Man, having a day off work in the middle of the week totally messed me up. I completely forgot about this. Well, I've got some stuff in the wings so I'm not completely unprepared. Let's revisit Birth again!
Monday I posted Birth's first EP, today we'll look at their second. Only 3 songs here, but they are more fully realized than the first EP. Each one of these songs are pretty finely crafted and rip the whole way through. They still have that 3cm tour influence, but you finally start really seeing what Birth is all about and what makes them special.
Midnight Parade has definitely been making the rounds. They've released stuff on Say Hello to Never Records, Further Platonix, even showing up on the Love the Fate compilation. So, they've definitely been busy and all, but I have none of these and had never heard them before. So, on top of my normal pleasure at finding a Japanese band with uploaded songs on bandcamp, I finally get to hear a band that has been on all those distro pages for so long.
The songs available on bandcamp are scattered, only one is off a release I could find available. Still, there's 3 studio tracks and 2 live tracks, and you can get a good sense of their sound. They have a bit of a Toe influence with the instrumentation, a little 3cm tour in some of the songs, and something else that I can't think of. Each song is plenty long and goes through lots of different moods before their epic endings. My favorite song of the three is 8cm先の憂鬱, which has a more aggressive tone than the others, and definitely reminds me of 3cm tour, or maybe Birth.
Check them out, and get their releases if you can. Now I have to add them to my list of stuff to buy in those intermittent orders to Japanese distros. Man, wouldn't it be great if there was a distro in the US that was trying to bring over Japanese stuff...
I have to say though, this video below, which was one made for the release of the unripe split, is so frickin' boring. These guys are just standing around, only playing their instruments. No emotion guys? Oh well, the music's good, so that's fine, I guess.
I'm not going to embed all these songs (they're all listed separately), so you can just visit the link below:
Finishing off the week with one of the few Killie releases that was actually "mass produced." There were 2000 of these made, not 100 like the cloth packaged CD I posted on Monday, so it actually got around. You can find this for somewhere around 10 bucks on discogs.com, to name one place.
What's sad, is that with such great packaging, you get so little music. Seriously, only two Killie songs? And they needed their own CD? How about this, Killie. Give me something with, let's say, 10 songs. Anything. A collection of everything, an LP, a 5xCD. I don't care, I just want a bunch of your songs together on something that isn't a personal mix CD. It's like you're passing drugs out in a slow drip, and it's driving people like me into a frenzy. We want more!!!!
Ah, now that I've got that out of my system, these Killie songs are badass. I enjoy Off Minor, but only listened to their CD once. Killie's whats important here, and they certainly deliver (quality, not quantity). Umm.... I tried to get good scans of this, but it was super hard. There is printing on the inside of the cardboard as well, which is cool looking. How about, just go get this release yourself, since it's not being sold for an exorbitant price (yet).
It's always fun to find new things when scanning these releases in. This DVD is a perfect example. Yoshi sent a handful of these DVD's with a trade we did, and I always that it was just a plain, black sleeve. But once I scanned it in and started finagling with the contrast, I found a secret. There's a little hammer on the sleeve! You can kind of see it on the picture above. I was always confused that a band like Killie, who always puts so much into their packaging, would have just a plain black sleeve for anything. So, this little hammer was a pleasant surprise.
We have a DVD here with a single song (called Resurrection in English, but the Japanese title is more aptly translated as"Christ is resurrected"). The production quality is really amazing and the sound quality of them playing live is good enough to listen to. The song is good, their performance is awesome. All around it's a win-win. The question is, why didn't you buy one of these when I was selling them for one-frickin'-dollar in my distro? It seriously took a few months to get rid of these, even though I was practically giving them away.
And so the week ends with Volume 3. This actually isn't the last of the compilation series, but I don't have Vol. 4, so that'll be it for this anyways. I really hope Aki continues with this series, as there isn't really any other compilations in Japan collecting this stuff.
As with the others, this one has a different style than the one's before. This one is mainly emo and screamo bands. Some of the stand outs are Bed, What Ever Film, and The Sunset Boulevard, although almost every track is really good.
I still have a copy of this in my distro, so pick it up if you like the tracks: Buy it Here!
I ordered this from Oto Records after doing some trades, sometime around 2008-2009. I hadn't been paying attention much to the Japanese scene, just catching the occasional band that popped out (like killie and hiha). So, I went through his distro and just grabbed whatever looked promising.
It turns out, I didn't do so bad. Hemp Coaching Juicer is fucking awesome. Their sound is pretty noisy hardcore that ventures into thrash, but they have that undeniable Japanese sense of melody. You get 6 songs here, which is much more than a demo. The cover is cloth, essentially a patch, although sewing this on my shorts would leave me no cover for this CD. This is for fans of Tiala, The Carnival of Dark-Split, and Breakfast.
I just got their split with High Tension Sex Girl, and it's amazing. I'm hoping to post a review or something sometime soon.
This is still available to purchase (I know, I'm kind of breaking my philosophy a bit here), so please support the band if you like this. I kind of realized this was still out there while I was trolling some record shops. Buy this here: Record Shop BASE Senseless Records
