| Chugakusei Kanoke - Hokosaki Ni Tsuita Gamu |
| There's
some bands that get name checked so damn much it feels straight
up lazy to type their names, no matter how appropriate the comparison
may be. Music is difficult to talk about, so these bands often get
thrown out as a sort of cultural shorthand when a new artist is playing
off an old formula. If the band is primitive and loud, there's The
Stooges. If they're wispy and dark, there's The Cure. You get the idea. The comparisons are lazy in that they're just a bit too pat: they usually don't truly give you any real insight into what's unique (if anything) about the band's approach. So, with this in mind, and being fully cognizant of my own concerns with the act of comparisons, I declare that Chugakusei Kanoke invoke the mighty Black Sabbath (the name doesn't sound nearly as cool in English, although you can get the gist: Coffin of A Junior High School Student.) Because, man, there's just no getting around it. Yes, they invoke The Sab even more than Church Of Misery. But unlike Church Of Misery, or the myriad bands who are plowing the same field (most of which aren't actually as good as Church Of Misery,) Chugakusei Kanoke don't play up the iconography. No fog machines, no black clothing, no hesher hair. They just straight up play like Tony, Geezer and Bill (although vocalist Hazou Kanou sounds more like Thee Michelle Gun Elephant's Yusuke Chiba than Ozzy or Dio, sorry:) their latest disc, Hokosaki Ni Tsuita Gamu, distills what made those classic early discs positively swing, not just clomp. They're heavier than God, but light on their feet. They can also be pretty shameless at times. "かかわれば" ("Kakawareba, i.e. "Concerned") snatches the "Iron Man" guitar dive, "誰にも言えない" ("Dare Ni Mo Ienai," i.e. "Don't Tell Anyone") has moments that are just a sneeze or two away from "Wicked World." The whole disc is peppered with this lifts/refs. But again, there's the little matter of not actually trying to act the part, a seemingly minor consideration that pays later dividends as the sheer musical ability of the band starts to peek through the riffage. Any bunch of dorks can thud along, but precious few can make this stuff dance across the room while keeping the mood pitch black, a feat that Chugakusei Kanoke pull off (seemingly) effortlessly. The casual power, like all truly locked in bands, is in the details, like the transition between "馬鹿がばれるの怖くて無口" and "Mは三つ目で マゾじゃない;" it's so slick it doesn't seem like a transition so much as a setup. It's these blink and you'll miss 'em moments that make Hokosaki Ni Tsuita Gamu so thrilling when it's played straight, in one sitting (those tracks roughly translate to "Watching The Fear Of Timid Idiots" and "M Is Third, Not A Masochist"…yeah, they sound cooler in Japanese.) The obi on the disc reads "Raw Doom Punk," and beyond the Sab, that's a pretty solid description, since the production borders on plug 'n' play sound board quality; there's not a single smoothed out edge, or vestige of studio polish, so much so that when "M Is Third" has Kanou sing with himself in what is clearly an overdub, it's downright startling. So far as the band itself…there's no web presence I can determine, and the few bits of information I can find are so abstract and tangental that they don't reveal anything about the music so much as give it an additional sheen of mystery. No problem: in a purely musical sense, Hokosaki Ni Tsuita Gamu works just fine without context. |