Galaxy Express 999 movie theme by Godiego, Nolans and ABBA by Coke.
The '79 song chart-topper in blistering live version with rare English verse.
Never Mind the Gosperats, here's エルラティーノ
MUSICA! MUSICA! MUSICA! Say "hola amigos" to EL LATINO & Ms. OOJA and their new CD, entitled CD “IMPACT”, which is aiming to spice up the Japanese music charts like a fresh packet of Wild-grade Taco Bell hot sauce. At first glance, the act (she sings, he raps) looks like a bad identity politics performance art project gone horribly awry, but the disc -- featuring an eerily authentic looking Parental Advisory sticker -- is no joke and is being heavily pushed in this summer's gal magazines and in some really earnest TV spots.
And why shouldn't it be? “IMPACT” marks Nagoya-based El Latino's first recorded output after a three-year absence during which he was presumably undertaking painstaking frame-by-frame analysis of movies like “American Me" and "Blood In, Blood Out". Now he’s back with a new batch of songs including “Lifestyle of Ghetto” and “Tu Amor” certain to make the Nagoya low rider club feel like true "Homie Rollerz". Now press your bandanna with the tips of your fingers and make a wish...
(Disclaimer: EL LATINO is not affiliated with the El Latino Mexican restaurant in Kyoto)
2009 is 1979: Daitokai - CRYSTALKING
Looking every bit like authentic troublemakers at a lowrider wedding, CRYSTALKING are destined to occupy a special place in post-apocalyptic musical history books for "Ai o Torimodose" (AKA "You wa Shock") from the Fist of the North Star anime. But years earlier the band scored their first million seller in 1979 with "Daitokai", opening theme to the popular "Ishihara gundan" cops-and-car crashes show of the same name. Soon after, an entire generation of Japanese kids tormented their parents by trying to hit vocalist Mushu Yoshizaki's inhuman soaring scales by any means necessary. Now it's your turn...
Daitokai - CRYSTAL KING
The must-see clip below begins generously with a fragment of notorious blackface crooners Rats&Star before settling into "Daitokai" proper - a hot concerto for Christmas lights, punch perms, gold-rimmed aviator shades, and two (count 'em) remote controlled toy helicopters!
The Eternal Question
I just got this email and can't really answer this question. Will Harrison-san and Eldred-chan step up to the plate, plz?
Way Back When (a couple of years ago) Half.com had all the Eternal Editions. File 7, from the third Yamato series, was rare, so I snapped it up from another dealer whom I can't now find. Then files 2&3 (Arrividerci Yamato) and 0&1 (Great Yamato and the first series) were hard to find.
Now, I can't find any Eternal Edition anywhere except Japan, and for some reason they won't ship to my address!
Help!
Know you of a place on this side of the Pacific from where I can get those soundtracks?
Thanks for your help!
jeffreY
NATSU DA ZE!!
Well, here we are blinded by the color and the sleeve art from the third single from V-Cinema superstar Riki Takeuchi's RIKI project. And boy, are we a long way from his appearances in Miike movies like Dead or Alive and several hundred straight to video gangster flicks. Entitled "MA-TSU-RI", the song makes the perfect musical accompaniment to shotgunning Sapporo tallboys and scarfing greasy yakisoba at your local neighborhood festival. RIKI even goes one better by banging on the taiko drums, wrestling a bear Mas Oyama style, anything to entertain you for the frankly amazing music video below. Summer means fun, especially when, as the Amazon.jp copy puts it, "Riki has started a rampage through the city!" And don't all the tekiya love him for it?
1978 is 2008 - Symphonic Suite Message From Space
I don't have much more to say about Message From Space, especially since I already devoted like a lot of posts to it already (an entire category, in fact), except to say that its my favourite Japanese anything ever and the sublime Symphonic Suite LP from the Those Guys at Columbia Records is yet another contender for the title of "1978 space war soundtrack-to-beat". I could have scanned the cropped LP cover, but here's the full Toei promo art for the Golden Week release. Vic Morrow was right, you know, "There are more beautiful dreams in space...." And here's all the proof you need.
