Perhaps those who only know of Echo & The Bunnymen through their song "Lips Like Sugar" may be unaware of the band's darker side. Heaven Up Here, The Bunnymen's second album, is certainly in darker territory, full of minor chords and gloomy atmosphere, especially with songs like "Over The Wall" and "The Disease". This is the reissue version with some bonus tracks from live shows, and I bought it at Tsutaya last summer. Take the lyrics, "As prospect diminishes/Nightmares swell/Some pray for heaven/While we live in hell/My life's the disease." Wow... yeah, that's pretty dark. The most popular song off this album is "A Promise," which was included on the Songs To Learn And Sing compilation album I bought on cassette in high school. While that is probably still my favorite song on this album, there is so much more on this album that I really love. The final track, "All I Want," is extremely cool, and after hearing it on YouTube, I knew I wanted to buy this album. The album starts off strongly with the aptly-titled "Show of Strength," followed right by "With A Hip" and its driving bass. The entire album is great and moody. This is The Bunnymen's sophomore release, and it is a fantastic album. This album was remastered and reissued with some bonus live tracks a few years back. I was surprised to find this album for sale at my local Tsutaya last summer.
Like fellow Swedish band The Mary Onnettes, The Shout Out Louds came out with a fantastic album several years back, only to release a letdown of a follow-up album. After Our Ill Wills, The Shout Out Louds released Work, which was rather boring by comparison. It was not a terrible album, but it just wasn't very memorable. Our Ill Wills was full of very memorable, catchy songs. Work was a decent album, I guess, but it just didn't have that same magic. I paid for the download from emusic.com, but I never bothered to buy the CD. (The Mary Onnettes' album, however, was just a snore and a disappointment.)
Well, Optica is a far stronger album than Work. Released this year in February, I eagerly awaited this album's release after hearing samples on the Internet and gladly ordered this from Amazon as soon as I could. When I got the CD, I fell in love with it, listening to it over and over again, and thinking to myself, "2013 is going to be a good year for great music." Optica does not have the same influence of The Cure and The Smiths as Our Ill Wills, but instead it has more of an '80s synth pop-style of influence. Instead of The Cure, bands like Human League and Tears For Fears come to mind. And, maybe people may disagree with me, but I sometimes am reminded of Howard Jones in a few of these songs. You know, Howard Jones: the quintessential '80s singer that everyone knows, but most people forget his name?
So the song that immediately became my favorite, the one that made me say to myself, "I'm definitely going to buy this CD," is "Illusion." It just screams "'80s new wave Britpop" to me, and I love it. My 5 year old daughter Ulan really enjoys The Shout Out Louds (her favorite song is "Tonight I Have To Leave It"), and the song she always wants to listen to repeatedly on Optica is "Walking In Your Footsteps." I also really enjoy "Sugar," "14th Of July," and "Where You Come In." From the galloping basslines of "Burn" to the playfully dancing flute of "Walking In Your Footsteps", to the dreamy "Circles," to the retro '80s-ish "Glasgow," this new CD by SOL is full of great songs and has been played over and over again in my car.
The Ocean Blue has been my favorite band ever since hearing "Ballerina Out Of Control" on the radio in 1992. I saw them in concert when they toured in support of their Beneath The Rhythm And Sound album, and was turned away at the door for being a few months short of 21 when they toured for their album See. The cool thing is that I did get to spend a lot of time outside of the concert afterwards, talking with Oed, David, and the other band members. It's been nine years since TOB released the Waterworks EP, and I patiently waited for this album all those years. Ultramarine does not disappoint! This album has a stronger synthesizer presence, which has been missing since Steve Lau left the band after Beneath The Rhythm And Sound. This album has quite a bit more reverb and distortion with the first two tracks, giving the songs a rather shoegaze feel to them.
The album starts out strongly with "Give It A Try" and follows that with their single, "Sad Night, Where Is Morning?" "New York 6AM" shows that David's lyrics have not lost the knack of creating vivid mental imagery, and next up is perhaps the second strongest track, "Blow My Mind." "Fast Forward Reverse," which was introduced first on the Waterworks EP, reappears here in a slightly different version.
In all, this past 9 years was worth the wait. Ultramarine is a great album, and the only thing lacking (in my opinion) is a song by Oed. I really like his music a lot, and I've grown accustomed to at least one song by him on TOB releases.
Wow, so now that My Bloody Valentine is back together this year they have released their new album, m b v, after 22 years since their legendary album, Loveless. Loveless featured such beautiful waves of shoegaze washing over me, giving me the feeling of drowning in a veritable sea of guitar distortion. It was simultaneously noisy and quiet, making me want to keep turning up the volume. If perhaps I would somehow go deaf from it, then the last sound I'd hear would be a beautiful one.
