I just found this apparently “underground” band, “Rick Rack”:
Naturally, as a bassist myself, I first paid attention to the bass player (who is unusually loud in the mix, but not inappropriately loud for a power trio) ... holy cow, is that girl like four feet tall? Her bass looks as big as she is! (But, damn, she can play it!)
I find myself completely unable to stick this band into a genre. To my ears, they skirt the edges of both punk and prog (two diametrically-opposed genres), without being either, and there is some jazz in there.
My eyes were drawn away from the bass player, to the drummer. The drummer is the reason I’ve watched that video about ten times now, in one day. The drummer is where the “jazz” is coming from. I have grown so accustomed to seeing so many drummers in music videos with their arms flailing all over the place in the name of “showmanship” …
… do we have any drummers following this thread? I know there are a couple guitarists, and at least one bassist (me). So any drummers? Because …
… I am drawn to this drummer because, first, she’s rock solid, but, second, I have rarely seen such economy of motion. She’s playing some relatively complex stuff, yet her whole performance is so … compact. No wasted motion whatsoever, as far as I can see.
I like it. Good song. They have a 5 song cd available in the US.
The original subject of this thread, Band-Maid, has a new CD out, called New Beginnings. You can hear samples of all the songs on iTunes Japan. It rocks.
On another, totally-not-metal note, bunyupp, are you familiar with aiko? Singer, songwriter, composer, and one hell of a great performer, with an incredible backing band.
And a godawful voice.
I’ve been in love with her since 2001, when I stumbled across some MP3s linked from some dude’s personal Web site. God, what a terrible singing voice! But … she somehow was able to convey to me, in Japanese, a language I neither speak nor understand, the emotions behind her songs so well that I understood what the songs were about.
That song is still one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. It made me fall in love with her. And, no, I wasn’t thinking with my dick. Aside from the fact that she’s built like a 12-year-old boy, this was 2001. YouTube didn’t exist yet, and neither did Google. It literally took me two years, with Yahoo, to find a single picture of aiko online, to find out what she looked like. It was her delivery. That live performance I linked doesn’t really convey it, but I felt the emotion in the original studio version … the first verse and chorus made me feel so very very sad. And then there was some subtle change in the music and in aiko’s delivery … the second verse and second chorus made me feel happy, and contented.
It took me several years, but I eventually found an English translation of the lyrics. Taken literally, the song is about a breakup. The first verse describes the grief that comes with the unexpected end of a relationship. And I felt that grief when aiko sang it. And then the second verse … the singer stands back up, squares her shoulders and says, “I’m sad that our relationship has ended, but I thank you for the relationship. I am a better person for having known you.”
(And, holy crap, I just now realized that that was exactly my response to getting fired from my last job. I got promoted into management, I failed as a manager, and got fired. I’d been fired before, but this was the first time I cried about it. I’d been working in a retirement home for two years, and I had fallen in love with the residents, and now they were being taken away from me. But I told the corporate jackass who officially fired me, “Thank you for the opportunity. I tried, and I failed, and I don’t blame anybody but myself for my failure.” I kinda left the guy speechless - that wasn’t the response he was expecting.)
To make matters even more confusing, the official music video for the song (which I can’t link, because either aiko or her record company seems to have decided to make her music unavailable in the USA, and everything has been yanked from YouTube), subtly implied, visually, that the song may have been being sung from the point of view of a woman who had just suffered a miscarriage.
But I was still confused by the title of the song, “Kabutomushi”. The English translation turned that into “Beetle”. Which was no help at all, as it didn’t seem to relate to the lyrics in any way. So I did a computer translation of “kabutomushi”, and got “helmet insect”.
BWUH?! That’s even more confusing!
More research was required. I eventually discovered that “kabutomushi” is the Japanese name for this guy here:
Okay, yeah, even more confusion. This beautiful, heartwrenching song is named for that monster?
sigh More research. I learned that those rhinoceros beetles are … popular pets for Japanese children.
The song was ultimately about a little girl whose beloved pet had died.
God damn! The song worked me up that much, emotionally, that I had to do all that research to learn something that was probably pretty obvious to Japanese listeners. But … at the same time, I realized how absolutely brilliant aiko was as a songwriter. Holy shit, she was able to turn me into a blubbering mess when I didn’t even understand the words!
And that was 2001. I’ve bought eight of aiko’s CDs, at $30 a pop. And now, as far as I can tell, she’s something of a legendary entertainer in Japan, and “Kabutomushi” is something of a “standard” (seriously, I’ve found so many amateur videos of young Japanese singers covering the song, and I’ve seen it performed on Japanese talent shows).
Holy shit, I just lucked upon one of her more recent live performances, from not quite 2 years ago:
So aiko turns 40 years old, six days from now (November 22). She's been at it, successfully, for long enough that it's not unreasonable to think that she has influenced the "next generation". And if my ears are not deceiving me, I think I plainly hear aiko's influence on this band, "Chu's Day":
Holy crap, that singer is simply adorbs (wait, I turn 50 in six months; am I too old to say "adorbs"?), but holy crap again, she is totally channelling aiko. She has a better voice than aiko, but everything about her delivery, and the construction of the songs themselves just screams "aiko!"
Okay, wait, one big difference between that singer and aiko. In her music videos, aiko rarely made eye contact with the camera. One of those things I noticed. The Chu’s Day singer is looking into the camera the whole tie.
Okay, wait, one big difference between that singer and aiko. In her music videos, aiko rarely made eye contact with the camera. One of those things I noticed. The Chu’s Day singer is looking into the camera the whole time.
Actually, the song is not about the beetle itself, but Aiko is using it as an allegory for herself when she is in love.
As she explains (sorry, the link is in Japanese), the song uses the kabutomushi because while it seems to be the strongest beetle, in fact if you remove the outer shell it is soft inside and becomes brittle. It’s really a lonely beetle. Although she does it to protect herself, her love is all bravado so she uses kabutomushi as as allegory.
She said that she wrote the song with the energy she felt after returning home from a live performance as a DJ for Countdown Kansai Top 40.
The song originally was going to be released as the B-side, but the producer suggested switching it to the A-side.
I’ll admit that my interpretation was a “best effort” given what little information I had to go on, and not speaking the language. It was still very early in her career, so there simply wasn’t much out there that I could find. Yahoo! wasn’t much good at finding Japanese-language sites when searching in English (most of my searches for “aiko” turned up the Grateful Dead song, “Aiko, Aiko”), and even if I could find them, translation tech was so poor that a Japanese -> English translation was gibberish, failing to take into account the syntax differences between the languages, and frequently choosing the wrong meanings for kanji with multiple meanings. I mean, even her name has multiple meanings, depending upon which kanji are used to write it (she uses 愛子 — Love and child, child of love).
Good, powerful voice for Chu’s Day. Linking from that video I found this song by the band “Touch My Secret” (I think). The drummer’s a guy, but the guitarist and bassist are female, and they can rock.
I’ve been noticing something, perhaps because I’m a bassist myself, but …
In Western bands, it seems that the bassist is almost always on the right (from the audience/camera perspective), but in Japanese bands, the bassist is almost always on the left.
Maybe because some of the earliest “supergroups” like The Beatles, The Who, Cream, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath had the bass player on the right and the Japanese thought that was the way to do it. But somewhere along the line western groups changed to what we mainly see now, bassist on left, and Japan hasn’t followed.
Mister Rik, I just got my copy of the February 2016 Metal Hammer and I thought you’d like to know that there’s a massive Babymetal sticker included with the magazine.
