Issue #76: Let's Live Happily
Exploring the new kinoue64 album, Nanase Aikawa's debut single and some of the great anison singles from January
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If anyone following J-pop had not yet been keeping an eye on the anime side of things, the massive success of YOASOBI’s “IDOL” last year should have convinced to finally start paying closer attention. And only a month into 2024, the world of anime brings us another inescapable song with Creepy Nuts’s “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” for the new arc of Mashle: Magic and Muscles.
“Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” by Creepy Nuts
As TSOJ’s fellow friend Patrick St. Michel has pointed out over at the Make Believe Mailer, “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” might be the first instance of the Jersey-club bed squeaks to accent an anison single. Club music from the American East side (Jersey, Philly, Baltimore) has certainly been a hot new sound over on Japan’s hip-hop circles, too, and Creepy Nuts have adopted it for a single of their own to great effect on “BIRIKEN.” While the duo’s song for Mashle isn’t as off-kilter in sound and structure as their previous dip into that knock-knock-knocking percussion, DJ Matsunaga’s Jersey-club-inspired production still invites R-Shitei to indulge in some zaniness that freshens up his performance from the more conventional pop efforts as of late.
I’ve been encountering “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” as TikTok material for idols a whole lot lately. I imagine the shimmying dance that they do with the song is inspired by the same moves done by the show’s main character here. But it has already become a popular meme independent from the associated anime. Seeing it thrive on the platform, the success of the meme dance speaks as much as about the compatibility of DJ Matsunaga’s production on TikTok as much as the influence of Mashle, especially given how club-adjacent hip-hop beats has been the foundation for the past year’s viral dances. Like, say, the dances that accompanies unofficial drill remixes of J-pop hits like Noriyuki Makihara’s “Mou Koi Nanteshinai.”
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Ebi Chu’s Yuno Kokubo and Ema Sakurai doing the “Mashle BBBB dance”
But YOASOBI’s “IDOL,” too, eventually grew so large, it began to live its own life separate from its attached show, Oshi No Ko. “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” is on its way to not only be a song beyond Mashle but also the kind of record that anime has been increasingly reliable to create: a hit.
Aside from Creepy Nuts, January has already brought a good amount of quality anison singles for 2024. Much like last year, I wanted to round up a few new releases of note, albeit a bit smaller in scale. And funny enough, half of them are from returning names from the past column.
Here are 5 of my favorite anison singles from January 2024.
“Yume No Ito” by Akari Kito [PONY CANYON]
Was I expecting an anison single from this month to get me to look up several ‘90s Britrock songs after? Certainly not one from Akari Kito, who returns with a more steely personality in “Yume No Ito” after spending the past year in a bubbly pop zone that’s removed from rock. As the buzzing riffs color some toughness in the voice actress, another sleek, translucent guitar line peeks through like a light through a pinhole. While the chromatic tone reminds me of the riffs from the loud, wide-eyed indie-rock in the school of Ride, it also gives the intense music a soft glow that extends to the impassioned chorus. “These overflowing feelings, I will deliver it to you,” she sings, revealing sincerity that lies the underneath the heated sounds.
Yume No Ito is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
“Dear Panta Rhei” by Sumire Uesaka [King]
For her new theme song for Shaman King: Flowers, Sumire Uesaka trades whimsy for wholehearted splendor. That’s to say nothing of the fantastical music video—A briefcase full of rice! A mysterious guy in an alien suit!—but the orchestral rock production of “Dear Panta Rhei” aims for epic drama as the lyrics thread a similarly poetic anthem about love and fate. “Drifting hope, string of connection / reel it in all to be with you,” she sings in the sweeping chorus. Not much cartoonish humor from her recent run of singles here yet Uesaka’s just as committed to the bit.
Listen to it on Spotify.