1978 is 2008: Symphonic Suite Arrivederci Yamato
Oh wow. 2008 really IS 1978…According to Variety and numerous Japanese new sources, producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki has just announced a brand new Yamato project in the works for all good boys and girls. But don’t break out the Dessler Wine just yet…lifers know that “The Nish” has a habit of announcing rad things that don’t always materialize (like his master plan to buy an actual US battleship and refurbish it for a live action Yamato movie in the '80s) but we wish him the best in reassembling the old gang for One Last Job and hope that he remembers to throw down some proper LPs should he manage to cross the finish line. After all, Uncle Nish helped to popularize the Symphonic Suite; the highest form of art in the history of creation (still big today with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest kids).
Consider, if you will, the final track from the Symphonic Suite Arrivederci Yamato, “From Yamato With Love”, which straddles classical, kayokyoku, Muzak, and genuine human emotion in a way that's suitable for a weepy walk home from a soul shaking experience in a movie theater circa ‘78 or simply as a musical accompaniment for eating a real nice tempura somewhere in Nikko.
From Yamato With Love - Symphonic Suite version
Meanwhile, over at Starblazers.com, Tim Eldred the Great and superfan Steve Harrison have just finished up an “Uchu Roman” epic of their own: an obsessive book-length look at the history of Yamato music featuring…well, just about everything! Behold weird covers, the concerts, the disco album, the Yamato / Raideen piano concerto, and best of all, translations of Nish’s immortal liner notes which continually wax rhapsodic about the power of LOVE, LOVE, and LOVE as only he can (and shall once more, hopefully).
The fun starts at the link below, but be sure to click around to make the most of it.
Smashing All Barriers - The History of Yamato Music
PS - This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Arrivederci Yamato. It opened on August 5, 1978...
Hot Coffee Shop Rock
BOA was a funky old coffee shop near Kichijoji station that had probably peaked around 1973, yet still clung onto the ghost of the Showa era past for all it was worth. It looked just like that idealized record cover there except that the husband and wife team that owned the place were ancient and ornery, the seats had seen better days decades ago, and the plastic dessert display outside was caked in dustballs. The sole concession to the world outside was the thin and tinny sound of modern J-pop radio that came out of a once state-of-the art speaker hidden away behind a metal grill on the wall. I was sad - but not surprised - when the place closed down earlier this year. If only they’d splurged for a CD player and slapped on KISSA ROCK – ADAM to EVE mo, then the march of time might have utterly stopped once and for all.
Like others in the series, this volume of KISSA ROCK features extremely sensitive and caring Japanese vocal acts from the bygone days of yesteryear pulling out every mellow musical trick in the book to help even the most wound-up person in Tokyo to JUST FUCKING RELAX ALREADY, OK? As a genre, “Coffee shop rock” could actually be softer than soft rock, even several notches dimmer than lite rock, but songs like "Umareta toki wa" still must have been a wall-shaking experience (in a nice way) when served inside a proper cathedral of coffee and cake.
1978 is 2008: Let's Ondo Again
Let's Ondo Again - Niagara Fallin' Stars
* LP: LX-7054 (COLUMBIA) Nov. 1978
* PRODUCER: EIICHI OHTAKI
A “super session” LP in which traditional Japanese instruments and arrangements - in addition to about a million other things - go through the mixer via producer Ohtaki Eiichi’s encyclopedic knowledge of pop music past. “Around the World in 377 Seconds” aims to do just that with quotes from Satisfaction and Purple Haze married to shakuhachi flutes and zonked out sitars, while the centerpiece is a one-two tribute to Pink Lady that crib bits from the then-massive duo’s best songs, adding lyrics about legendary thief Goemon Ishikawa for period authenticity. The finale sees Ohtaki channeling Chubby Checker in a matsuri mood as he urges us to “ondo again” like we did last summer, presumably. Shouldn't work, of course, but like one of those "Weird Al" polka medlies or a Carl Stalling cartoon soundtrack, the pieces all fit together somehow. The magic's in the music, etc al.
Around the World in 337 Seconds
Pink Lady
Kawahara's Goemon Ishikawa
Let's Ondo Again!
