Available at Amazon Japan
| Hikashu - Hikashu |
| It's
1979, and the idea of technopop is starting to really take hold in
Japan. Yellow Magic Orchestra has come of age with the release of Solid
State Survivor, and on top of that, the words "quirky" and "jerky" have
started to be applied to the music coming from the new breed of New
Wave bands that are trickling in from the West. Devo's debut has slowly
made its way onto Japanese turntables, bands like The Pop Group and X
Ray Spex are twitching their way into the very fabric of the pop music
they were created to oppose. There were a lot of bands feeding off of
this energy, and as per the law of averages, most of them sucked,
simply taking trendy squiggles of electronically enhanced sound and
haphazardly stitching them to the same crap everybody else had been
doing for years. Then, there was Hikashu. Our story begins with one Koichi Makigami, who by the mid 70s had done some time in theatre troupe Tenjo Sajiki spinoff Tokyo Kid Brothers. After leaving that collective, he formed his own troupe, Ulysses, and was approached by synth noodlers Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita. These three scored the Ulysses production "Youchuu No Kiki" ("A Larval Crisis,") and Hikashu was born. The band's (recently reissued) self titled debut came out the next year, and it's a vivid reminder that electronic pop wasn't always safe and sweet. Between the formation and the debut, the three core embers had spent time in the heavily New York influenced Tokyo Rockers scene, gigging with such art damaged bands as 8½ and Friction. This resulted in a technopop that was markedly different from YMO's spacey, aloof art pop, instead working much more darkly comic territory. "ヴィニール人形" ("Vinyl Doll") is a sinister, occasionally jarring walk through a dark alley, taking the best parts of Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Red Light" and Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home A Heartache," and adding an extra layer of sci-fi electronic weirdness. "炎天下" ("Entenka") matches discordant No Wave sax, spooky electronic whooshes, a jew's harp (?!) and the paranoid, babbling vocals of Makigami. The group's cover of Kraftwerk's "The Model" takes the original's cold drift and emphasizes the creepiness with subtle reverb, spindly keyboards, and an airless mix. It's not all monsters under the bed, however. Opening track "レトリックス&ロジックス" ("Rhetorics and Logics") is every bit as bouncy and catchy as any top 40 bound technopop from the period, even with the brainy subject matter and James-Chance-on-a-leash sax. Single "20世紀の終りに" ("At The End Of The 20th Century") almost beats contemporaries The Plastics at their own game, substituting bizarre, sometimes manipulated vocal flourishes for Chika's cute/insane punctuations. The album is at its best when it mixes the two styles: "プヨプヨ" ("Puyo Puyo") starts with an ostensibly cute tune and careens off into totally unexpected places. Avant Garde jazz hacking where a guitar solo would be, demonic backing vocals, and a closing that sounds like Makigami is trying desperately to get out of his straitjacket. Speaking of which, Makigami's vocals are all over the place, jumping from quivering, Japanese traditional influenced emoting to God knows what: quacking, yelps, maniacal laughter, hiccuping, eye-bulging intensity. His endlessly inventive, yet perfectly integrated stylings bring to mind Peter Hammil's comment about trying to be the "Hendrix of the voice," a description that Makigami would also come to embody. His work on Hikashu's debut is not as awe-inspiringly technically proficient as his later work would be (which can be said of the band in general, in fact...they got weirder as they went on,) but it's 100% distilled odd, even today. He quickly became one of the most respected vocalist in Japanese music, integrating such diverse and "non-rock" influences as Tuvan throat singing, and to this day holds voice workshops in the Shinjuku area. Hikashu would become one of the "big three" technopop bands (which, nonsensically, didn't include YMO, being comprised of Hikashu, P Model, and The Plastics...guess YMO was big enough to get their own category.) As mentioned above, Hikashu got further out the longer they went on, even counting improv giant Otomo Yoshihide in their ranks in 2006. Of all the diverse threads that run through the group's various incarnations (they had their share of lineup changes throughout the years,) everything is present and accounted for in one form or another on this debut. A catalog wide reissue campaign started earlier this month, finally making these seminal, bizarre, and yes, quirky works available again. |