Nine more songs to hear (anime and otherwise)

Look, I have to admit something. I am a weeb. Yes. I’m sure you didn’t know, so this may come as a shock.

I say that to partly explain my next point, which is that there’s something about Japanese pop you can’t find in the American variety. To sound like a complete snob, American pop has never interested me all that much. Just to be clear, I’m not counting the Beach Boys or Fleetwood Mac or Michael Jackson in with “pop” in general here — I mean the more recent Top 40 stuff.

Meanwhile, Japanese duo Yoasobi gave us Idol. The OP to this year’s big-name anime Oshi no Ko, “Idol” is just the kind of song I didn’t think I’d like back when I was in high school if you had described it to me, but it is extremely fucking good. I especially like the almost martial section in the middle, but there’s plenty here you won’t find in typical pop — see 0:40, all that staccato starting at 1:06 on what almost sounds like a harpsichord, the chorus itself, and all the great bass lines (a running theme in the Japanese pop I’ve heard.)

I don’t normally give a shit about chart numbers, but it was nice to see “Idol” hit the top worldwide and here in the States for a bit. A recent conversation here on the site reminded me that non-US artists too often go ignored here in the States, and “Idol” is a good sign that that might be changing (also the legions of BTS fans over here.)

Continuing with the anime theme, here’s another song you may know if you’re into the scene. “Fukashigi no Carte” is the ending theme to Bunny Girl Senpai, which I swear is on my short list to keep watching. This version in particular, featuring all six female leads’ VAs, is beautiful:

Apparently there’s a lot of context here I’m not getting, so I’d better go watch the show, but even without watching it you can easily appreciate the theme. I love that old feel it has, like an old jazz standard.

Speaking of old-fashioned, here’s a song that sounds meant to resemble the old French chanson style. “Etoile et toi” is the ending them to the Kizumonogatari series of films that I reviewed a few years back:

At first I thought they might have covered an old classic, but “Etoile” was apparently an original written for the films. Probably helps that I’ve seen the movies, since there is definitely context to this ending that gives it more emotional impact. But it’s good all on its own too.

Leaving the anime realm for now, though not leaving Japan — not quite anyway. This next song is also French, an instrumental piece by Japanese fusion guys Casiopea and cover of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano Pavane pour une infante défunte / Pavane for a Dead Princess. That title is already pretty damn grim, fitting the story behind it, and Ravel’s original is accordingly beautiful but somber.

Casiopea’s version adds some interesting flavor to the piece with its synth tones that Ravel couldn’t have hoped to get back then. I can and will criticize some of Casiopea’s cheesier synth uses (I’ve come around on some of their music after their debut that I didn’t like at first, but “I Love New York” still sucks) but they use their instruments effectively here. It feels even more emotional than the original in a sense, or maybe emotional in a different way. Still mournful enough for the subject matter.

The only other thing I can say about “Pavane” is that the title must have inspired ZUN of Touhou Project in naming Remilia Scarlet’s theme in Touhou 6, “Septette for the Dead Princess”, even though musically the two have nothing to do with each other — “Septette” rips off the third movement of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” for a few bars instead. Saying that knowledge would have got me shoved in a locker in my old school, but thankfully the late 90s/early 00s were a different time.

Next up is not “Septette” (though it’s also great) but a legendary meme song from the old internet of 14 years ago: an arrangement of the Touhou 4 theme “Bad Apple”:

It’s been a while since, but this song was huge back then among the kinds of weirdos who went to anime cons, like me. Touhou fans were and are an even weirder, more obsessive subset of that group that would be impossible to explain without its own dedicated series of posts (maybe a subject to revive that deep reads series with?) So I can’t say why “Bad Apple” got so popular, given how many good Touhou covers are out there, but it deserves that status. A lot must have to do with the cool changing silhouette video. Good thing for me it’s an old one: I actually recognize all these characters, since I fell off from the series just a little after this “Bad Apple” cover got big.

I guess I shouldn’t just be a damn weeb for at least one entry. So here’s something from a western game: the entire soundtrack of Outer Wilds.

I know this isn’t a song but a whole album, but can you complain about getting more music out of this post? Maybe, but listen to the whole thing anyway, because it’s good. I forget whether I referred much to the music in those two review parts I wrote a while back, but if I didn’t, I’ll say here that the soundtrack adds a massive amount to the game itself, both in creating atmosphere and in tying into the story of the game itself. I won’t say any more about Outer Wilds itself for fear of spoilers, but if you haven’t played it, you should anyway. (But note, I haven’t played Echoes of the Eye, so I can’t comment on that. I heard it’s horrifically scary and I’m a coward.)

Something now that I might have been embarrassed to admit to liking 20 years ago. The next song is “Bubble Tea” by Soundcloud composer dark cat:

Man, how the hell do you squeeze so much sugar into a song and not have it be unbearable? It’s really good, though, with a nice beat and mix of synths, cute vocals, and a few weird fart sound effects and those ultra-high-pitched vocal samples that I usually hate but that seem to do okay here. They call this music “catstep”, whatever the hell that means, but dark cat seems to be pretty cool whatever label you choose for them.

Something very different and part of the way around the world now: Sastanàqqàm by the band Tinariwen from northern Mali. That’s a hell of a lot of desert, the Sahara itself, but the Touareg people have managed to live there for a long time and with a long musical tradition. Just look up Timbuktu and music on Google.

I like the mix of more regional/traditional instruments and electric ones, and there’s a great beat and groove to “Sastanàqqàm”. I’d like to find more music from those parts in general — west Africa is responsible for a lot of modern American music for a historically obvious and depressing reason, so maybe we should all have more interest. Maybe it’s part of why Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel and other artsy 70s musicians got into it in the 80s with New Wave. I only hope the extremist jerkoffs don’t manage to take over these regions and ban music again like they did in 2012, in addition to all the other bad and worse shit extremists get up to.

Now to the final song, back to my weeb roots and to the one song on this list I’d consider marking NSFW unless you have a very cool boss. And a VTuber song no less (of course, yeah.) It’s “I’m Your Treasure Box” by Houshou Marine:

What can I say, it’s a catchy song. Sounds and feels very cabaret-ish with the instruments and Marine’s cute but supercharged sexy singing, and also considering it’s about the horniest song ever written since Prince was writing songs. The lyrics are about as lightly veiled as possible, and the music video adds plenty to the appeal of the song itself. Especially the last couple bars of the chorus from 1:37. You tell me that’s not what it looks and sounds like.

But all the sex is justified and in character, Marine being the sexy pirate captain character of Hololive who’s constantly meme’d about being horny. It’s a perfect character theme as far as I’m concerned. That’s coming from a totally dignified and learned musical position too, no other possible reason I could like this song.

And that’s all for now. This was a pretty thrown-together post, but sometimes I just have to do that to keep the momentum going. Quality control, now that’s not such a priority.

Key changes, dramatic endings, and “Shoujo Rei”

Lately I’ve been cycling through a few different songs and albums. This is the usual thing for me — even though I’d say I have a pretty eclectic taste in music (just look at the music tab at the top of this page) I tend to get hooked on a few songs over the period of a week or so, then keep cycling. No idea why that happens or why I put certain songs or albums on loop at certain times, but it just happens.

Right now, I’ve got Steely Dan’s Aja on the playlist (especially the opener Black Cow and the closer Josie, the latter of which I didn’t get into in my short review for some reason — it’s great, though some might take issue with the lyrical subject) along with some bossa nova and a few old Vocaloid songs. It’s a relaxing set, maybe appropriate considering my current fucked mental state. Music helps out a lot with that.

But the reason I’m writing this post is one of those songs I’ve got on the looped playlist: mikitoP’s Shoujo Rei, or “Ghost Girl.” I’ve written about it here once before — it’s one of my favorite Vocaloid songs, and mikitoP is rightly considered one of the best Vocaloid composers for both this and his other work.

