Issue #14: Halfway / Oriai
Digging into the new DAOKO album, Momoe Yamaguchi's "Yokusuka Story" and the latest entry of city pop revival
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Around which exact point is Ai Furihata’s new single “City” in the global game of City Pop Telephone? A current member of Aqours, the seiyuu’s debut as a solo singer has all the hallmarks of a stereotypical city pop revival track from the thick, bright synth keys, the boogie-funk slap bass and a throbbing bass line that’s asking to be re-fixed into a synthwave cut. The music video, too, references aesthetics of an imaginary Japan in the ‘80s with shots of a retro taxi car, midnight Tokyo skyscrapers, and an anime rendering of those cut scenes.
Revival of a certain ‘80s nostalgia isn’t anything new in Japanese pop. Synth-pop trio Satellite Young and their still-fantastic self-titled 2018 album immediately come to mind with their throwback to the shiny, Bubble-era new wave. But Ai Furihata and gang’s efforts feel like it continues another extra round in this big stylistic feedback loop. “City” is no longer just directly referencing the domestic pop records and the country’s own vague memory of the ‘80s but now riffing off the interpretations of those aesthetics by artists both domestic and foreign.
“City pop revival” as a subgenre is at a point now where a K-pop artist like Katie can issue a “city pop anime version” of her two-year-old single, “Remember.” It’s beyond seeing former Wonder Girls member Yubin explore retro sounds and imagery in the video for “Lady” or being given random anime stills when you search up Yerin Baek’s cover of Toshinobu Kubota’s “La La La Love Song.” The music is now made in a time where those loose touchstones have crystallized into parts of a recognizable aesthetic, and it’s intentionally trying to evoke those certain touchstones.
Ai Furihata’s “City” is yet another step in the evolution with now a Japanese artist interpreting a chain of interpretations partly inspired by foreign voices. Though city pop is originally rooted in Japan, the style that Furihata is referencing feels separate from their own culture as it’s now too divorced from the original source of the ‘80s Japanese pop. They called it “City” for crying out loud: there’s a very obvious intention that they want to check all the boxes to deliver a tribute to this trendy, internet pop aesthetic.
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We got another record that sounds like the internet for our Album of the Week. Our This Week in… feature, however, looks back at a song that’s yet to arrive on the digital streaming landscape (outside Japan at least). This issue’s singles are all over the place in terms of platform; one of them, as far as I know, is Bandcamp only.
Speaking of the internet, I did blurb about one of my favorite songs of the year, 4s4ki’s “Nexus,” for the spring music issue of Tone Glow, an experimental-music newsletter where I am a contributor. 4s4ki’s song as well as her new album, Your Wonderland, very much sounds like “internet pop music” for lack of a better word. You can check that as well as great writing from a variety of other writere on their choice songs here.
Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Anima by DAOKO [Toy’s Factory]
Recommended track: “Occharaketayo” | Listen to it on Spotify
DAOKO chose an interesting time to look back at her beginnings in her new album, Anima. Perhaps referencing the more home-bound and emotionally raw phase of her music career is an effort to invite in more creative inspiration. Her transformations in 2017’s genre-omnivorous Thank You Blue was a spectacle to witness, but her style-dabbling started to cut into her distinct voice come 2018’s Shiteki Ryokou. Steering the music back to her center is a rather natural course in response.
Especially after a series of commercial-driven pop collaborations, Anima often sounds like a fresh return to her internet roots with much of the production inspired by music created more in the digital space. The title track’s kitchen-sink beat throws together wonky bleep-bloops and random guitar squiggles, like a mash-up of laptop IDM and Vocaloid rock. She raps a cute love letter over high-BPM drum ‘n’ bass in “ZukiZuki” in the same chill, hushed manner one would record over a lo-fi hip-hop beat.
But DAOKO’s revisit feels prescient when the atmosphere surrounding 2020 doesn’t feel so different from those years when she first started making a name for herself. The times are even grimmer with the future appearing even less promising while many are only capable of taking it one rough day at a time. DAOKO’s reclusive pop music speaks as intimately about today’s broken reality as it did when she resonated with the disillusioned millennial youth. “If I’m the only one who was built specially faulty, I want you to let me know,” she sighs an evergreen lyric on the haunting track “Achilles Ken.” She doesn’t sound exhausted as much as she sounds just numb from having to tough out a life that wants for her to lose.
The more overt dives into pop provide the album’s brief, colorful moments while preventing Anima from sounding too inward for its own good. DAOKO gets lost in the dance music blaring out her headphones in the lead single “Otogi No Machi,” and Scha Dara Parr briefly grab her out of her gloomy world in the funk-rap collaboration “Hi Sensei Paisen.” Despite an abrupt tonal change, a diversion into more light-hearted music comes off rather natural after seeing DAOKO dipping into multiple genre exercises in her previous releases.