“CHAIN” by Maaya Uchida [Pony Canyon]
A dial down in sound from rowdy power pop to sparkling funk impresses in Maaya Uchida a more collected state of mind upon first listen of “CHAIN.” But as the voice actress remains unhurried along the fluttering music, her breezy vocals masks her rather upfront intentions that inspire such a title for this single. “With this chain that I’ve caught you in / I won’t ever, ever let you go again,” she sings in the chorus, her winsome delivery turning her intense clingy-ness into its own show of affection. Swaddled in the sweet music, “CHAIN” convinces it might be worthwhile to be the subject of Uchida’s deep, possessive love.
Chain is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
“Soaring Heart” by Liyuu [Lantis]
Outside of her time in Liella!, Liyuu has been reliable to share effervescent electro-pop tunes for her solo material. The intro to her new one alone follows the trend as it open the track with a dazzling mix of surging synth drops and other assorted electronic speckles. For all the showiness upfront, though, the production behind “Soaring Heart” practices restraint and control, patiently building up to the fireworks. Liyuu remains as understated, with her calmly articulating her feelings that otherwise seems to be spilling over. And the grace in which she handles the themes of “Soaring Heart” gestures to a more mature turn for the artist.
Listen it on Spotify.
“Shouten” by Sora Amamiya [MusicRay’n]
Following the flowery kayokyoku arrangements in last year’s ambitious Douka EP, the braided math-rock riffs of “Shouten” time-slips Sora Amamiya back to the modern day. Fiery jazz pianos and scribbled guitars fill the restless track to its brim, the rock production stacking up increasingly dense. Yet the ascending music continues to soar, its skyward trajectory embodying the sentiments in the voice actress’s unwavering lyrics. “I’ll give my life to / these moments of maximum impact / I reach out my hand / toward the light of thousands ahead of my sight,” she sings in the mighty chorus. Where one might be overwhelmed by an endlessness that lies ahead on the horizon, Amamiya only sees possibility in her shining theme music.
Shouten is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
Before we get going on this issue, forgive me for not preparing a Monthly Listening post for January. I’ve honestly have not listened to enough albums in the past month to really fill up space. If you can hold on until February’s Monthly Listening, I’ll tack on a few records from January there to make up for it.
But we should have some great new releases on this issue to keep you over if you like shoegaze, digicore and more. Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Shiawase Ni Kurasone by kinoue64 [self-released]
*Recommended track: “After School for You” | Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp
Scroll down kinoue64’s social media feed, and it’s apparent that the shoegazer has been pretty busy lately. Their new album, Shiawase Ni Kurasone, alone comes after one productive 2023, where they dropped two full albums and an EP. Even after such prolific output, their Twitter account remains frequently updated with screenshots of an in-progress DAW file or videos playing a new track solo in a studio. And after making the internet their main home of operation, the Hiroshima-based artist recently performed their first-ever live show, in Seoul of all places — their Hatsune Miku-meets-shoegaze tracks now leaping out of the URL to IRL cities overseas.
Just three days after their show in Seoul, kinoue64 shared a new song, “Yakusoku,” later included here in Shiawase Ni Kurasone. “It’s about a lot of things, like my memories from Korea,” they tweeted with the YouTube link of the release. The lyrics are as ambiguous as the bleary guitars; sung through Hatsune Miku’s warbling vocals, I would not have been able to make out any of it had it not been written out in the descriptions. Yet it’s perfectly impressionistic as a track in the lineage of dream pop should be, with its infinitely broad phrases ringing clear as day once it lines up in perspective.
“For your melancholy days / I will wear out my voice, I will make noise,” goes a verse in “Yakusoku.” Layer it with the artist’s brief post attached to the song, and it can read as an address to the dear fans who went out to that inaugural live show in Seoul. But it also sticks consistent to the overall theme inherent in all of kinoue64’s 2023 releases and this treatment of their own shoegaze music as a salve. They make their ambitions obvious, listing it succinctly on their Twitter bio — “after school for you” — and using that same language throughout their discography. As records like After School Art Club have done some fantastic world-building to create where their indie-rock thrives, the I Want Only You to Listen to It EP laid out for exactly whom and what they hope their music serves.