As usual with Vocaloid songs that weren’t written by Mitchie M, “Shoujo Rei” is an upbeat-sounding piece with extremely depressing/crushing lyrics. But I don’t want to address the lyrics here — I’m depressed enough as it is, thank you. No, I want to address what happens at 3:23. Modulation, the change of key mid-piece, has been present in music for centuries now and used to be common in pop music, particularly in the 80s and 90s. That trend has fallen off enormously over here, but it seems not to have taken that kind of hit among Vocaloid composers.

I’ve also written a little before about my feelings on the key change. It’s been dumped on a lot lately, and I completely understand why: when done poorly, the key change is almost painful to hear. The effect is clearly meant to emphasize and crank up the emotion of the piece, but it has to be earned: if the piece was already trivial and/or cheap-sounding, all the key change does is highlight that poor quality. Those 80s and 90s, though they gave us a lot of excellent music, also gave us many examples of this kind of lazy, hamfisted garbage pop, most of it overflowing with sap (and I know I said I was all right with sap in my last post, but again, it has to be earned.)

So why does “Shoujo Rei” work so well for me? I honestly don’t think it needs its key change, but said modulation doesn’t hurt it at all for me for two reasons: 1) the emotions expressed in the song aren’t the cheap or everyday sort that wouldn’t deserve this kind of dramatic treatment, and 2) the music itself isn’t trivial at all, standing out with a nice breezy arrangement (especially with the surf guitars and steel drums on the track, minimal but they add a lot to the atmosphere) and an understated vocal performance that works far better in expressing that emotion. Sure, maybe understated because it’s Hatsune Miku singing in her synthetic voice, but the human-sung covers I’ve heard like Elira’s work just as well with that vocal tone.

Now for the probably very weird and tenuous connection I made in my own brain with fiction-writing. I’ve completed the outline for a novella and have started on the work itself, and without giving anything away, I’ve planned out a pretty big and dramatic ending to it. However, I’m afraid of faceplanting with that ending in the same way a lousy, trivial pop song with a big dramatic key change might. I see a parallel here between modulation in music and “modulation” if you can call it that in a story. Sure, those old story structure charts I remember seeing at school contain that climax and denouement as standard elements of a story, so maybe it’s just a matter of course, but I feel there are effective and ineffective ways of pulling off a good climax. (And yeah, this is true for more than just writing fiction or music — add your dirty joke here.)

I guess this is just a function of my own talent at writing a story that isn’t garbage. I still don’t have complete confidence that I can do that, but I’m working on it. Next time, I promise I’ll write a less self-indulgent post (or am I well beyond saving on that point?) Until then.

A review of K-On! The Movie

What a change. When I watched the first season of K-On! a while back, it hit a sour note with me, though there was plenty of nice sweetness mixed in that I enjoyed at least enough to finish. After some months I watched the second season, plowing through it in about a week and enjoying it a lot more than I did the first.

And now I’ve watched the movie, and I’m finally there. Not quite at the “huge fan” level, but I think 2011’s K-On! The Movie (as usual, not too creative with the title for these film additions to TV anime) is the best piece of K-On! I’ve watched: a nice spin on the slice-of-life routine by taking the girls of Houkago Tea Time to London, complete with the setup for the trip and some post-trip antics set just before graduation.

Spoilers etc. etc. Also, if you want story and character background that I won’t provide here, feel free to read my first and second season reviews. Or just watch the first and second seasons instead if you like. I was pretty hard on the first, but I might like it a little better now if I were to rewatch it (though I’d probably maintain that it still has a few issues dragging it down, at least for me.)

The gang prepares to go to London with some English conversation practice

First, however, we have to go back to the second season. Sort of — there’s that episode titled “Plan!” listed as no. 27 out of 27 on HIDIVE, but that the anime cataloging sites list as a separate OVA that falls somewhere in the middle of the season chronologically. So “Plan!” is distinct from the film, but it sets up the film’s events, with a lot of the girls’ usual antics surrounding their efforts to decide where to go and to get their passports aside from Mugi, who already being a world traveler has hers current. This OVA is pretty much what you’d expect out of K-On! season 2, which is to say good comedy (see Yui and Ritsu fucking with Mio’s several attempts to get a passport photo out of a mall photo booth.)

By the end of the episode, the group still haven’t decided where to go. They’re split: Mio wants to visit London, the birthplace of modern rock (post-50s American rock like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly anyway), Azusa wants to visit New York to see the classic jazz clubs, and Ritsu votes for Hawaii (personally, also my pick if I had a say.)

Wherever they go, it will definitely involve some hijinks. No excuse for the writers to put the girls in maid costumes this time, though; if you want that go back to season 2

Jump forward to the beginning of the film. The first 30 minutes or so take place in Japan, around the girls’ high school where Houkago Tea Time is still not decided on a destination. Yui now has her heart set on “Europe”, which is such a vague suggestion that the others aren’t sure what to do with it, and Ritsu has switched from Hawaii to Dubai (which I’ve been to for non-vacation purposes but wouldn’t recommend — Hawaii was a far better option.)

After Yui sets up a lottery to settle the matter that she ends up pretty transparently and poorly cheating at, they leave the choice to the club pet turtle Ton-chan by setting up cups in his aquarium and seeing which one he’ll touch first. Mio wins the game, and soon enough the group is planning for a trip to London. Yui is disappointed until she’s told that London is in fact in Europe (well, sort of, though this was a few years before Brexit. Geographically in Europe, anyway.)

Don’t blame Yui, she probably fell asleep that day in her geography class

The next 70 minutes or so is spent in London, where the band explores the city, sees the sights, does the Abbey Road walk, unexpectedly runs into a few friends from back in Japan, and manages to shove plenty of good comedy in. The girls don’t have much in the way of English skills, with even the international traveler Mugi struggling to follow in places, but that language barrier makes for some nice comedy as well along with an all-too-relatable joke about going to the wrong hotel with almost exactly the same name in a foreign city and having to run across town to check in.

The highlight of the early part of their trip occurs on this first trek through London, when Houkago Tea Time tries to go to a sushi restaurant for dinner, gets mistaken for the band for that night, and feels pressured into playing a short set for them. Because of course, they all brought along their instruments to London aside from Mugi, who ends up provided with a keyboard for the occasion and has had her big ass Korg synth shipped overnight anyway. And of course, the band ends up awkwardly leaving the restaurant without eating. (And what kind of asshole restaurant manager doesn’t at least provide free dinner to their entertainment? Seems like the least you could do.)

After running into the actual band for the night, extremely coincidentally being Love Crisis composed of a few of Ritsu’s friends from school, the crew finally reach their hotel, where we get more hanging around/slice-of-life stuff about traveling and having to eat the food your little sister packed into your bags because she’s a lot more responsible and sensible than you and most of your friends combined (Yui’s sister Ui again acting as the true MVP of this series.)

I’m not sure they ever really explained why the girls brought their school uniforms to London. Maybe it would feel too weird for the audience to see them in plain clothes for longer than 20 minutes at a time? Still wish I had gotten to wear a blazer to my school too — only in that alternate universe where I ended up at the local Catholic high school instead.

Following a tour montage around London, or at least as much of it as they can see in a day, the crew receive an unexpected invitation to play at an outdoor concert hosted by a Japanese cultural festival that just happens to be going on that weekend. Naturally, they can’t turn that offer down, not even if the time they’re scheduled to go on stage is two hours before their plane leaves. If I know anything about London airports (a little bit, based on some time in Heathrow and Gatwick many years ago) I’d say that’s an unreasonably tight schedule, but what’s life without taking some risks.

And Sawako also shows up in London at this point, because again, of course she has to make her appearance to be the “responsible” adult guiding the girls and delivering moral support at their big show again (though even after her serious character upgrade in season 2 I doubt her responsibility a little.)

