Japanese Correspondent: Mo’some Tonebender

I don’t want to slag it off before it’s had a chance, truthfully its barely had time to struggle out of bed and get a glass of water, but I’m not very excited about 2008 yet. I’m hoping something will come along and knock my socks off, but who isn’t? Well, I’m talking specifically about music here. There are games on the horizon (and movies) but those are all subjects for another post with a different pointlessly long introduction. So in response to my lack of excitement I decided to be more proactive and find out more about Japanese music. Which should be easy, because I know absolutely nothing.

And indeed it sounded easy, but where should I start? How do I find what I like in the sea of things I don’t even know that I don’t like yet? I started for a search for “Indies” which means in Japan pretty much what the similar term means in English. It’s both a philosophy and the lack of a major label. So while searching by it meant that it narrowed my focus, it wasn’t narrowed much. So I did all I could, picked a few names at random and gave them a search on the old youtube. On the whole I didn’t find a lot I liked.

One trend I saw, but in a lack of foresight retained no evidence of, was that some bands had a sickening habit of getting their female vocalist to put on a cutsey baby girl voice. This might work for some people but it doesn’t for me. The best in those was this: (which is either really very annoying or catchy and cool)

Artist: Budo Grape
Song: Button wo Oshinaose

So on to what I meant to talk about, Mo’some Tonebender. According to Dr Wikipedia, they’re a three piece rock band that formed in Fukuoka in 1999. Truthfully, most of the stuff on youtube was too heavy for me (thrashy and screamy) but the following two were fairly cool:

Song: You are Rock’n Roll

This is just a rock song. It does what it needs to and bad members heads get replaced by flowers, while the lead singer Zuhiro Momoka tells us over and over that nothing is out of the ordinary (当たり前よね). And then the crazy horns come in and go all over the place, which probably can’t be avoided either.

Song: Pechika

This is some sort of heartfelt ballad about reading a newspaper in the morning with a fairly neat videoclip. Well I think its neat.

It seems that all my shallow delvings did was show me that there is a whole sound out there to be heard that I’ve avoided due to fear of the unknown (and fear of Ayumi Hamazaki), so my search goes on. Perhaps I will again find something that sounds cool, or perhaps I’ll give up out of laziness. Only time will tell.

By Lance Roger.