That said, the insular nature of Anima is what fosters a more intimate closeness compared to her past few releases. Her hushed, intricately wordy raps read like private, spur-of-the-moment voice notes while her more tinny, digital beats further establishes a homemade feel to the album. DAOKO’s best tracks continue to feel as though you’re eavesdropping into a musical diary entry: “I wonder how exactly I’m supposed to feel,” she sighs in “Occharaketayo” after a long, brutal day, her words trailing off into the gossamer pop music. The more she retreats into the music, better Anima gets.
Singles Club
“Halfway” by Gen Hoshino [JVCKENWOOD]
While the cozy new-wave of “Halfway” sounds calm and collected, I still wonder if Gen Hoshino is doing alright. The man responsible for 2016’s jolly hit “Koi” made me double-take last year shouting “I got something to say: everybody, fuck you” on “Same Thing,” and the purposefully scattered nature of that song’s home EP suggested as though he wanted to break away from something. He seems to have cooled down from the sound of “Halfway,” finding a sweet middle between his interest in current-day electronic-pop and his retro taste. The meek yet chic music, however, can’t completely hide the rift between him and his partner: “From how we always look/ we probably seem somewhat peaceful,” he sings about the charades. Hoshino doesn’t sound entirely out of it yet, but he sounds like he’s at least taking it in stride.
Listen to the song on Spotify.
See also: “Bubbles” by South Penguin ft. NTsKi
“Lily” by Kitri [Nippon Columbia]
Kitri already raised the bar for the duo’s own monthly singles campaign with “Lily.” While the moods of the piano pop featured in their amazing full-length, Kitrist, from January resided in a softly lingering melancholy, they dive into a more tragic, if not doomed emotional state. The sisters’ thin, hushed voices feel spectral as you hear their words trail out into the sound, especially as the two grieve over a personal loss: “The taste of the tears I gave/ All the words start coming back,” they sing in the chorus. They refrain from the dramatic despite the bleak mood, but the stillness of the voices only let their sorrows hit deeper.
Listen to the song on Spotify.
See also: “Hare Moyou” by Kiyono Yasuno
“Gypsophila” by Stomp Talk Modstone [Haru To Shura]
“There’s such a chill, such a chill,” Mimu Sano softly sighs in Stomp Talk Modstone’s new sun-kissed single, and then a torrent of noisy yet effervescent guitars consumes the music whole. Sure, the two vocalists in the indie-rock band whisper to each other about chill, almost twee matters, like slipping into the feeling and describing the fuzziness as colors, but the reverb-drenched music is far from soft or subtle. “Gypsophila” instead zeroes in on the classic indie-rock cross-section of starry-eyed dream-pop and the scribbled lines of shoegaze to recreate the scale and the electricity of their infatuation.
Gypsophila/Wander is out now. Listen on Bandcamp.
See also: “Humming” by Lucie,Too; “Ano Natsu No Shoujo” by So Shibano
This Week in 1976…
“Yokosuka Story” by Momoe Yamaguchi [CBS Sony, 1976]
No. 1 during the weeks of July 5 - Aug. 16, 1976 | Listen to it on YouTube
The topic of age heavily revolves around Momoe Yamaguchi. The teen idol’s legacy is staggering just by considering her accomplishments during the 1970s relative to her age. She debuted at 14 and left the spotlight at 21, leaving behind 22 albums as well as 29 singles that charted in the top 10.
Her songs, too, remain conscious of her years. Yamaguchi’s early singles are provocative partially because their narratives play against the young idol singing them. A few dance with innuendo as she sang about being awakened to new, intense feelings while pleading to give up anything for love in return.
“Yokosuka Story,” meanwhile, doesn’t wink so much at her teenage innocence and instead portrays her more straightforwardly as a woman beyond her years. The classic pop music is as stoic as it is playful with the sax riff adding it a flirtatious color while the strings provides more gravity to the chorus. “Is this it,” she laments in the central refrain to herself about an unrequited love.
While Yamaguchi may be shot down in “Yokosuka Story,” she sounds far from weak or bashful. Her low voice evokes a steely toughness, especially accompanied by a robust string section, and she also shows off some cleverness through her poetic turn of phrases. It’s impressive enough for the idol to build such a cunning character for herself, but the feeling of loss in “Yokosuka Story” hits because she’s willing to dismantle it. Even a strong-willed woman like her can fail to get her way and turn vulnerable in the face of love.
Yamaguchi recorded “Yokosuka Story” when she was 17, though she appears anything but teenage. From her voice to her demeanor on record, she sounds too composed as a person to be ruled by petty emotions—a quality I associate with naive youth. And this overall image of Yamaguchi is why I’m mostly astonished to remember she was only 21 when she retired. The young idol sounded at home in an adult world for better or for worse.
Next issue is out July 22. You can check out previous issues here.