I’m not sure if K-On! fans have a “stand for your national anthem” song or whether it’s “Rice is a Side Dish” if so. “Fuwa Fuwa Time” is still their top hit for me.

The show is a hit with the dozens of people watching — not a huge crowd, but the band gets to share some of their culture with Yui even leading an extra ad-libbed verse with London-specific lyrics that I liked (even if the rest of the girls start freaking out a little about actually missing their flight at this point, and understandably so.)

Here’s where I got a nice surprise: the film doesn’t end upon the band’s return to Japan. In addition to chronicling their legendary post-graduation trip, K-On! The Movie also fills in a couple of chronological gaps left by the second season.

First, Sawako gets one last opportunity to step up for the crew in blocking her fellow teacher’s attempt to prevent them from holding an impromptu concert in their homeroom class, just the kind she played as a hard rocker back in her own Sakuragaoka school days. Their efforts result in the best concert of the series, all the better because they didn’t have permission to hold it. Better to ask for forgiveness later than permission now, or however that saying goes, but this kind of rule-breaking is also totally in the spirit of K-On! and of playing rock music in general, even if the girls’ songs tend to be on the fluffier side.

The other of these concerns Azusa, who still feels some anxiety about the future of the Light Music Club upon the graduation of her seniors. Though it does seem at this point like she’ll be fine, having her friends and classmates Ui and Jun around, it was nice to see how much effort Yui and co. put into their appropriately sappy song for her, “Touched by an Angel!”, not to be confused with the 90s American TV drama of the same name about non-Biblically-accurate angels helping humans out in their everyday lives. Sap can be good when it’s justified, can’t it? I’ve really softened up a lot, I guess.

No, nothing wrong with some sap. I like maple syrup, and that’s made of sap too.

This overseas adventure was an excellent way to end K-On!, at least in its animated form. Houkago Tea Time’s London trip was a nice change from the comfortable hometown setting of almost all of the two regular seasons. All the more so for me — I have fond memories of traveling a lot as a kid, though usually not for vacation exactly, more the consequences of moving around a lot during my school days and having a lot of overseas family (and this is the category I put all my Middle Eastern adventures in.)

However, I did take part in a club in my final year of high school that sent us off to the Netherlands and the UK once I proved I would be worth at least enough to them to justify the place ticket. I’m not sure I actually did end up justifying that cost, but scamming my high school out of a European trip is even more satisfying to my rotten self, so all the better. And later, when I wasn’t being chaperoned and watched like a hawk to make sure I wasn’t drinking beer or eating edibles in an Amsterdam café, I managed to get over to Spain for a while.

Hanging out in London. I recognize the Tower of London back there, nice touch. I’m guessing London is portrayed pretty accurately in this film, but I leave that to the Londoners to decide since I’ve been in that city for three days out of my life almost 20 years ago.

My longwinded point here is that despite its adventurous feel, the K-On! movie stirred up a lot more nostalgia in me personally than the two TV seasons did, partly because I never really had a true hometown and have never lived in Japan, but also because I’ve done plenty of that kind of frantic traveling — staying in hostels with a bunch of strangers, getting an extremely cramped but private two-star hotel room when possible and when I could afford it, and dragging my belongings all around a strange city when I couldn’t leave them behind.

Travel is a great way to bond with friends as well, and this film felt relatable in that sense. It was fun seeing the girls drag each other through London and set up in their hotels partly because I’ve been in similar situations throughout my life, some of them back in my student days.

But the accommodations usually weren’t this nice. Also note, Azusa is a fellow sleeptalker. I’m afraid of what I might say in my sleep while other people are in the same room.

It’s nice to see the cast in a fish-out-of-water situation, having to try out their English. I watched the subbed version, so I’m not sure how the dub handles this language gap — it must be a little bizarre to watch characters speak in English about how they can’t speak English and not have the actual English speakers understand them. However, I appreciated the Japanese dub using native speakers for the English-speaking characters, all the more so because none of them having major parts, the studio probably could have gotten away with cutting a corner there.

But it’s obvious that KyoAni didn’t cut corners with any aspect of the K-On! movie. The film looks as good as you’d expect; my praise for the visuals in Season 2 especially applies here, and the new original songs are just as fine as you’d hope for after watching the TV series. And naturally, there are some nice callbacks to the first two seasons for viewers, who wouldn’t be starting the series with this movie anyway (and if you are, don’t, unless you really like watching stories and picking up the context to the characters’ relationships in reverse order. If you do, then who am I to judge?)

We even get a Rosetta Stone reference again

Before closing the book on K-On!, just a couple of other observations that I know thousands of other people have made by now:

1) Yuri

Which is always played for comedy in K-On! when it does come up. K-On! The Movie has a fun running gag about Yui trying to write the lyrics to the band’s song for Azusa while also keeping it a secret, but not doing a great job of it as you’d expect. However, when Azusa sees Yui’s notes (containing “Azunyan LOVE” and the like) she draws the wrong conclusion, eventually telling Yui she doesn’t swing that way. It’s hard to blame her considering how grabby Yui gets with her, but Yui being Yui, her actual intentions are pretty innocent.

However, there apparently was some yuri-ish stuff in the manga that got played down in the anime, in particular with regard to Mugi’s implied orientation. If this or similar bits from the manga were cut down or out completely, that would make comments about her being a big yuri fan in the first season at least make a lot more sense. Though you can certainly be a yuri fan without being a lesbian, those couple of jokes seemed to come out of nowhere without this extra context. I haven’t read the manga anyway and don’t plan to, but it might be something to look for if you have.

As long as I get a little actual music talk, it’s all fine with me

More generally, this kind of yuri-teasing if that’s the intention is interesting to me. I can take it or leave it, but it may bother some people looking for something more than teasing. Not like K-On! is a romance at all anyway, and maybe cultural differences also factor into how we over here interpret these stories. As usual, I’ll place a disclaimer here that I’m not a social scientist of any kind and can’t make any conclusions on this point. I just want to avoid inadvertently pissing off my own readers if I can manage to gain an audience for my work. (Now intentionally pissing them off, that’s a different matter entirely.)

2) Legs

All over the series, from episode 1 of season 1 to the end of the film. Director Naoko Yamada really likes these shots for some reason. They’re so common that you can find a ten-minute compilation of these shots on YouTube. However, I don’t think of this as a fanservicey sort of series at all, and my read on it again is innocent (though who can be absolutely sure of anything?)

The above two points don’t even count as gripes, though. I completely enjoyed the K-On! film and recommend it, but only if you’ve seen the rest of the series, since you’ll need all that story and character context to really appreciate this. It feels effectively like an ending, even if it’s not exactly the end of their story. I’ve heard there’s a college sequel to K-On!, and while I’d be happy to see that animated especially given the relative lack of college-based anime, after 12 years it doesn’t seem likely. But as always with anime, you never know.

My only real complaint is that this and too many other anime movies attached to TV series aren’t hosted on streaming services. More shitty licensing issues? I don’t know, but these films aren’t hard to find as long as you know where to look.

A full run through the King Crimson discography: Part 17 (THRaKaTTaK, 1996)

Oh no, it’s THRaKaTTaK. This album seems to be a bit obscure these days — as with a few of Crimson’s more minor releases and certain old live albums, this one isn’t featured on their YouTube channel. In fact, this is yet another live album, the other regular live release by the 90s band (including the unreviewed B’Boom.) But it’s a very different kind of live album from that and the archival VROOOM VROOOM — instead of a full normal live set or two, THRaKaTTaK contains a collection of improvisations recorded by the band in various shows and compiles them on one hour-long-plus disc. And congratulations to Earthbound, because it’s no longer the worst King Crimson album I’ve heard. I’ve seen people both praise and shit on THRaKaTTaK, and while I don’t think it’s the worst album ever created or anything so dramatic, I fall much more in the second camp than the first.

