Sure, and this week we have some fun Mystery J-Rock. I am completely clueless on who does the first track or what it is called, since I only saw squiggles on the page, but I like it a lot. The second one is by Plenty, kind of a J-Grunge band with some interesting music. The third is the Genki Rockets song Touch Me from their second album.
A few tunes from an interesting band. The first is Pontiacs doing Cold Fingered Girl, used as the OP for the anime Level E. The second is The Pontiacs song Shinjuku, the third their song about America. I won’t bother to identify the last few; if you keep listening that far you must already know you love this band, you will track down the titles yourself. They sound a bit like what would happen if T-Rex had 10 Years Afters love child, and put it up for adoption in Tokyo.
A few more fun bands from Japan for you to check out. A lot of these folks have albums released in the US and UK as imports, although they can be pretty hard to find (hint: Amazon and the like are good places to look if your local brick and mortar doesn’t carry them). First up this time is a favorite band of mine, Uplift Spice with her song Omega Rythm. The second band is another favorite, Scandal, doing a live version of Shoujo S, which is the opening song for Bleach. The final tune this time around is Psycho x Letter by Aicle, a Visual Kei band. As with all Visual Kei bands, it is a bit difficult to tell which band member is what gender, but the music is great.
There is some amazing music coming out of Japan, and I thought it was time to share a few more of my favorite tracks. The first one is the 5th single from One OK Rock, called Answer Is Near, it was uploaded by the band and it rocks. The second one is The Plasticzoom’s Witch, which was both directed and uploaded by Yu Wakatsuki, and it rocks. The third track is a live version of the Asian Kung Fu Generation song Re-Write, and it rocks. Are we noticing a pattern here? If you go to the YouTube page each of those videos came from, you will find more tracks by the same artist.
Another fine J-Rock band, Uplift Spice was formed in 2005 and is best described as Emo-Punk. The first one of this set is Minority Parade, which they played on last weeks J-Melo episode. The next track is Memento, followed by Justice; that should be enough to tell you whether or not this band is worth following. I for one enjoyed the hell out of every track I have heard from them.
Uplift Spice also has a MySpace page you might want to check out for more information.
A band I stumbled across the other day, One OK Rock has been around in Tokyo since 2005, and has a lot of energy. The songs here are Liar, No Scared, and Dreamer, in that order, and represent just a small amount of the band’s output.