Available at Amazon Japan
| Kirihito - Question |
| My
friend Craig once told me that the Cult's landmark 1985 LP Love was the
first album he had heard wherein he "could tell where everything came
from." In other words, music stopped being about a new, exciting sound,
and started being a synthesis of recognizable forms. Now, Craig told me
this in 1990, nearly 20 years ago. Maybe I'm a late bloomer, maybe I'm
just too susceptible to novelty, but I've always been willing to allow
a band/artist/whatever its medium, regardless of any hidden or blatant
"inspiration" of the past. Craig's one of my best friends, I love him and all, but I think he missed the point (although it should be pointed out that he wasn't dissing The Cult.) Most modern creative endeavors are in one form or another a pastiche of the past, or at least history, and like retro bands or Quentin Tarantino films, one of the unique pleasures of our time is not just watching artists manipulate tiny pieces of our memories, but recognizing those memories as they're distorted. OK, so Inglorious Basterds is a reference fest. So what? You might be able to count off a bunch of films that utilize similar ideas, but find me another film that hits modern nerves in the same way. It's not just the ideas, but how they're executed, and in what context, that makes much of current media's past heavy-product compelling. Much the same thing can be said about Kirihito's Question, although its constituent elements are more difficult to pull apart. 70s electronic music, of course. Krautrock in general, obviously. Tron, Legos, video games, Daft Punk and 80s cheese funk also rear their heads after a bit of surface scratching (pardon the redundancy.) But while that list of elements and references might look like the sort of thing someone might put together after a few too many hours spent reading Pitchfork's archives, the result belongs to Kirihito. Because all the source spotting in the world still won't produce something as effortlessly goofy as "What?" I'm not 100% sure if that sound which appears on each track on this album is a synth or a guitar set to maximum groove thang, but it fits, giving the duo of Kan Takehisa and Shunsuke Hayakawa a thoroughly weird spine for their retro futurist ruminations. Tracks like "Sai-bo" are simultaneously of the past, present and future, mining our parents' generation's ideas of the future (computer voices! squiggly noises!) with a decidedly current attack, like if Neu! teamed up with the Boredoms and decided to dress up in polyester and wingtips. Question is studiously faceless, which is not to say it's personality free. Far from it: "No Fun!! No Funk!!" is utterly bizarre, 70s car chase music as played by shockingly unfunky people, yet finding a transcendent groove within. It's stiff AND seductive, finding a weird middle ground that suggests a confident swagger that, nonetheless, can't dance to save its life. "Flashman" does it one better, with a cartoonish shuffle and spaced out drift, simultaneously awkward and self assured. Kirihito manage to make a virtue out of nerddom, yet avoid the cloying scenesterisms that could have quite easily sunk it. Just because "君にメロメロ" ("Kimi Ni Mellow Mellow," i.e. "You Get Mellow Mellow") sounds like a karaoke session with a group of robots trying to emulate Sly and the Family Stone gone horribly wrong doesn't mean there's not a genuinely intriguing heart beating at the duo's core. Question might be made up of obviously pilfered pieces and parts, and it's unquestionably a self consciously weird concoction, but it's no less charming for it. |