You might have predicted this already from what I’ve said about Crimson’s past improvisations, sure. I’m not usually a big fan of them. But I don’t always dislike them either — I can see the value in “Requiem” on Beat, for instance, or in “Sailor’s Tale” on Islands. These are far from my favorite tracks on these albums, but at least they build atmosphere or seem to tell some kind of abstract story. There’s some sense to them. Even the live improv stuff on Earthbound might have had some potential if it had been recorded properly, and with a different singer, and if those improv pieces had just been breaks between the actual songs. Still shit aside from the recording of “Schizoid Man”, but there was something salvageable there.

No such luck on THRaKaTTaK. The album opens and closes with two minute-long renditions of “THRAK” that are just fine, no complaints there. But between them are several tracks making over one hour of janky noise, clattering, sputtering, twanging, every other sound-related verb you can think of: it’s all happening and there’s no clear sense to any of it. There seems to be barely any attempt at coordination, with the instruments instead clashing, running into each other. Occasionally the band does fall into something that approaches interesting, like a few moody sections on “This Night Wounds Time” and “Slaughter of the Innocents”  that could form an atmospheric part of a larger piece if it were in that context, but in here it’s just a very relative reprieve from a lot of bullshit. This music — and yeah, I will at least call it music, sure — does almost nothing for me. (And if you want to measure your own reaction against mine, here’s THRaKaTTaK Part I that was very kindly uploaded by some guy instead of the band itself. It’s just one small part of the album, but it gives a good idea of what almost the entirety is like.)

Yet I’m still reluctant to call this album total garbage. It’s not pure agony to sit through or anything, for one. As headache-inducing and irritating as it can be, I’d rather listen to THRaKaTTaK than some no-hook piss pop album, some radio filler autotune plastic-ass junk. But then that’s not exactly soaring praise — just because this ultra-avantgarde stuff is the exact opposite of something I hate doesn’t mean I have to like it. No, I approach this kind of pure noise in the same way as I do some styles of abstract expressionism in the visual arts, action and color field painting that produces what look to me like canvasses full of splatters or squares of color. Some people say Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 or Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series are brilliant, and I say I just don’t see what they do. If you’re a big fan of either kind of extreme abstraction in art, please tell me what I’m missing. That’s a serious request, too.

Good place to break out one of my favorite old screenshots

So maybe it’s the same with THRaKaTTaK. Maybe some people get some real emotional resonance out of this noise. But I don’t, and if my music isn’t giving me either emotional resonance or cool hooks or at the very least showoffy technical prowess, then I don’t have any use for it. I listened to THRaKaTTaK three times over the last week, thinking that it might sink in, that I might have some kind of revelation, but it never happened, so there — either I’m an uncultured swine or this stuff is just nonsense.

Well, those two aren’t mutually exclusive either, are they? It’s also worth noting that THRaKaTTaK being stitched together from several live shows, it doesn’t represent anything like the actual live 90s Crimson experience, so at least they weren’t torturing their audiences with this cling clang shit for an hour at a time. But then that raises the question of why it’s all compiled here to torture the completionist listener.

A review of K-On! (S2)

I said I might, and I finally have: I recently finished the entire 39-episode run of the highly regarded slice-of-life anime K-On! While I liked the first season in parts, I was a little underwhelmed by that 13-episode run back when I watched it last year considering its strong reputation among slice-of-life enjoyers, and aspects of it really annoyed me (and see the details here.)

So I had some misgivings about the show’s second and final double-cour season going in based on my experience with the first. The idea of double the K-On! just didn’t excite me all that much for maybe understandable reasons, and it took me a while to get around to this second season and then a while longer to watch the first few episodes, which I gave some more positive first impressions about here. And then, like a flood breaking through a dam, the rest of the season got watched over the course of two weeks.

If you already know who these two characters are without seeing their faces, you probably won’t need the usual rundown, but I’ll provide it for everyone else. Though I guess it is obvious from their instruments, isn’t it.

Maybe a good sign, but did my positive first impressions hold up throughout? Should I just spoil that now? No, I’ll be a jerk and keep you in suspense for a while while we lay out the events of K-On! season 2, at least as far as that’s possible considering the show’s very light plot. (And a note on title conventions: this second season is technically titled K-On!! or K-ON!!, with two exclamation points instead of one, I guess because it’s season two. There seems to be absolutely no agreement about how to handle this, so I’ll keep using K-On! S2 because it’s god damn confusing enough already the way these anime series use punctuation in titles. It’s a good thing I don’t care much about strict grammar and formatting on this site.)

I’m to writing what Yui is to playing the guitar: we both love it but we’re not too concerned about technical details and go with our gut instincts. It doesn’t always work out.

As for those events, as expected, once again there’s not much to get into. The second season opens at the start of a new school year at the girls’ high school Sakuragaoka, with our beloved Light Music Club and its members: seniors Yui Hirasawa on guitar, Mio Akiyama on bass, Tsumugi Kotobuki aka Mugi on keyboard, and Ritsu Tainaka on drums, and their junior, the second-year Azusa Nakano also on guitar, and better guitar than her senior Yui since she actually knew how to play the thing when she joined.

From left to right, Yui, Mio, and Azusa, actually talking music. But a warning: this screenshot is not representative of most of the show.

These five spend their last year at school (minus Azusa with still one year left) occasionally practicing in their club room but more often drinking tea, eating cake, doing impromptu comedy routines, and trying to figure out what they’re going to do once they’ve graduated. Aside from a few big events they have to plan for (a school trip to Kyoto, an outdoor music festival their teacher advisor scores tickets for, and their own big concert at the school’s culture festival) this is K-On! It’s slice-of-life relaxation, iyashikei if you find it healing to the soul. There’s not much conflict, and barely any relationship-related conflict with a couple of very minor exceptions.

But if you’re looking for drama, backbiting, or any of the other sensational stuff you might associate with school-based anime, you won’t find it in K-On! (and another reminder that even “school-based anime”, for as much as some people avoid it, isn’t a genre in itself but includes all kinds of series. It’s just a setting, though maybe a way too commonly used one.)

Ritsu at a school assembly, making a face that sums up most of how I felt about high school

Since I’m done with my synopsis, I’m now happy to report that my more positive first impressions I set down last month pretty much held up all the way to the end of the series. Though it’s still not my favorite slice-of-life/comedy anime, this second season of K-On! was a major step up from the first and was generally pretty damn good.

I originally felt K-On! season 2 would likely be more of the same, but now I only partly agree with that. Sure, it’s more of the same in the sense that it’s still a lot of tea-drinking and cake-eating and high school hijinks, but second-season K-On! feels to me like the first season done right: like the writers adapting Kakifly’s manga kept what worked in the first and removed or improved upon what didn’t. I don’t know whether these were consciously made improvements, given how well-received that first season was, but they’re improvements to me at least, which I’ll break down into three specific categories (so prepare for my usual overanalysis of a comedy of all things, but you know what you’re getting on this site.)

1) The comedy hits more often

This is admittedly a subjective point. It’s extremely difficult to pin down what makes something funny. I’ve seen people dismiss Nichijou, for example, as just a lot of nonsense “lol random” humor. I loved Nichijou, and I can argue that it isn’t just “funny because random” garbage, but the fact is if the jokes don’t hit for someone, they simply don’t hit, and there’s not much argument to make at that point. A lot of season 1 of K-On! similarly didn’t hit for me, but for some reason I found season 2’s comedy worked better.

Ritsu/Mio is an especially entertaining pair

I don’t think this is a case of being worn down — there was a months-long break between my first and second season watches, and I’m more likely to be annoyed and put off of a show than to be worn down by it anyway, which clearly wasn’t the case here. The main five girls all have great chemistry and play off of each other well, and though that was also the case in season one (especially with the characters barely changing at all from start to finish) their actual comedy bits mostly work this time. Maybe it’s all the final exam and graduation-related stress that I remember myself all too well and can sympathize with.

