Oh Japan, don’t ever change.
But there’s no reason this idea can’t succeed in the U.S. Why not have Freddy Kruger, Leatherface, Jason or Pinhead throw out the first pitch? Granted, this still wouldn’t be enough to get me to watch baseball…
In related news: Hello Kitty Ringu products.
We now interrupt this blog for some shameless huxtering: Amazon has the complete 6-episode run of the wonderful and completely insane anime series FLCL on Blu-Ray for $18.99.
This is probably my favorite anime series of all time. It’s weird, funny, and endlessly inventive. You spend 5 episodes thinking “This is great, but it makes absolutely no sense!” And then you watch the sixth episode and go “Wait, it does make sense!” It really rewards re-watching.
It’s about a boy a who has a mysterious woman bump into and then start hitting on him. That is to say, bumps into him with her Vespa at full tilt and starts hitting on his head with her bass guitar. After that, giant robots come out of the resulting bump.
Then it gets weird.
It’s awesome. Trust me.
And if a paying media outlet wants an already completed review of FLCL that Locus Online passed on, please let me know…
Last Saturday I was over at A.T. and Carol’s house watching a Japanese science fiction action film called Returner (imagine every big budget American science fiction film between 1980 and 2000 being jammed into a blender and set to frappe and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the plot elements). It was fine if you didn’t mind the complete lack of originality, but we watched it because I thought it might be the one I saw a clip from a year or two ago. The problem is, while my memory of the clip is fairly clear, I can’t remember sufficient details to find it via a Google search.
In the clip I saw, people were fighting some freaky looking monsters that were obviously some sort of CGI (about the same level of the CGI in Returner, i.e. better than the Skiffy Channel’s cheap monster movies, but not as good as a major U.S. release). I think the monsters were sort of pale and slightly taller than human sized (but not multistory kaiju sized monsters). It was live action, not anime. And they were fighting in some sort of open, brightly lit interior area, like an atrium, or foyer, or perhaps somewhere in a museum. And the monsters weren’t guys in suits and didn’t look anything like the monsters on Ultraman, etc.
This should be enough to find the clip again, but it doesn’t seem to be. Maybe it wasn’t a movie, but part of a TV show. And maybe it wasn’t from Japan, but Hong Kong or South Korea. Or maybe Taiwan. (But not the Philippines. Probably.) And maybe they weren’t monsters, but aliens. Or maybe demons. Beings from another dimension? And I thought I saw it on Fark, but couldn’t find it when I searched there. Maybe it was linked from comments in the thread?
Movies I know it’s not:
Any ideas? It’s driving me to distraction…
This week’s Shoegazer Sunday offering is a Japanese band called Civic. First up is “Tensai”:
Here’s a live version of “Guitar,” which is a tremendously fun high energy number. Skip the first 1:20 seconds of annoying “walking on stage” intro electronica.
Like many of my Japanese shoegazer discoveries, Civic records for High Fader Records. Guitar seems to have been reborn there as “Tobacco” up on the High Fader Myspace page, and have another song called “Innocent” on their own MySpace page. They have a very coherent, appealing sound, with the male and female vocalists trading off verses. They’re probably closest to SuperCar among their Japanese shoegaze brethren, but they’re also have a bit of U2, The Beatles, The Byrds, and maybe The Ramones in their sound.
Since I don’t read Kanji, I couldn’t tell you what the name of this song is:
I would buy a full length Civic album right now if one were available in the U.S…
More obscure Japanese shoegaze, this time from Speaker Gain Teardrop off their album RENDERING ENCRYPTION (a title that will no doubt bring a smile to Cory Doctrow’s face).
Here’s both the live and studio versions.
Here’s a live version of Japanese threesome Lemon’s Chair song “Sonar.” It starts off as some very pleasant noodling, and then more than halfway in transforms into a sonic wall of sound that never quite loses the central groove.
They also have a nice solid slab of steady-state shoegazer sweetness called “Swallowtail” on iTunes, but there doesn’t seem to be a version of that on YouTube.
Like Supercar, Plastic Girl in Closet is another Japanese band treading the boundary between Shoegaze and J-Pop. Also like Supercar, their dress sense seems to come from The Beatles circa 1964.
Here’s another obscure Japanese shoegazer band, Mash, with their song “Bury.”
I like the way it builds, though the outro crescendo could have been a bit shorter…
Little did I know that almost immediately after I put up the short version that Tokyo Shoegazer would put up the complete 8 minute, 29 second version.
Well, because I run a full-service blog (full service, I tell you!), here it is:
After posting last week’s Tokyo Shoegazer song, I did some more research, and it seems that Shoegaze is (thankfully) a lot more popular in Japan than I first realized.
Here’s a band named Supercar (which evidently broke up in 2005) with “Lucky.” Here they seem a little more J-Pop than Shoegazer, but either way they’re very tasty. Skip the first 42 seconds of cheesetacular introduction.
And here’s the live version: