| Kazumi Nikaido - The Kazumi Nikaido Album |
| It's
the quiet ones you gotta watch out for. At first glance, Kazumi Nikaido seems like just another one of the female folk singers that populate the Japanese music landscape. Pleasant music, polished within an inch of its life, maybe nice enough to play every once in a while when you're in the mood to chill, but not the sort of thing you recommend to friends (unless you have friends who live at the local Starbucks, where bland "alternative" folk...y'know what, forget I said anything.) On second and third glance, the impression doesn't change. The first three tracks of "The Kazumi Nikaido Album" are, indeed, low key folk songs. As you might have guessed, this album wouldn't be here on if that's what this thing turned out to actually be. Starting with "今日を問う Pt 2" ("Today's Question, Part Two,") the album doesn't just wake up: it bolts out of bed, makes loud cartoon noises, and starts painting surreal cartoon characters on the walls with applesauce. Nikaido simulates a wah-wah-ing trumpet, sliding into a low jazz shuffle in which she seems to be trying to squeeze as many syllables as humanly possible into the songs' five and a half minutes. It peaks early, in about 90 seconds, or so it seems. But then it stops cold, a warm vibraphone surrounds the listener, and she starts babbling at 90 miles an hour again. It peaks again...and again...and again...hitting full blown chaos at roughly the halfway point, only to pull back just enough to make room for the next, even more in your face freakout. Despite all this, it never loses sight of the tune, which should have been impossible but somehow wasn't. There's probably a structure to this song...verse chorus verse, something like that...but figuring it out would spoil the fun. It's got to be insanely complicated, though. Who knows how many times they had to play this thing before they got the random stops, starts, and other assorted effluvia down. Better to just kick back and enjoy the frenzy. Well now, the cat's out of the bag, so "アイレ可愛や" ("Cute Air") is free to just be what it is. That said, it's difficult to say exactly what that might be, but it's something along the lines of a traditional Japanese ceremonial song as played by electronic kazoos for a particularly demented children's show. Nikaido occasionally dispenses with words, instead chirping, cooing, and warbling in a high, nasally tone that's somewhere between a trumpet and yodeling. And she still doesn't lose the song. "いてもたってもいられないわ" ("Even Though I Can't") is a ragtime dustup with way too much energy that collapses in exhaustion about two minutes in, closing in a show stopping warble that sounds like a little kid howling at the moon. After that run of dementia, "Long Torch Song" is a return to low key folk, but it's impossible to listen to it in the same way: the nice girl with the acoustic guitar has turned out to be a bit loopy. The oddity is reintroduced with a bit more subtlety for the rest of the album. "Lovers Rock" is "Hopelessly Devoted To You" out of some bizarro universe's production of "Grease," "Temperature Of Windowside" quietly simulates the world's quietest carnival until it crashes into a group sing along that sounds unsettlingly like feeding time at a mental ward. Smack in the middle of all this, "絵空葉書" ("Empty Picture Postcard") and "虚離より" ("Lost In Imagination") float along in barely there electronic bliss. Nikaido has been called the Japanese Björk, and it's true that these two tracks wouldn't be out of place on "Vespertine," all intimate vocals, gentle electronics, and music box lullabys. It's refreshing to find an album this odd that doesn't announce itself bluntly, first lulling the listener into a false sense of security before unleashing the weird. It's equally refreshing that the weird never feels forced, and never detracts from the tunefulness of what are essentially pop songs, albeit pop songs that most pop fans wouldn't recognize as such. Finally, this is that rarest of beasts: a completely insane album that will appeal to just about anyone. |