Andrew Kilbride
An unfortunate aspect of having an Anglo-centric pop culture is that modes of entertainment not in English often get over- looked. Even though English is sort of an international lingua franca, for better or for worse, a small percentage of the world actually speaks it as a first lan- guage. Yet, this said percent has a near-monopoly on promoting and canonizing popular art. Because of this, I want to highlight music either from non-English speaking countries or places that aren’t really a part of American discourse.
To start this off, I’m going to wax poetic about Japanese rock and talk about some of my favorite releases under this umbrella. In later articles, I hope to discuss music from less-discussed places that I’m unfamiliar with, but I feel like this is a good place to start because Japanese rock isn’t nearly the cultural powerhouse that,say,anime and J-pop are.
1. Boris – “Akuma No Uta”
Picking a favorite Boris album is damn near impossible because they have so many,and they genre- hop way more than most artists. That being said,“AkumaNoUta” is a pretty good start, with its reasonable runtime and face-melting “Ark of the Covenant” riffage by noise making extraordinaires,Wata and Takeshi Ohtani. It’s more intense,urgent and plain fun than 99 percent of the music out there.
2. Haru Nemuri – “Harutosyura”
I don’t really know where to begin with this one. Her sound mixes J-pop and post-hardcore in a way that I never really thought was possible. Haru Nemuri’s high-pitched and often fast vocals sound really surreal over heavy guitars, which in turn are juxtaposed with electronic and pop-adjacent production flourishes. I really have no idea how this record is as good as it is, but I love it.
3. Les Ralliz- Dénudés – “77 Live”On one hand, I suppose it’s kind of tragic that Kyoto’s Les Rallizes Dénudés never released an official studio album because they defi- nitely would have released a bunch of classics. On the other hand, its impossible to imagine them beyond their live bootlegs of long, minimalist jams centered on hypnotic repetition and sustained guitar feedback. Even without any official releases to their name, they perfected a radical sound that the American psychedel- ic bands of the ’60s only hinted at. 4.Endon -“ThroughtheMirror”Endon are listed on RateYour- Music.com as “Avant-Garde Metal,” which I’m adding because words and genre signifiers aren’t really enough to convey how strange Endon are as a band. Their instru- mentation is almost always ugly and chaotic, with the band having two DJ-like electronics manipulators in leu of a bassist, and their vocals are screamed and distorted buzzsaws that ignore language in favor of onomatopoeic sounds. Anything they touch is gold. 5.Sigh-“ImaginarySonicscape”Most of the bands I mentioned earlier do a decent amount of genre-hopping over their career, but here Sigh unashamedly alternate between black metal, techno, jazz fusion and soft pop, often doing it multiple times within a single song. This record shows how amazing music can be if the artists aren’t afraid of transcending the often self-imposed confines of their genre.