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VARIOUS ARTISTS
Japan For Sale Vol. 2 (Columbia)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
It drives me nuts when I get ahold of an interesting but slightly flawed CD with "Volume 2" in the title and I've never heard the original volume for comparisons. I can't tell you if this is an improvement or a minor disappointment. There certainly is some fun music here, ranging from electronica to J-Pop, heaviest on the former and really only marred by a few truly boring tracks. Yoshinori Sunahara's "Balance" has some interesting sounds, but only a few that are repeated over and over for six and a half minutes, while DJ Krush spends a like amount of time rapping at high speed in Japanese in "Candle Chant." I suspect that if I spoke the language it'd be more interesting, but I don't even like English language rap when nothing around it changes for six and a half minutes.
The positives outweigh the negatives, luckily. Mayu Kitaki is charming and maintains a bit of mystery in "Nakanaide," which opens the set in a semi-detatched tone. Dt, L'Arc-En-Ciel and Ken Ishii are all well worth hearing and Boom Boom Satellites, well, they're ALWAYS terrific and they don't disappoint in the slightest here. For me, the real fun kicks off with their "Soliloquy." For those of us with a fetish for J-Pop, tunes like this and Chara's "Skirt" are downright fattening. In fact, I now want ev... no, need everyt... no, make that require everything Chara's ever recorded including phone messages. I'm floating after that, so I can't tell you for sure if most of what follows is as dreamy as it seems to me. After three listenings I'm still picking up new sounds in the electronica backdrops and enjoying the power in the rockin' beats.
Aaaand then... something goes terribly, terribly wrong.
Takkyu Ishino's "Stereo Nights" is so obnoxious I nearly burned my speakers. The beat is the same over and over, his voice is run through a vocoder to create a robotic effect and he says "Stereo Nights" so many times you begin to hate the words. Toward the end the ideas are so exhausted a female voice begins bouncing from side to side saying "Left speaker - RIGHT speaker... Left speaker - RIGHT speaker..." Nice one. This song is so bad it could have erased from your memory the good work of all that had come before, had it not been for the pure pop magic of Puffy Amiyumi's "Atarashii Hibi" and Polysics' "New Wave Jacket." These are both real J-Pop minus all the electronica trappings, and wouldn't it be wonderful to close on such a high? Yeah, but this is largely an electronica disc, so we go back into the beat box for a down-tempo bit of tune noir from Aco called "Shinsei Romanticist." While extremely listenable, it doesn't take an FBI audio expert to figure out the voice on the tape doesn't actually belong to Madonna, despite the remarkable similarity. Higher voice. Shorter cones. Good song, though, if a bit long. I like being tranced out, and Aco provides a trance outro. I sure do wonder how volume one compares. I'm thinking it's worth finding out.
Track List:
Nakanaide (Mayu Kitaki) * Iceblink (Main Mix) (Ken Ishii) * Yume No Nakae (Dt) * Candle Chant (Tribute) (DJ Krush/Boss The MC) * Balance (Yoshinori Sunahara) * Soliloquy (Boom Boom Satellites) * Spirit Dreams Inside (L'Arc-En-Ciel) * Skirt (Chara) * Yumegiwa Last (Supercar) * Stereo Nights (Takkyu Ishino) * Atarashii Hibi (Brand New Days) (Puffy Amiyumi) * New Wave Jacket (Polysics) * Shinsei Romanticist (Aco)
© 2002 - DJ Johnson