Well, this new album has had a bit of a lukewarm reception among some. I didn't expect m b v to become the next best thing since Loveless (or even surpass it), but apparently a lot of other people did. I'm trying to be impartial with this CD. I don't want to compare it to their legendary, groundbreaking album from 1991 and be fair. At the same time, there seems to be widespread critical acclaim for m b v, which I am not sure the album truly deserves. A part of me thinks that perhaps if this album was released by some other band that it wouldn't have received as much attention as it has received. There are a few tracks on this album that make me think, "Come on... 20+ years and this is the best you can do?" I must say that most of the tracks on here are pretty great. I think part of the problem is that since shoegaze has been resurrected for the past 10+ years and is stronger than ever, everyone expects the band that invented the shoegaze genre to produce another brilliant shoegaze album. However, this new album does not quite live up to that expectation. There isn't layer after layer of reverberating, distorted guitars, and instead the music is a bit simpler. m b v at times seems to be more in between the raw Isn't Anything and the polished Loveless albums.
The brief, vague song titles are typical of My Bloody Valentine, that is for sure. The best songs on this album are "She Found Now," "Only Tomorrow," "Who Sees You," "If I Am," and the song that is closest to the Loveless style, "In Another Way." The song "Is This And Yes" is an instrumental song which frankly sounds like something they just came up with on a rainy Sunday afternoon while playing around on a keyboard. It's really not that exciting. Upon first listening to "Nothing Is," I was excited because it started out sounding like a really awesome song. But after a while I realized that the song just wasn't ever going to actually begin, and it ends up sounding very repetitive with the same five seconds or so being repeated over and over again. So while overall this is a nice album to listen to, I find myself skipping past a few tracks. To me, that does not signify a strong album.
So if you want to listen to music that could be called "Loveless version 2.0," you would be happier listening to bands such as Fleeting Joys and Astrobrite. If you want to listen to a new album by the band and not get your hopes up, then try this one out. I'm glad that My Bloody Valentine has released a new album after such a long wait, but I hope that their next one will be stronger (and that we won't have to wait another 22 years for it).
Oh hey, speaking of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album, this year a tribute album was released in Japan called Yellow Loveless. It's real cool that there is a shoegaze scene in Japan, even though J-shoegaze bands like Clams, Hartfield, and Nanocycle seem to have disappeared. I expected there to be a song by Plastic Girl In Closet on this album, but the only J-shoegaze band name I recognized on this CD was Lemon's Chair. Most of the tracks on here are faithful renditions of the original songs by MBV, while others are considerably different. "Touched" was always the song that was the strangest on the original album, and in fact when I gave Loveless to my sister as a Christmas present, when she got to "Touched," she thought that the CD was warped or something. It is certainly an acquired taste, and the version by The Sodom Project is a bit more accessible. Until it steps into some dubstep, and if you can't stand dubstep, then you won't like this track. Lemon Chair's rendition of "To Here Knows When" is a very abstract take on the original, and while not very recognizable, it is very serene and ambient. The track that really steals the show is Shonen Knife's cover of "When You Sleep." They do a Motown-style rendition of the song, and it is such a fun song. For some rather fantastic and faithful versions of the original songs, there are "Only Shallow" by Tokyo Shoegazer, "Soon" by Sadesper Record, and my two favorite tracks from the original Loveless album, "I Only Said" by Age of Punk and "What You Want" by Lemon's Chair.
I highly recommend getting this album for all MBV fans, especially for the Shonen Knife song. It's great!
More new 2013 music from Sweden! I found this album at Tsutaya and decided to rent it. That's right, you can rent CDs in Japan, in case you didn't know that. Perhaps that is why the MiniDisc format was so strong in Japan: people would just rent CDs and copy them to MD. So anyhow, since I am apparently such a pretentious hipster who gushes praise for the Swedish indie-label music scene, I have to say that I like Sad Day for Puppets and I love their clever band name. SDFP's singer, Anna Eklund, has a voice that is a perfect mix of sexy and adorable. Song after song, this is a great album. Track 2, "Stardust," and track 3, "Human Heart," are probably my favorites on this album. SDFP is often lumped in the shoegaze category, but there's nothing really anything on this album that would make me think so. Actually, this album reminds me of Ladytron at times. The first song I heard of theirs, "Marble Gods," instantly hooked me. However, Come Closer is a different style of album. It took me a second listen for this album to really grab me. It's great and the vocals are as fantastic as always, but just different since it doesn't have strong guitars like their earlier music.
This album is brand new, and apparently Fastcut Records has released this in Japan while elsewhere in the world, everyone must buy this CD imported from Japan. I find it interesting that this would be released in Japan before Europe and North America. It makes me wonder where this great following for great music exists in Japan, since most Japanese people I know do not seem to know much of English-language music beyond The Beatles and Michael Jackson. It certainly isn't among my junior high school students, because all they care about is boring J-Pop crap like Arashi and Exile. Then again, I didn't start comprehending what great music is really about until I was around 14 years old. Until then, I was still listening to top 40 music and didn't really know what I liked.
Next: A trip to Tokyo Sky Tree.
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