Kinoue64 directly lifts that Twitter bio as the title of the highlight track off of the new album. As far as their music in the album goes, “After School for You” is stylistically the closest sibling in the family tree of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless: the blizzard-like assault of reverb, the loose influence of drum ’n’ bass in the percussion. Elsewhere, Shiawase Ni Kurasone embodies a very modern look into shoegaze, and that’s to say, the artist treats Loveless as only one of many parts in the cluster forming this moody, woozy indie-rock. More than a few instances, the guitars cut with the twinkling, razor-sharp lines found in emo; the shifty math-rock riffs offer a stiff guiding melody for Hatsune Miku in songs like “Mukankeizu” and “KaihoSengen.”
Shoegaze and Vocaloid: if the fusion conjures an image of intensely hermetic music, kinoue64’s own mix of the two says otherwise. Their indie-rock is weighed down by reverb and melancholy as typical of shoegaze, and yet the guitars also move with a propulsion that echoes the wide-eyed excitement expressed by the more youthful romantics of the genre. The dazed tone of Hatsune Miku may be hard to parse for lyrics, but her vocals are hardly oblique, free from the impression that it’s hiding any deeper secrets.
For kinoue64, the two functions as a means to reach a more optimistic life view. Listeners have to look no further than that album title: let’s live happily. From the project’s emo influences to the main artist’s commitment to being a guiding light for the melancholy, it calls to mind for me the band JYOCHO and their almost religious search for a better frontier. Along riff after winding riff, they sung songs in an album titled with a similar sentiment: let’s promise to be happy. Kinoue64’s efforts in Shiawase Ni Kurasone may be DIY bedroom-pop competing with blockbusters in the world of modern-day shoegze. Yet their determination to uplift others can competes with any cinematic epic, and this time the shoegazer writes out their message in finer print.
Singles Club
“Sketch of the Season” by Jane Jade [Robert Joy]
Singer-songwriters Sakura Fujiwara and Yuga don’t seem like an obvious pairing from solely checking out the chill-out R&B and autumnal folk, respectively, that they’ve been making on their own. But as the new duo Jane Jade, the two friends sound in sync like they’ve always sung these hushed folk songs together. Yuga brings Fujiwara into her world with the gentle acoustic strums and the balmy slide-guitar twang in a track like “Sketch of the Season” slotting nicely with her tenderhearted songs in her 2022 album, Wordless Nights. As the latter also embraces a similar sound in her new single, the collaboration seems to provide fresh inspiration for both artists involved.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “2-6-2” by Hinemosugara; “sunshine” by Sakura Fujiwara
“Promise” by MarsBoy ft. Swetty [self-released]
MarsBoy lays down emo raps in “Promise” over candied synths that quickly gets bulldozed by blown-out bass. Handled by J1rock, a lead producer in their Vande Geeks crew, the lulling digicore beat ratchets up into a volatile breakdown with sour bass and crunchy drums knocking like a corrupt Jersey club upload. As the video captures a live crowd erupting to a frenzy with Smartphones out when the beat breaks down, it almost gets me to forget that everyone here is turning up to a track built to spill some raw, teenage heartache. About half the lyrics here are unintelligible due to the corroded bass yet the longing comes through clearly: “I don’t give a fuck / but do you miss me every night?” MarsBoy raps before sliding back into his hard-to-parse mumble, though you don’t need to hear much else.
Listen to it on Spotify/Soundcloud.