2) Double the episodes, double the fun

Just like Doublemint Gum. Though there aren’t any twins in K-On!, unless Yui and Ui looking nearly identical counts despite their being a year apart. But to Wrigley’s: if you want to target the extremely online weeb demographic, there’s an idea. I’ve never worked on a licensing agreement before, but I’m sure I can pick up the essentials. Drop me a DM.

Now from my professional delusions back to K-On!, here’s a paradox: if I wasn’t crazy about the first 13 episodes of this stuff, how did I mostly enjoy the final* 26? Aside from the tighter writing, I think the double-cour format helped the series breathe in a way it couldn’t in the single-cour first season. The effect on the show’s pace was even more pronounced than it might seem, in fact, the second season covering just one school year over 26 episodes where the first covered two over 13.

Wouldn’t that result in a lot of filler, you might ask? That depends on what you consider filler. In a slice-of-life show like this, I’d say as long as there’s plenty of good comedy and character interaction, there’s no such thing as filler. Accept that the plot is light, that things will happen when they happen, and let the series carry you along as though you were floating on an inner tube down a lazy river.

Not quite like this patchy-looking stream in their hometown, but that’s the best analogy I could come up with.

Some of my favorite episodes have the girls doing barely anything of note at all: in one they’re just trying to escape the summer heat in their club room; in another Azusa does her best to relieve her boredom during vacation and keeps falling asleep and imagining more exciting surreal scenarios in her dreams than she’s actually living. The big events of the series still happen, but those events aren’t rushed like I felt they were by necessity last time around given its compressed time frame.

This new approach instead emphasizes the strengths of K-On! The whole show has a nostalgic feel to it, especially strong for me in the Kyoto school trip episode, the 5K race, and the marathon study sessions.

The joys of school festivals, the kind we never had. (Nice Rosetta Stone reference in this episode too for the history nerds.)

And again, it may be strange that I find this to be a positive myself. Aside from some of my classes like history and English that I enjoyed just for their subject matter, I hated high school. I joined a school sports club all four years purely to put on my college admissions resume, but I got nothing out of it otherwise, and socially the less said the better. I could not have been happier to leave on graduation day, and so I couldn’t relate to the girls’ tears as they approached their own graduations aside from their having to leave their beloved junior Azunyan behind.

Azusa’s minor story arc of her struggles over how to handle the rest of Houkago Tea Time graduating was well done and led to some emotion here that was totally warranted. Low stakes in the grand scheme of things, but the stakes are still there.

But then the girls’ life at Sakuragaoka is so different in some ways from my own high school life that my brain barely associates them at all as similar. Especially from the social angle, which I’m sure some other more drama-oriented school series depict. School was a joyless shitcan as far as I was concerned, and while I can’t speak at all to the real-life Japanese school experience, it probably isn’t all that different in terms of its social pecking order and the other cruelties it puts many kids through. If nothing else, K-On! is an escape from that world, something like the escape of the idealized world of Yuru Camp I got into in my review of its movie. That’s not a drawback or a flaw of these works; it’s a strength and a selling point.

Though it still doesn’t take away from my continuing disbelief at the main cast’s gelling so well in concert when they’ve barely practiced. Not to mention Yui and Ritsu in particular pulling positive outcomes out of thin fucking air after they’ve goofed off all year, conveniently getting into the same high-tier women’s university as Mugi and Mio. Yui is a savant, sure, the show’s established that, but Ritsu? But fine, whatever. I’m guessing this was just to set up the college spinoff later on, though it seems it was never animated because I guess nobody wants to watch a university-based anime (except me? All I’ve seen of the university setting in anime is Uzaki-chan and the part of Death Note where Light is a college student, but that hardly counts. I’m open to recommendations.)

3) Sawako is way less of a shithead this season

If you’ve read my first season review, you know how I felt about the Light Music Club’s teacher advisor Sawako Yamanaka. Her perverted side, directed as it was towards her students, was a major irritation and wrecked many of the scenes she had a prominent part in for me. I know I’m in a minority on this point, but her saving the day at the season-end concert did nothing for me since I’d been given no reason to like her. And granted, the series recognized this side of Sawako’s but tried to have it both ways with her, which didn’t work for me in the slightest.

Now I’m happy to say that Sawako’s gropy nonsense is no longer present and her perverted side toned way down. Though it’s not gone — see her outrageous outfits for the girls’ club recruitment video in the out-of-order episode 25 that they refuse to wear.

Don’t pout, Sawako. You’re lucky you still have a fucking job.

But in general, she’s a lot more bearable this time. I still don’t love her exactly, but now her laziness and weird vanity at least match with the club’s perception of her, if not the school’s as a whole. And she does work hard when she has to, so credit where it’s due I guess.

K-On! still has its annoyances for me, like all of Yui’s supposed hard work taking place off screen and just being referred to by others. A lot of the cast’s achievements still feel somewhat undeserved for that reason. I’m still not all that taken by Yui’s whole airhead aura either (having also just watched season 1 of Aggretsuko, I wonder how she’d hold up in that setting — the show even brings up this possibility in the career-dedicated episode.) No surprise then that Mio is still my favorite character, but again, all five of these cornballs work well as a group, and along with the rest of the above improvements, that made season 2 of K-On! a pretty nice watch.

I actually came to like Yui more this season, so another point there.

As for the technical aspects of the show, I have absolutely no complaints. KyoAni is one of the best-loved anime studios for their consistently great work, and K-On! as a whole is no exception — in fact, comparing the two, the second season looks like it has higher production values, and season 1 wasn’t cheap-looking by any means.

I also continued to appreciate the attention to detail given to the musical aspects of the show on the not-too-common occasions they actually bothered to come up, with their realistic-looking animation while playing. It’s no surprise to me that this anime got some viewers interested enough in music to start playing themselves, especially given the characters’ use of real-life instruments. Everyone knows about Yui’s Les Paul and Mio’s left-handed Fender bass, but I’d like to try out Mugi’s Korg Triton Extreme. Apparently you can’t get her 76-key version anymore, though. Makes sense Mugi was able to adapt to 76 keys after playing the full 88-key piano for so long — the more common and cheaper 61-key keyboards out there are far too restrictive, especially for a pianist like her. Fingers running off the ends of the keyboard when you stray too far.

I don’t know much about drumming, but I do know that Zildjian is the oldest still-operating instrument manufacturer in the world, founded by an Armenian guy in Istanbul way back in 1623. Maybe you can get some 400th anniversary deals on your cymbals right now.

And of course, there are several more original songs to enjoy. I’m not that into this peppy sugary pop-rock the girls write in the show’s universe, but these songs are perfectly fine and well-performed, and they fit the tone of the anime as a whole. Though given how the Who gets brought up a few times, Ritsu being a professed Keith Moon fan and Yui performing a few Pete Townshend guitar windmills, I would have liked to have heard Houkago Tea Time’s cover of “My Generation”. Or even just “I Can’t Explain” or “Substitute”, one of their early songs before they got into the hardcore rock opera stuff (which is good too, but probably too much to ask out of the girls at this point in their careers.)

Looking back on it, I’m mostly happy I could come to see the good points in a show that so many people seem to love so much. I still can’t say I love it like the serious fans do (though I’d say I’m only a “serious fan” of a very few things in that sense anyway) but I think I’ve appreciated it about as much as I possibly can at this point. My quibbling aside, I can understand now why people keep coming back to and talking about this decade-plus-old series. Like the other slice-of-life works I’ve enjoyed, K-On! is an escape from a shitass world, and one that at least in its second season is very nicely done.

