Seagull
Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her are a tough group to get a handle on.
Anyone browsing through the racks at the local Tower could be forgiven
for thinking they're a sticky sweet Jpop band: the flashy graphics and
occasionally cutesy band photos certainly point in that direction: the
cover of their final album,
Future Or No Future, is about as teenybopper as possible, the inserts showing members
Aiha Higurashi
and Nao Koyama asleep on their beds, surrounded by toys, clutching
their princess phones, as if they were fourteen. "No! No! No!" has a
cover that doesn't exactly scream rock 'n' roll, either. The music
tells quite a different story, all sharp angles, arrogant sneers, and
crunchy guitars. Songwriter Higurashi subscribes to the
Wire/Pixies/Guided By Voices school of spiky indie pop: she often
reduces her songs to short, repeated phrases, one or two simple ideas
that go beyond the natural repetitiveness of pop and into mantra
territory.
It would come off as lazy filler if she didn't know precisely when to
throw the listener a curveball: "Red Dress" repeats one simple idea for
a while, then lethargically moves to an equally simple second idea,
then onto a third: is she being cool or half assed? Just when the
listener starts to think it might be the latter, a mysterious and
unsettling spoken word bridge throws the whole thing into a different
context. Instead of a pointless rumination on clothes, it reveals
itself to be the circular, worried ramblings of a confused woman trying
to reach out (and probably not succeeding.) It comes off as very stream
of consciousness, a difficult thing to pull off in any context, let
alone pop.
Much like similarly structured efforts (I'm thinking of Guided By
Voices' "Alien Lanes" and Wire's "Pink Flag,") much of "No! No! No!"
loses its impact when the individual songs are left to stand alone.
"Krazy 4U" by itself would barely qualify as filler, its three line
lyric ("I may be crazy for you / I may be psycho 'bout you / Krazy 4U")
repeated to the point that it nearly becomes meaningless. In the
context of the album, however, it's another mood, another facet of
using a cool demeanor to (barely) hide an ocean of insecurity. There's
a clear flow to the sequencing as well, and not just musically: the
album gets darker and more paranoid as it moves towards the middle,
only to open up, both emotionally and musically, in the last third.
That opening up is odd, to say the least. The bizarre "A Guitar For Me
And Milk For Her" opens with Higurashi shouting a gutsy "Baby!" before
revealing that the baby in question is not a lover, but her brand new
daughter. She contemplates the effect her music will have on the little
squirt, and follows up with "Motor Psycho," in which she struggles with
the dual lives of hedonist rock star and new mom. Unsurprisingly, mom
wins, but the insecurity remains with the closer "Do I Love You
Enough?" It's probably not a coincidence that these final tracks are
also the most fleshed out musically and lyrically, as HIgurashi's
concerns take on much less ethereal and more down to Earth (and
presumably more rewarding) responsibilities.
Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her would release one more album (the
aforementioned "Future Or No Future") before calling it a day, with
Koyama working on illustrations for manga. Higurashi kept going,
writing a numer one song for Judy and Mary vocalist Yuki ("The End Of
Shite,") releasing two solo albums, and forming a new band called
Loves. "No! No! No!" is a high point of the SSKHKH catalog, bridging
the gap between the bleak, sparse sound of earlier albums with the more
elaborate later material.
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Amazon Japan has some listings, as well as sound clips for each song.