See also: “Tikhop?” by MarsBoy ft. Yvng Xan, WM Loby, Swetty; “cuz u just memories” by Swetty
“LIKE” by S.L.N.M. [self-released]
Coming from the bugged-out noise-rap beats that often filled their releases, the downcast boom-bap sound of “LIKE” serves as a refreshing production choice for S.L.N.M. While it’s smoother in feel, the decluttered music hardly sands down the group’s edges as it gives more space for the rappers to freely stretch out and let loose. If the lyrical play from the act seem like business as usual in complexity as well as speed, “LIKE” impresses from how they perform the high-tech acrobatics with such calm and ease.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “Ourback$” by Flat Line Classics; “Kids Return” by JJJ
This Week in 1996…
This section is usually dedicated to the Oricon number ones throughout the chart’s history, but for this issue, I’ll write about a hit that did not make it to the very top.
“Yume Miru Shojo Ja Irarenai” by Nanase Aikawa [cutting edge, 1995]
Highest position at #12 during the week of Feb. 12, 1996 | Listen to it on Spotify/YouTube
Nanase Aikawa’s debut single remains emblematic of the thrill-seeker image that followed the pop singer in the world of her songs. After turning down contributions from a number of lyricists, including an almost-but-not-quite take named “Crazy Love,” producer Tetsuro Oda ultimately went with the titular lyric written by none other than Aikawa herself: “Yume Miru Shojo Ja Irarenai,” or “can’t stay a dreamin’ girl.” In her first missive to the world, she was already tired of feeling like the innocent girl, ready to grow up and experience something realer.
The veteran songwriter and key producer to Aikawa’s rise in the ‘90s, Oda essentially based the character behind her debut on the outsider he saw in Aikawa when he first met her in 1989. “This girl didn’t smile at all even though it was an idol audition, and kept staring down the judges,” Oda wrote in 2019 for a column on news site ZakZak. “Of course, that eccentric girl got dropped from the audition, but she left an intense impression on me. There was girls rock back then, but the acts seemed as if they were competing to be the most emotionally sound. I wanted to make rock music that’s darker but also pop, and then I was reminded of the girl I saw at that audition.”
In “Yume Miru Shojo Ja Irarenai,” Oda’s vision for darker girl-rock translates into a portrayal of a teenage girl romanticizing the more treacherous waters of the adult world. The sleazy glam-metal riff in the production personified the troublemaker who that girl must have idolized to become, and the more those guitars sound like the musical caricature of lawlessness, the better: this is how the theme music to a leather-clad punk rebel should seem in the mind of a naive teenager. What set the song apart from other howling J-pop voices backed by big, bad guitars was Aikawa’s own bratty snarl that writhed at the dissatisfaction from current boring lifestyle.
As the glam-metal sound tempers the world of the song with street-corner seediness, some of the lyrics can begin to read worrisome as danger entices a young voice like Aikawa’s. “I want to drown in a fabulous lie,” she shouts in the growling chorus what she wants without shame no matter how shallow her needs. Yet for all its potentially destructive consequences, her dire thirst for it wins out. The tremble in the singer’s voice soon begins to sound like restlessness, this impatience for change that eats her up inside. “Yume Miru Shojo Ja Irarenai” doesn’t so much recreate the sensation of living life on the edge as the guitars might suggest. The single instead communicates this deep, pained yearning from Aikawa to have any piece of that lifestyle and just experience more.
Aikawa fully embraced the sound and character introduced in “Yume Miru Shojo Ja Irarenai” for the rest of the ‘90s. By her first million-seller single, “Koigokoro,” her media image had grown from being a street brat into a full-blown outlaw. Then 21 years old, Aikawa is on the run on a motorcycle in the song’s music video, clutching on to the the back of her lover; a few moments before, she’s seen wielding a Gatling gun while robbing a bank with her love interest. Yet it’s the rawer draft of a character found in the debut that people are most attached to. Almost 30 years later, Aikawa is destined to stay eternally as that dreamin’ girl, yearning for what she can’t yet have.
You can listen to all of the songs covered so far in this section in this playlist here.
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Next issue of This Side of Japan is out February 21. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
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