Rest easy, heroes

And hey, I might even watch the K-On! movie, which I wasn’t originally planning on doing. I still have a lot of these series-attached anime films to watch and cover here, however, and this one isn’t at the top of that list: there are two I absolutely have to get to first. You’ll see soon enough, hopefully. Until then!

 

* I know this is leaving out episode 27, which doesn’t seem like it’s grouped with the series proper but rather with the movie that capped it all off. I’ll watch that episode before I watch the movie, according to the suggestions I’ve seen online.

A full run through the King Crimson discography: Part 16 (VROOOM VROOOM, 1995/6, 2001)

I’m really tired of posting about these live albums I have and not being able to provide links like I can with the studio albums. B’Boom: Live in Argentina is a regular-release live album of the newly reformed King Crimson at their first live show since their Three of a Perfect Pair tours in 1984. The album also bears the title “Official Bootleg” — apparently there was a different set of illicit recordings sold that were of horrible sound quality (worse than Earthbound even?) so the band decided to put their own recording out to stamp that one out, but fuck me if they’d ever bothered to post it on their YouTube channel with most of the rest of their catalog.

Well forget that album, because there’s an archival release called VROOOM VROOOM that’s actually on Crimson’s channel, so I’ll write about that instead and will also simply link to the whole album above rather than pasting individual songs this time as there are so many of them on this double-CD release. Even if I don’t have much to say about these pieces individually, since I’ve written about most all of them in their studio versions, but then live Crimson is pretty different from studio Crimson as we’ve seen throughout this run of albums starting in 1969.

That difference is to the band’s advantage here, because I like the live stuff from their 90s incarnation somewhat more than their studio work. While THRAK had its highlights, I’m not the biggest fan of its sound — it’s fine, but a lot of the album feels “metallic” in a way I don’t like all that much, or at least not when the songs aren’t interesting. These live settings add a lot to that sound, however. Maybe it’s the improvisation on top of some of these tracks together with the bits of crowd interaction, but both the instrumentals and songs seem to have more energy live. VROOOM VROOOM contains performances from two of Crimson’s 1995/6 THRAK tour shows in Mexico City and NYC and they are consistently on in both, playing through almost all of the THRAK setlist together with a few 80s favorites like “Elephant Talk”, “Indiscipline”, and “Three of a Perfect Pair” and even a couple of 70s pieces that stuck around (“Larks’ Tongues Part II”, and even with a “Talking Drum” preceding it for once.)

And hell, it’s all good. I don’t know what else to say about the above work on this album except that I’d like to have been in the audience. Especially the Mexico City one, since they seem to know how to have a good time down in the warmer parts of the world — reminds me of my old home, even if I don’t like the heat there very much in itself. Crimson also shows what was probably always true, maybe even back in 1969, that they didn’t take themselves as seriously as they might sound sometimes, with a few funny ad-libbed bits in “Indiscipline” courtesy of Bruford’s creative drumming and Belew’s reaction (“It remains consistent… usually.”) See also Adrian’s cover of “Free as a Bird”, the “lost Beatles song” that got dug up and put on the 90s Anthology series of Beatles outtakes and alternates — this particular take was apparently on John Lennon’s unfinished raw version that gets filled in with some humming. A nice contrast with the show’s heavy pounding instrumentals, just Mr. Belew on a piano if that’s him playing, and it goes over well with the crowd.

Aside from a couple of thankfully very short clangy improv pieces and the drum duets I still don’t like all that much like “B’Boom” (though they might be interesting to the drummers for the technique) I like VROOOM VROOOM enough that I’d recommend it over Crimson’s 90s studio work, since it 1) sounds better to my ears and 2) contains all the best 90s work anyway like “Dinosaur” and “Walking On Air”. I still prefer Absent Lovers as far as Crimson live releases go, but considering how perfect that one is, that’s no dig at this album. It just makes me regret not dedicating a post to Absent Lovers, being an archival release — a rule I set at the beginning of this post series I’ve broken in this post. Shit, I shouldn’t have set any rules for myself at all back then.

At least that issue is about to be solved: since Discipline Global Media was created around the next big period of Crimson activity starting in 2000, they become the “regular releases.” Before making it to 2000, however, we have that other live album left to cover I mentioned earlier, and it’s quite something. Prepare yourselves. Until then!

A full run through the King Crimson discography: Part 15 (THRAK, 1995)

Now I’m in an awkward position. I wonder if fans felt this way around 1995 when THRAK came out, because it absolutely makes the previous year’s EP VROOOM obsolete. The only songs exclusive to the EP are Cage and “When I Say Stop Continue”, two of the less interesting ones to my ears, so there’s not that much reason to buy VROOOM today since THRAK contains its better material along with a lot of new stuff. Unless you’re a King Crimson completionist, that is, and good fucking luck to you if that’s the case. You have a lot of live albums to buy.

That said, my feelings about 90s Crimson, at least in the studio, didn’t change that much upon my relisten to THRAK. It’s better — about half of it is more or less enjoyable, and that’s not a small amount considering the album’s nearly hour-long runtime. That was the CD age: kids today won’t relate, but many bands back then didn’t seem to realize just because you have the ability to make your album 70 minutes long doesn’t mean you should.

Thankfully, that doesn’t quite apply to King Crimson. There’s nothing truly unpleasant on THRAK, but the album does range in quality. We’ve already addressed the opening instrumental VROOOM, now for whatever reason divided into “VROOOM” proper and the coda as Coda: Marine 475. The title track is also a carryover, along with Sex Sleep etc. and One Time, and they’re all just as fine or okay as they were on VROOOM.

As for the new stuff, it’s once again a mixed bag. The two best songs on the album run right after the close of the “VROOOM” coda. Dinosaur is a pretty fine catchy rocker with lyrics featuring a dinosaur lamenting its fate but that also might be about something other than a literal dinosaur (since old bands used to be and maybe still are called dinosaurs, and Crimson was 25 years+ old at this point) and with Adrian Belew doing his best John Lennon impression in the verses. By contrast, Walking On Air is another romantic song, but a stronger and more distinctive one than “One Time”. The other standard song on THRAK is People, which is pretty ehhh. A little generic-feeling, and with that sort-of-approaching social commentary that again feels weird out of Crimson.

I prefer light social commentary from my anime these days. I would also say this is an extra-fitting screenshot to fit the “dinosaur” theme but I think she’s supposed to be a Godzilla.

Aside from the two two-part interludes (Radio I and II are total wastes; Inner Garden I and II are very short, interesting tries at capturing a sort of gothic feel that aren’t terrible) we have the album-exclusive instrumentals left: the drum duet B’Boom, which I don’t care for too much, and the “VROOOM” variation VROOOM VROOOM (these fucking titles, man.) The closing “VROOOM VROOOM” isn’t bad and even contains some fun quotes from “Red” in the middle, not a bad way to go out.

So again, THRAK is pretty all right. A little disappointing in how underwhelming it is compared to their 70s and 80s work, but 90s Crimson wasn’t the same band, anyway. It feels like they were no longer progressing quite as much at this point, either. This version of the band is sort of accurately described as a blend of the 70s heaviness/fullness of sound with the 80s precise instrumental work, but when you think about it, no previous version of the band could have been described as a blend of older Crimson styles or “70s Crimson plus or minus whatever.” That’s not the case at this point. I’m not sure if that will change in their 00s releases, but I hope it does — I’d take a failed experiment from King Crimson over a repetition or mixing of older styles. Then again, maybe they’d earned some repetition after so much innovation.

Anyway, if you’re interested, just listen to THRAK and see what you think. “Dinosaur” and “Walking On Air” are enough to make it worthwhile along with the pretty decent “VROOOM”-related pieces, anyway. For what it’s worth, I could see someone totally new to Crimson loving this stuff — my problem is I started with Crimson King and already had Red on fairly regular play by the time I got to THRAK.

Next up are two live albums out of this 90s Crimson, one of which is a good time and the other of which is… you’ll see. Until then!