Latin Geisha
Somewhere around 1999, after we co-wrote the book “Japan Edge”, Carl Horn and I were summoned to talk about anime at a film festival way down in sunny Buenos Aires. They put us up in a brand new Holiday Inn where it seemed like nothing worked except the elevator and the TV. The night we arrived, Robotech en Español was on the air, hosted by a woman in a sparkly halter top that filled viewers in on what happened to Rick and Minmay in the previous episode. Then it was jetlag and music videos until dawn with the inexplicable-yet-totally-appropriate nasty pounding funk of “Latin Geisha” by Ilya Kuryaki & the Valderramas in heavy rotation. The video was a parade of girls (none of them actually geisha and never the same one twice) each acting “sexy” for the camera in a photographer’s studio, with the two guys in the band – dressed like pimps – popping up every now to lip synch and to show their approval. I bought their CD "Leche" - easy to find on account of That Cover !!! - the next day. From then on, Carl and I stargazed, ate a lot of steak, and watched a lot of movies in BA as the magnificent ching-chong opening of Latin Geisha provided a musical accompaniment to our attempts at entertaining the locals with talk of Japanese cartoons. Sometimes I wonder why they never asked us back!
pizzicato five REMIXES 2000
When pizzicato five REMIXES 2000 was released at the turn of the century, it stood in the middle of a biblical flood of e.p. releases from Yasuharu Konishi and company. Such timing made REMIXES seem like yet another non-essential, non-canonical outing for Readymade Records completists only. But the march of time since the groups’ amicable breakup is making even their most trivial of works worthy of reappraisal. While pizzicato won over their biggest audiences with their "Twiggy Twiggy" retro lounge sound, their final phase added a future to the past-present landscape they inhabited. For instance, “Jolly Bubbly Lovely” (Cubis Tout-jour Mix), the final track on REMIXES 2000 and remixed by cubismo grafico, is full of compression and schoolyard cheers that offers precognitive flashes of the Go! Team, and Daft Punk, while pulling the down the curtain on p5 itself. A year later, they were no more. But that sound is bound to be with us for a while still.
Gokudo Ramen
Say "osu" to RIKI, the new singing persona of everyone's favorite straight-to-video yakuza movie tough guy Riki Takeuchi (Miike's Dead or Alive, Tokyo Mafia).
Today, 2/27, marks the release of the second RIKI single KURENAI NO BACKFIRE. While Riki is certainly no stranger to the recording studio, the Kishidan-style yankii/bosozoku comedy leanings of the RIKI project represent something of a new direction for Our Man (even though he played a decotruck driver before in Pachinko Game Drifter). Since the yakuza movie market has all but dried up in recent years, Takeuchi and his peers have had to scramble to make ends meet. Enter: playing living caricatures of themselves for fake applause and canned laughter. This recent television appearance by RIKI should get you up to speed on the state of the art before viewing the video for the new single itself below.
Your Little Cabal
Silver Sun are/were a fantastic UK power pop band from the tail end of Britpop who racked up comparisons to Cheap Trick, the Beach Boys, and Weezer. Naturally, they were fated to be bigger in Japan than anywhere else. “Tokyo e Ikitai”, featuring lyrics in Nova teacher "knee-hongou", was recorded in 1996 as a B-side for the fans there, and was compiled on the Japan-only “'B' is for Silver Sun” LP.
Christmas Carol
The Mack Show - Christmas Carol EP (2005)
Before they was The Colts, these buncha greaseballs here was called The Mack Show. They released the holiday themed (but still spendid) "Christmas Carol EP" in time for the 2005 holidays. It still sounds pretty good.
Everybody talks about you, “Philly Bomb”
Nona Reeves - Warner Music EP (1998)
God Lawd! Is this record almost a decade old already? It seems like just yesterday this breezy slant-eyed soul trio celebrated their major label signing with the fine five-track “Warner Music EP”. Since then, Nona Reeves has released a series of LPs of wildly varying quality, managed to get their song “Love Together” featured on the Parappa the Rapper game soundtrack, while vocalist Gota Nishidera (purveyor of some fine Michael Jackson style dance moves) moonlighted as a DJ at club events. Not bad, but still not as triumphant as the prank video for “Warner Music” would seem to suggest when they raided the Tokyo WB office ala Reservoir Dogs with toy guns in search of a suitcase full of cash. Those were the days.
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