 Well,
this is a curiosity. "Justin Heathcliff" is a bit of a forgery, a faux
British psych folk album written, recorded and performed by one Osamu
Kitajima, who went on to a long and successful career peddling new age
music to the masses (as well as picking up a PhD, apparently: he's
"Dr." now.) The story goes that Mr. Kitajima was writing commercial
jingles when he decided to move to the UK, where he was exposed to
British folk and psych (there's no readily available information about
what, exactly, he discovered, but I'd guess that the Incredible String
Band and Syd Barrett are in there somewhere.) Whatever music might have
inspired him, he chose a suitably English sounding pseudonym and in
1971 unleashed Justin Heathcliff's one and only album on an
unsuspecting world (well, OK, just Japan.)
There are a lot of remarkable things about this lone effort, the most
obvious of which is how good the "forgery" is. Foreign languages are
notoriously difficult to sing with credibility, and Kitajima's delivery
must have fooled more than a few people. He has a rich, throaty
baritone and phrasing that spins his slight Japanese accent into a
vocal mannerism, sounding a bit like a deeper version of Badfinger's
Pete Ham or, more recently, Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys (in fact,
fans of early SFA would be well advised to give this a spin.) There's
also the music itself, which takes in seemingly every
studio trick available to a post-Sgt. Pepper artist and whips it up
into a gentle psych coctail that might have been a few years out of
date by the early 70s, but nonetheless has aged well enough that it
could easily have been part of the indie psych pop resurgence of the
90s (Apples In Stereo, Dexide The Emons, The Sights, etc.)
The second remarkable thing is how strong the material is. Kitijima
left Japan as the folk boom was really gaining steam, and he takes that
burgeoning aesthetic and filters it through kaledoscope eyes and a
laundry list of instrumentation, taking what could have been another
pleasant but faceless folk album and cranking up the interest by
several notches. There might not be anything pioneering about the
elements of this album in and of themselves, but take "Good Bye:" the
effortless shifts from simple to odd to Beatle-esque digression to
whatever you'd call that guitar solo are simultaneously thrilling and
effortless. "You Know What I Mean" brings up that Badfinger comparison again, but with more Kinks and very British whimsey in the mix.
Seriously, who taught this guy how to put this stuff together? A career
of writing TV commercial jingles can explain catchy songwriting, but
doesn't explain where Kitijima got his mastery of using the stereo
effect with such dynamics. Which leads to the third remarkable thing:
for a one off album made by a guy who was essentially recording his
debut, it doesn't just sound great, it sounds modern.
Post-modern to be exact, with a range of styles, approaches, and sonic
trickery that effects everything from the arrangements all the way down
to the sonic space of the record itself. If someone had told me it was
a new album produced by some Pitchfork ready group of nostalgia minded
20 year old American midwesterners, I'd have no cause to doubt them.
There's nothing about the album that wasn't already present (and, in
many ways, had already come and gone) by 1971 in the UK, but there's an
intangible quality that would make it at home in the present day, and
not just as an influence. The only thing that sound like they could be
dated are some of the sentiments: "To Live In Peace" and "You Should
All Think More" are about exactly what you think they are, and closing
the album with a seventeen second ditty called "Love Makes The World
Complete" is wide eyed, unironic hippiedom at its most obvious.
Thing is, even these (now) naive sounding sentiments find some currency
when they're couched in rich, warm psych pop that's as well constructed
as "Justin Heathcliff." All the above talk about sonic detail and post
modernism should not be taken to mean the album lacks immediacy or
simple charms. It's an effortlessly entertaining work, and it's a shame
Kitijima didn't see his way clear to make more of the same: after this,
he dropped the pseudonym and recorded what was obstensibly his debut.
While that album, "Benzaiten," shares the sonic richness of "Justin
Heathcliff," it was a much more experimental (and instrumental) work,
adhering more closely to the still new progressive music coming from the UK that he
undoubtedly absorbed along with the pop he emulated on this effort. Alone as it
may be, "Justin Heathcliff" isn't just a curiosity, it's a minor lost
classic, an album that would doubtless find it's fanbase quickly should
it see a wide western release.
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Available from Forced Exposure |