New feeling

The name of this song is New Feeling, and that’s what it’s about.

Lately I’ve been feeling pretty up. Not happy, never happy, but energetic at least. It’s part of the reason I’ve been able to write so much — these ups are productive for me, though I can’t exactly call them pleasant either. And then add in my bouts of sleeplessness as I write this at 2 am.

At times like these, I don’t know what I’d do without music. And while I will be getting back to King Crimson soon, their 90s style of thrashing and stomping around isn’t exactly 2 am music for me. No, I’ve been using something a little lighter in tone. Some Talking Heads (listening to all of 80s Crimson sent me back there) and some bossa nova and fusion. I’ve also been revisiting legendary Japanese fusion guys Casiopea to see if my opinion of their music has changed in the last few years, and I’m happy to say it has, and for the better. Back when I first heard their debut in 2019 I loved it, and I still do. However, their following work left me so underwhelmed back then that I quit listening through their discography after their fourth or fifth album. It all felt like a bland soup of waiting room smooth jazz to me, a serious drop in quality from the excitement of their debut. I hated Super Flight, and aside from a song or two like “Gypsy Wind”, Make Up City and Crosspoint bored me to sleep.

I’m still not blown away by most of this music, none of which comes close to the heights of their debut for me. However, here’s the change in my opinion: aside from parts of Super Flight that I still can’t stand for their unbearably cheesy synth tones (“I Love New York” sucks; I’m not budging on that) I can appreciate this music a lot more than I could a few years ago. It’s tasteful, written with plenty of care, and even if some of it sounds like doctor’s office waiting room or mall lobby fare to me, well, those places need music to avoid awkward silence, right?

And this stuff is better and more interesting than 99% of what actually plays in those places where I live. I still hate this style of smooth jazz when it’s drowned in cheese: see Kenny G, who has technical skill going for him and not much else (aside from mass appeal and commercial success of course, and one halfway decent groove captured on the weather channel part of the vaporware-adjacent News At 11.) But Casiopea, those are some cool guys. That’s not to mention their massive influence on 80s and 90s video game BGM, or the fact that they were apparently amazing live. I probably need to watch a few of their old concert videos.

So where’s the connection with romantic comedy and slice-of-life anime here? It may be a stretch or the fact that I’m trying to live in a constant cloud of sleep deprivation that’s affecting my judgment, but I feel the same way about some anime series that years ago I wouldn’t have even given a first chance, let alone a second. It may have started with Nagatoro, which I found after coming across Uzaki-chan. Though I didn’t love Uzaki all that much, Nagatoro grabbed me where it put off some other viewers with its initially harsh depiction of a bully-turned-love interest (and that turnaround was pretty quick, even if the bully side of Hayase is still there.) Then I found the more straightforwardly sweet Takagi-san and loved that even more.

Okay, Takagi kind of bullies Nishikata too, but it’s a little more good-natured this time. I really do recommend this show, anyway. Even if it’s annoyingly split by season between three streaming services.

And finally, just last year Yuru Camp managed to break down my resistance to slice-of-life anime. I used to avoid a lot of these sorts of series I thought didn’t have plots, until I realized that many of them do; they just tend to have lower and more mundane stakes than most people would expect from anime (and another reminder to all of us that anime is a medium full of all sorts of stories and characters, not just the hyper-dramatic like we hear so often — but then you already know that if you’re here.)

Now I’m wondering whether I can take my new more generous feeling towards certain kinds of music and fiction and apply it more broadly so that I’m not such a miserable fuck. I’m pretty good at not coming off that way when I need to be presentable, but my friends know what I’m like (and you know too, since I hold nothing back on this site.) I don’t enjoy being like this, and if I knew some way to be more content in a life I feel extremely constrained in, I’d act on it. But maybe it’s really all about my state of mind. Almost everyone lives constrained lives, so even if my constraints might seem a little harsh to some people with the traditional family and culture I have to deal with, I can’t say I’m in a unique position.

I’d wish you a happy Valentine’s Day, but I’m not feeling that positive quite yet. If you’re with someone who makes you happy, you don’t need my wishes anyway. So happy St. Valentine’s Day maybe, if you observe that. And happy Tuesday, though Tuesdays usually aren’t that happy for your typical worker. I’m going to listen to more fusion and try to have some nice dreams for once. Until next time.

A full run through the King Crimson discography: Part 13 (Three of a Perfect Pair, 1984)

By 1984, the Belew/Bruford/Levin lineup was still together: the longest-lasting version of Crimson to date, though apparently things were getting pretty rocky during the Beat sessions. Good thing Fripp and Belew patched things up, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten Three of a Perfect Pair.

Perfect Pair (or Three? Abbreviating this one is awkward) is generally seen as also a step down from the excellence of Discipline but a step up from Beat (so I guess a half-step up?) I more or less agree with that; it’s not for nothing that Discipline is the last of the four Crimson albums widely considered to be extremely influential/revolutionary/etc. (along with Crimson King, Larks’ Tongues, and Red, or that’s how I count them, at least.) It’s not that this version of the band had run out of steam after its first album — Beat had some great material, but it also varied wildly in quality and had a sharp division between its first and second sides, featuring both more straightforward pop and out-there experimentation with just a little of the blending that worked so well on Discipline.

Perfect Pair has some of that issue too. In fact, it seems after Beat that the band realized what they’d done and simply decided to play up this pop/experimentation division on its next album, splitting it into a brain-inspired “Left Side” and “Right Side.” As before, the first side is poppy and catchy and radio-friendly (even if the radio ultimately might not have cared, sadly) and the second is full of weird extremely radio-unfriendly instrumentals. It’s also generally considered that the first side belongs to Adrian Belew and the second to Robert Fripp, though I doubt it’s as clear a split as that — if you know Belew’s solo work at all, he has plenty of weird experimentation to go along with his “normal” music, and the pop stuff on Perfect Pair wouldn’t work without Fripp’s guitar either.

As with Beat, I like this “pop side” more than the experimental one. So much for my hardcore prog fan credentials, but fuck it, what else can I say? Model Man and especially Man With an Open Heart are fine 80s pop songs, the latter of which definitely should have been a radio hit with its extremely catchy verse and chorus (though as with “Heartbeat”, I think it was passed on in favor of irritating dogshit like fill in the blank 80s trash hit you hear at your local grocery store. If you want another reason to turn on Publix, here it is, though this seems like more of a licensing issue.) These are all pretty straightforward love songs, too — a nice way to introduce Crimson to your normie friends to begin corrupting their minds so they eventually end up hooked on repeated listens to “Fracture”. I’m certainly not as open as the “man with an open heart” in his song, but I guess I can appreciate the sentiment in Belew’s lyrics at least.

However, the best songs on this side and on the entire album are the two that I think effectively mix Crimson’s two sides again. The title track is one of the best openers the band ever came up with, its lyrics about a dysfunctional mess of a relationship woven into that interlocking double guitar line in different time signatures trick resulting in a really special song, one of my favorites not just from 80s Crimson but from the band’s entire catalog. And Sleepless isn’t far behind with its godly bassline — cite this song as one of the reasons Tony Levin is so highly regarded; he does an amazing job here — and its tense atmosphere.

After the fourth track “Open Heart”, we’re done with all this cool bright 80s pop/rock stuff and into the dark starting with Nuages. Aside from the beat poetry ode to an abandoned wreck of a car Dig Me every piece from here on is an instrumental, and most of them (“Nuages”, Industry, and No Warning) are what I’d call proto-dark ambient with their sometimes creepy, oppressive feels. This is also predictably where the album loses a lot of listeners (or where it gains the real weirdos, maybe.)

