Dead Bambies - Dandelion Session (Thomas Imposter)

There's so much great stuff coming out of Japan at the moment and the Thomas Imposter label is home to some of the best of it.  Dead Bambies unquestionably qualify for inclusion in that category: their frenzied guitar attack has launched many welcome assaults on my ears in the last few years and I hope and trust there will be many more to come.

This session was broadcast in my Dandelion Radio show in September 2018 and it's great to see it getting an official release via TI.  Not only that, but the four session tracks are augmented here by a further three previously unreleased tracks: you can hear one of them, Taste of Honey, in my show this month. 

It's available to download from the Thomas Imposter Bandcamp site.  Get a copy here.   Also, listen out for their labelmates The Jungles!!! whose brilliant debut session can be heard in my show this month.

Hayato Takeuchi - EP (Bearsuit)

The Bearsuit label continues to enhance its reputation as our foremost purveyors of quirky and innovative oddities with pretty much everything they put out.  This release from Tokyo's Hayato Takeuchi continues this fine run, blending delightful pop melodies with departures into the bizarre over five tracks of some of the most engaging music you'll hear this year.

Exactly what you'd expect from Bearsuit, in other words.  Takeuchi once recorded under the name Bubbly Folks and recorded a track for the label's excellent compilation Tomato Sauce Lasers, Sausage Lassos two years ago.  The track he contributed then offers a hint of what's on offer here but it's Takeuchi's fondness for repeatedly bemusing, surprising and delighting the listener that makes this such a great listening experience.

The word 'repeatedly' is used advisedly because that's essentially how it begins, with the repetitive, hypnotic 'Etude G-12', but lest you think this experimental masterpiece will lay its mighty footprints across whole the collection, be prepared to be danced around in a kind of Mr Kite-like daze to the big top extravaganza that is 'Mr Henderson No Ai To Replica', a wonderful piece of whimsy that features in my Dandelion Radio show this month.

From there, you're not so much dragged back to earth as propelled into space ready for the head-journey that is 'Anata To Watashi No Kyoukaisen', which ends the album with a cosmic embrace that leaves you somewhere between the mind thrill of a Stephen Baxter novel and an encounter with The Clangers.

It's great, in other words.  Get it here.

Swamp Sounds/Uncle Pops & The Dumbloods (Bearsuit)

The latest split release from Edinburgh's Bearsuit label pairs Japan's Swamp Sounds with Uncle Pops, who hails from Dundee.  As we've come to expert from Bearsuit, the release is a triumph of experimentation paired with the kind of obtuse hooks that somehow lift the whole thing very much into the realm of the eminently listenable.

Uncle Pops, aka Douglas Wallace, is a little more low key about it, specialising in meandering soundscapes and fascinating temporal shifts that come out sounding like the soundtrack to some film whose sense you won't be able to make out but which you really wanna see.  He was involved with Anata Wa Sukkari Tsukarete Shimai's album The Lost Charles Underscore and if you loved that album as much as I did, you'll have some idea of the territory we're getting into.

Swamp Sounds are the work of Nagoya's Yuuya Kuno, an experimental musician who also records under the alias of House of Tapes.  His half of the release is less texturally complex, more perky and an absolute delight throughout its five tracks.  I'm opening my Dandelion Radio show this month with opening track 'Marionette', the mutant disco rush of which offers a snapshot of the warped, exhilarating journey Yuuya is about to take us on.

At times bewildering, at other times faintly unsettling, but always mad and always magnificent: get it here. 

Ippu Mitsui/Annie & The Station Orchestra split (Bearsuit)

 

Bearsuit is one of those labels that just never lets you down, so I suppose it's entirely possible you'll not bother with this review and just get yourself a copy of this as soon as you know who's responsible for putting it out.

 

For those who still need to be convinced or have never encountered them before, however, this album covers classic Bearsuit territory of wonky electronics birthing melodic yet brilliantly off-kilter tunes. 

 

Ippu Mitsui does that amazing, classically Japanese thing of pulling together a load of diverse elements and putting them together in a way you suspected wasn't possible, but hoped it would be.  I'm featuring 'Doramyu Kick-Off' in my Dandelion Radio show this month, a typically frenzied stab of mad beats and colliding electronica

 

Meanwhile, Chas Kinnis, aka Annie, offers something more spacious, at times delicately textured, at times anything but.  'Time', in particular, is a sprawling six minute opus of the smoothly atmospheric and defiantly catchy.

 

Above all, it's a great listen, Annie's less manic tunes offering a sublime contrast to the frenzy dished up by Mitsui yet somehow complementing it brilliantly.

 

Get it here.

Best Albums of 2013: 13. Nnevteiga

13. NnEvTeIgA - Nnevteiga (Tendress)

Crazy brilliance from this Japanese band who take loads of disparate elements and glue them together with demented noise.  The result is a mad brainshaker of an album with too many high points to list here among its twelve tracks, but I'll try one: 'ItA EkUTshI' crams more into its two minutes than most bands could come up with in a lifetime.

Get it as NYOP here.

Just three days left to vote in the official festive fifty here.  

Anata Wa Sukari Tsukarete Shimai - The Lost Charles Underscore

Inevitably, the most exciting ones are the ones you find it hard to trace the origins of, identify what the band have been listening to or even anticipate what the next track will sound like.  In the music of Anata Wa Sukari Tsukarete Shimai (often shortened, conveniently, to AWSTS) reference points fly by often enough, but they're fleeting and quickly replaced by something else that burrows through the headphones and into your ears, leaving you in a state that fluctuates between stunned bliss and numb wonder.

Headphones are optional, of course, but recommended, because this is music you need to fill your head with.  The band's album has been put out by the very fine Bearsuit Records and for me it's their best release yet.  Apparently the people responsible for AWSTS go by the names of Bunny and Gnomeform, which only makes me like them even more.

 But the names, great as they are, fade into irrelevance when the music starts up.  I love the strange elusiveness of the grooves, its warped fuzziness and the way so many parts of it hang together that probably shouldn't.  I love the teeth-on-edge melodic spasms of 'Drink It Up', the mellow yet troubled vibes of 'I Can Make Footprints With My Eyes' and the way 'Backyard' sludges around my brain and threatens never to end.  I love, perhaps more than anything else' the skewed beauty of 'Doll', which you can hear in my Dandelion Radio show this month.  And I love the rest of the twelve tracks too, but it's hard to find words for something as elusively brilliant as this.

Get the album from the Bearsuit Records bandcamp site here   And bookmark the site while you're there, because they're putting out some seriously interesting stuff and you'll almost certainly want to go back.