 The
late 70s/early 80s were a heady time. Punk had died down, but the point
it had proven (i.e. rock music had become stagnant) was still lingering
in the air, looking for new directions, testing the waters. In Japan,
though, it wasn't simply new blood that was taking new chances. Zuno
Keisatsu's Panta formed HAL and explicitly changed his methodology in
an attempt to move past the normal boundaries of rock 'n' roll, R'n'B
revivalists The Roosters moved away from their good time pub rock and
into sleeker, more atmospheric works, and Happy End bassist Haroumi
Hosono's electronic exotica project, Yellow Magic Orchestra,
had...well, they had become Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Then there's Moonriders. They were hardly newcomers: starting life as
folk rockers Hachimitsupai, they played with the big names in the
circuit, including the previously mentioned Zuno Keisatsu and Happy
End. Unhappy with their financial state, the band split, and in 1976
reformed under the Moonriders banner, starting a career that continues
to this very day. While many of their 70s peers avoided complacency in
their own ways, nobody ever got quite as weird as the Moonriders, and they welcomed the 80s with a very strange album indeed, the cinematically themed "Camera Egal Stylo."
Working with movie themes isn't strange in and of itself, but the
Moonriders build a schizophrenic, wobbly fever dream of an album that
is all the more bizarre for its occasional flashes of familiarity. "The
Third Man" ("第三の男") takes Anton Karas' iconic theme and molds it into a
psychedelic summary of the film itself, all disoriented echoes and
splashing footsteps. Irreverence permeates the whole
album, one-upping such similarly conceived albums like John Zorn's "The
Big Gundown" by not simply exploding the musical structures, but by
wedding them to recognizable, but thoroughly "inappropriate," forms. I'm
guessing Woody Allen didn't imagine his serious and contemplative film
"Interiors" ("インテリア") would inspire a ska-funk sing along, and I
guarantee you that when Jean Luc Goddard directed "Alphaville"
("アルファビル") he wasn't thinking of the kind of Keystone Cops chase music
the Moonriders serve up here. And I don't recall a vacuum cleaner solo
in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" ("二十四時間の情事.")
But beyond the mix and match tomfoolery, there's a deeper layer of
weirdness. "Lolita" ("ロリータ・ヤ・ヤ") sounds like The Residents covering the
Twilight Zone theme, at least until the surf band shows up and, er,
burps their way through the tracks dub inspired soundscape. "The 400
Blows" ("大人は判ってくれない") somehow becomes a bouncy new wave track with
random noises and chants of "living language/dead language" and a
guitar solo that sounds like it was lifted from Robert Fripp's buzzing
contributions on Blondie's "Fade Away And Radiate."
Perhaps the weirdest thing about "Camera Egal Stylo" isn't it's skewed
sonic juxtapositions, but that, at heart, it's simply a pop album.
There's usually a chorus to be built up to, or a riff to repeat. Just
simple pop songs with insanely warped, complex executions. Once the
initial confusion at blizzard of ideas subsides, "Camera Egal Stylo" is
a catchy new wave record, one with so many detours into carefully
crafted cul de sacs of sound that it transcends its origins to become
something much more: a great album.
---
NOTE: Kanji in
this article reflect the Japanese titles of the films, which were
sometimes totally different than their Western titles. For example,
"Hiroshima Mon Amour's" Japanese title is "二十四時間の情事," which translates
into "The 24 Hour Affair." |