I’m not in love with this second side either, and not even with the closing Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part III, that song series the band revived for some reason (maybe to bookend their career, if you start counting from Larks’ Tongues? Interesting to hear the 80s update, but I much prefer Parts I and II.) However, I also don’t hate them at all or even dislike them on the level I do some of that second side of Beat. Maybe it’s because these pieces really do create an effective atmosphere, especially “Nuages” and “Industry” — I can see them used in the context of a game with an urban/industrial sci-fi setting of some kind. If we’re on the continued hunt for “who did these guys influence,” add my bet of the second side of Perfect Pair -> modern dark ambient/vaporwave, a little of which I’ve covered on the site (see TOWERS and desert sand.) This shouldn’t be a surprise, since Fripp collaborated so closely with ambient godfather Brian Eno through the 70s and 80s and contributed a lot to experimental music through his own solo work.

Not that it makes me want to put on this second side any more than I do already. Like I said, I’m not in love with it, but I can respect what they’re doing especially on the more effective tracks like “Industry”. I think the atmosphere is effective, anyway, so if that’s what they were going for with these tracks, it mostly worked. And combined with two of the band’s best songs ever, the title track and “Sleepless”, and a collection of pretty fine New Wave pop, I’d rank Perfect Pair pretty highly. It’s not quite up with their four all-time classics as I count them so far, but I probably put this album on just as often as those. At least the first side of it.

Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the ambient and atmospheric a lot more in music, games, anime, any art in general as long as it’s done tastefully and effectively. Maybe I’m just getting old.

And that’s all for 80s Crimson. No, not even a posthumous live album this time to tie matters up, though considering how god damn good this band was live, that was a big mistake, one that would only be remedied with the archival release Absent Lovers over a decade later. Both that and the official concert video Three of a Perfect Pair: Live in Japan are highly recommended, featuring great renditions of a lot of this band’s best songs along with a few old favorites like “Larks’ Tongues Part II” and “Red”, and the video is worth watching just to see their stage antics — Belew having a lot of fun with his guitar effects, Bruford going nuts on his massive drum kit, Levin just being cool on the bass, and Fripp of course sitting down the whole time as he works away on his guitar. (And don’t miss the short travelogue in the middle with the guys wandering around Asakusa! I’ve only been there in games, sadly. But one day…)

As for the band, it was once again finished following Perfect Pair. I guess they’d gone through each primary color in their trilogy of album covers and had none left, or more probably Robert Fripp again felt the band had done its job and had to hang it up. I won’t even say it’s a shame this time: I’m just happy we got what we did. Though they never quite reached the heights of Red, 80s Crimson was just as skilled and enjoyable, and in some ways even more likable than the 70s version (though maybe that’s just Belew’s infectious positivity?) They had their excesses too, but then it wouldn’t be Crimson without excesses. So rest in peace, 80s Crimson.

Does that mean this post series is finished? Not even close (are you getting used to this theme?) King Crimson wasn’t dead but was merely on a long hiatus, though once again the members didn’t know it. Next post, we’ll be entering my era: the 90s. See you there!

 

* A general note on the album cover, because despite its simplicity I thought this one deserved some attention. Apparently that weird symbol wasn’t just something the guys pulled out of their asses. According to the album’s Wikipedia page:

The Peter Willis designed artwork illustrates the sacred–profane dichotomy while being a simplified version of the Larks’ Tongues in Aspic cover; a rising phallic object represents a male solar deity about to penetrate the crescent figure, a female lunar deity.

So there you go. And now I can’t look at this cover the same way ever again.

A full run through the King Crimson discography: Part 12 (Beat, 1982)

For the first time ever, a King Crimson lineup would completely hold together long enough to record more than one album, a true miracle. Beat is also one of the few Crimson albums that sort of has a concept, this time a tribute to the Beat Generation of the 50s. All those references went over my head aside from the very obvious stuff in the opening Neal and Jack and Me — I’ve never read Jack Kerouac, but I understand that the references go further than that just from reading about some of those connections online.

Concept aside, Beat continues the interlocking guitar lines and the mix of experimental and pop sense of Discipline. It’s also a step down from Discipline. Maybe that was to be expected considering that every track on the previous album was a winner, but my feeling is that Beat is a lot more uneven than its predecessor. Even those two “pop” and “experimental” aspects of this 80s Crimson that were so intertwined in Discipline feel as though they’ve been unwound somewhat, so that while the mix is still here, it’s not blended in quite the way it was before.

There are just a couple of songs that I feel do blend those sides of Crimson, and they also happen to be my favorites (and also all on the first side of the album.) Waiting Man combines a distinctive and hypnotic drumbeat with a great delivery from Adrian Belew, and Sartori in Tangier is a memorable instrumental with some of the flavor of Discipline in it. I also like “Neal and Jack and Me” as an opener, though it’s not the absolute best 80s Crimson would come up with — that would be the opener to their next album. But man, that ending section really works nicely.

Every other song on Beat either falls definitively into the “pop” or “experiment” slot, and out of those five, I only really like one. Heartbeat is about as close as King Crimson ever got to being a top 40 pop band — it’s a straightforward 4/4 love song, and I’ll set aside my pretensions here and say it’s a good one. The fact that this wasn’t a pop hit in 1982 is a shame, though maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that it was never overplayed so that I don’t have to hear it every time I go to the grocery store. (Then again, the grocery store doesn’t play good 80s pop/rock, only stuff that I disliked at first and have grown to completely hate like “Sussudio” and “Heaven is a Place on Earth”. Please, expand your fucking playlists, you corporate drones!)

But then the second side of Beat is a major dropoff in quality from the first. The Howler is rough and ugly without much of an aim (kind of reminds me of “The Mincer” off of Starless and Bible Black in fact, both for that and the similar title) and Neurotica is just too damn neurotic for me to enjoy and without much else to recommend it aside from the chorus. Even the softer Belew song Two Hands doesn’t quite work for me, though I see the more romantic types enjoying it. And considering my favorite romance is Saya no Uta, that might say a lot about just how romantic I am.

Either Saya or the classic Nekomata fight in SMT Nocturne, a true heartbreaker that one. Still waiting for my hybrid SMT/Persona digital demon dating sim.

That leaves the closer Requiem. This instrumental seems to be among the most controversial pieces in King Crimson’s catalog. Understandably so: it sounds like one of 70s Crimson’s improvs in the 80s sound, and as with a lot of those pieces, it gets equal love and hate or at least disinterest. But while it’s not my favorite track on the album, I do get something out of “Requiem” that I don’t get out of some of Crimson’s other improvs. This one feels like an eruption, building up slowly into its climax near the end of the track after which it slowly fades away. Sounds suitably mournful for a piece titled “Requiem” too, though who it’s a requiem for, if anyone, I’m not sure. Probably not for the band, since they’d be around for a while longer in this form.

But then, “Requiem” has the same problem some of Crimson’s wilder pieces have: I have to really be in the mood to identify with their dark, jagged, rough atmospheres. I just happen to be in that sort of mood more often than I’d like. I guess this music isn’t meant for very happy people, is it? Then again, Adrian Belew is optimistic enough to balance things out — just go back to that first side if “Requiem” isn’t your thing.

So Beat is all right. Still a good album on balance, but certainly not the one to start with the 80s lineup of the band in my opinion. Though if you have a friend who’s really into 80s pop and they haven’t heard any Crimson yet, consider sending them a link to “Heartbeat” — it really could fit onto that Vice City radio station, the one that starts with playing “Billie Jean” (and now that I think of it, wasn’t “Owner of a Lonely Heart” in there too? I wonder if that game eventually led some kids to get their minds expanded with Close to the Edge and Relayer. It all comes back to 70s prog in the end!)

And before I move on to the final album in the 80s trilogy (and spoilers there I guess) I have another bonus track to highlight. Absent Lovers is another instrumental, one I’d never heard until going through this full relisten, and I like it more than half of the tracks on the album proper. So why didn’t it make the album? Just as with “Dr. Diamond” on Starless, it’s a mystery.