Ganglion is an excellent hard core rock girl band out of Japan you should definitely be listening to. The first track is their most recent release Never Ever Again, which came out this past October and was also the name of their just completed world tour. Next is Save Your Heart from last July, also one of their songs from the tour. Then we have Black Out from last March, which means these examples are only my favorite few tunes from the last year. And trust me, if this band comes to my town, I will definitely be part of the audience, rocking my butt off.
In English Wagakki Band means a band playing traditional Japanese instruments, and that much is accurate. But it doesn’t give you any idea of the energy these people bring to the stage, or of how amazing the fusion of rock and traditional Japanese music can be when in the hands of masters like these. On Monday they will be doing a concert at Irving Plaza, NY, NY, and then they will swing south for a stage at SxSW in Austin, Texas. This is in honor of/promotion for their new album Yasou Emaki, which I am already looking forward to. And then there is the Anime they are involved in this year.
Here are a few tunes to get you ready for the concerts. The first track is Hangekino Yaiba, which means something like Blade of Counterattack, and was posted on Aug 14, 2015. The second is Akatsukino Ito, or The Intention of the Akatsuki, and is wonderfully visually dense with the Dragon. Finally, weighing in at 36+ million views and still climbing, is Senbon-Zakura, roughly A Thousand Cherry Blossom Petals, the first song by them I ever saw. If you have even a small chance of making one of these shows, do yourself a favor and be there. This is one of those bands the world will remember for decades, don’t let yourself miss this opportunity or you will be kicking yourself about it 50 years from now. Oh, and did I mention they were involved with an Anime production?
Fate Gear seems to be a Steampunk Heavy Metal girl group from Japan, a concept that may take a bit of getting used to, for me at least. The first track is named the same as the band, Fate Gear, the second is Romancer. Mina plays guitar and writes the Music & Lyrics. She used to be with the band Destrose who also released the second track, and now is separate, at first just partnered with a great vocalist, but then they picked up a quality drummer to round out the group. While the songs presented here came out in the summer of 2015, they have a lot going on this year as well.
The Japanese band Indigo la End is a bit hard to categorize; Alt, Rock, and Pop, they do it all. The first track is Images Do Not Appear On The Eyes from their first Warner Music single in 2014, the second is Nameless Happy Ending from their Space Shower Records days in 2013, the 3rd is Sweet Spider, also from the Space Shower era, circa 2012 or so. They have more recent tracks, but some of them are a bit overproduced, so I had to go with a few of the classics.
Released last week, Flumpool‘s new CD includes the theme song for the TV and Movie series Ajin: Demi-Human, Yoru Wa Nemurerukai? (Can You Sleep At Night?), which is the first track here. The Anime series itself just started airing in January, and runs for 13 episodes. This song was also the OP for the trilogy of movies of the same franchise; the first hit theaters in Japan in November, the second should be out roughly in May. According to Cruncyroll it will be streaming in North America on Netflix soon, but as of yesterday I wasn’t finding it.
The second track is their 2012 single Because… I am, and the third is Awakening Identity, which was posted online in April of 2015. I am not sure when it was actually released, as this was posted in support of their album The Best 2008-2014. The band also has a nice collection of ballads, but I tend to prefer music with a pulse, so I posted the ones I liked.
Japanese rock band Bump of Chicken have a new album coming out this Wednesday, February 10th, called Butterfly. The first song is the title track, the next is their 2014 hit Ray, and the third is Hello World, released as a single last April and now part of the new album. These tracks are a little more pop than I usually prefer; they started as Alt-Rock with some mainstream Rock tracks, but the songs that sold a lot of copies sounded like these, so their style has changed over the last few decades. But not every time; the tunes used in the Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (the original series) and Blood Blockade Battlefront were excellent, so I had to include one of them here as well.