to the self-loathing behind the title. But while the singer-songwriter matches the low-slung vibe with her wallowing vocals, her lyrics reveal a series of rather hopeful thoughts: “I found myself getting over it / I don’t mind the pain like I did back then.”
Like she mentions in “nasake,” pain visibly persists in the songs of rowbai. She just has learned how to live with it better, often resorting to turn it into music as a way to cope. Naive however also resist music as a form of blood-letting, maintaining a casual feel as she releases her inner turmoil. Part of that breeziness comes from a sleeker production that gets much rid of the noise roughening up her beats in the past. The lyrics, meanwhile, spill onto the page like stream of consciousness, with her saying how she feels as is until it built into a song proper. The candidness paints a rather quotidian scene in which these ghosts tend to live: “I want to warp to my house and sleep / no, I don’t even want to sleep right now,” she quips in “kaerimichi” like their tweets on her private account. Rowbai’s problems start to feel easier to handle in Naive, her mind free from the intensity of the past.
Singles Club
“Hitchcock” by chef’s [Otemoto Studio]
Chef’s immediately get to flexing on “Hitchcock.” The four-piece band shows off a coiled knot of a guitar riff before blasting off into a charged indie-rock tune, and the busy fret work nor the tension that builds from it settles down in the slightest. Coming off of the breezier, more straightforward chords in last year’s Cartoon Candy EP, the spiky music in their new one feels unusually hot-headed. Who or what might have ticked them off is hard to parse from the lyrics that unroll as restless and winding as the riffs. All that’s evident is that one should approach them with caution.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “meanwhile” by LIGHTERS; “Instant Joke” by omeme tenten
“TYOSTAR” by STARKIDS [guntai9]
“TYOSTARS” suggest a move from STARKIDS to get back to basics. While the throbbing electro bass line teases yet another wavy rap track designed for club debauchery as much as Initial D-esque drift-racing, the crew sets up camp to focus on rapping for rapping’s sake. No para para homages, no molly-popping, just braggadocio to maintain their hype as the most in-demand in the Big TO.—Tokyo, that is. Not that I don’t like seeing them wreak havoc in a neon-lit club bumping their warped take on Eurobeat for the occasion. But the loose cypher feel here seems to find them taking a breather, free from the binds of their own meticulously curated brand for once.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “falling apart” by espeon; “Barbie” by Whoopee Bomb
“Marginal Era” by T5UMUT5UMU [self-released]
If you’re like me, getting into dubstep again from the classic era—the Youngstas, the Bengas, the Tempa All-Stars mixes brought back to the rotation—you’re in the perfect mood to indulge in the new T5UMUT5UMU. Through his T5 series, the past year saw the producer dish out tracks of various modes across the hardcore continuum. The stripped-back production and its wonky bass line place “Marginal Era” in the realm of 00s grime, though the more kitchen-sink fills of laser synths and rattling drums also reminds me of the post-dubstep tracks that rebuild grime into something more alien. If this is T5UMUT5UMU taking a rest, I wonder what zany bass track he’s got cooking.
Marginal Era is out now. Listen to it on Bandcamp/Soundcloud
See also: “Icebox” by Iceyveins; “Parallel Pressures” by Oyubi & Fetus
This Week in 1993…
“Makenaide” by ZARD [b.gram, 1993]
No. 1 during the week of March 1, 1993 | Listen to it on Spotify/YouTube
Like with many of ZARD’s singles, “Makenaide” sees frontwoman Izumi Sakai yearning to be close with a love interest who’s destined to be forever out of her reach. Yet in a rare instance, she sounds overjoyed despite the distance between them as she endearingly admires them from afar. “No matter how far away / my heart is by your side / hope you can feel me looking over you,” she sings in the chorus of her band’s most remembered single, and the band’s gleaming new-wave rock triumphantly climbs and climbs with no ceiling in sight.
If ZARD as a band had already earned a reputation of writing strictly love songs since their debut in 1991, Sakai and her team conceptualized “Makenaide” to be anything but. “I had already written about love for a number of songs, so I wanted to try a different type of lyrics,” Sakai said in the liner notes of greatest-hits compilation Golden Best 15th Anniversary. “I thought it sounded like a cheering anthem from the tempo of this song, and I immediately had an image of what to write.”
With the single scheduled to release during college app season, Sakai partly wrote the encouraging lyrics of “Makenaide” (literally translating to “don’t lose”) with students experiencing a tough time with exams in mind. Then the world of sports soon adopted the song, leaning on the runner imagery in the chorus to its very literal extent: “Don’t give up / The finish line / is right there.” It’s nearly begging for the media to pick it up for its live marathon broadcasts, which is what Nippon TV has been doing for their charity programming since 1993.
And so when the 2019 TV documentary Forever ZARD The Origins of the Songs of Izumi Sakai introduces “Makenaide” as a “love song about supporting someone who’s chasing their dreams,” it seems slightly off to describe it as a “love song” after observing the multiple lives that the single has taken since its release. Based on what’s solely on the lyric sheet, it’s not a wrong description. But it’s difficult now to hear the chorus as anything other than words of encouragement to cheer on athletes, its much often quoted parts overshadowing the more affectionate lyrics down the line.
ZARD had already been playing with materials fit to craft an Olympian anthem, taking on an ‘80s arena-rock kit of gated snares and electric guitars. But if their reverberating music evoke a superhuman feel, it’s from the music reinforcing the larger-than-life scale in which Sakai sang about desire. I often envision ZARD’s best singles taking place in the world of dreams, somewhere beyond the physical realm. As Sakai sinks deeply inward while she ruminates on intense matters of the heart, their pristine instruments echo into the infinite, gleaming with a hyperreal glow. While “Makenaide” also has their signature elements to strike something similarly dreamlike, the decades of media use have ruined some of the magic with it flattening its lyrics into one-dimensional text.
You can listen to all of the songs covered so far in this section in this playlist here.
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