expect delay
I honestly thought that the arrival today of kurayamisaka yori ai wo komete, the debut full-length from Tokyo’s Kurayamisaka, would have come with a little more fanfare, with their 2022 debut EP kimi wo omotte iru being immediately hailed as a classic of the J-gaze genre and starting the buzz that’s been steadily growing for […]
Japanese idol-gaze heroes RAY announced details of their fourth album yesterday, and after 2022’s Camellia, which took their album naming convention towards the floral, they’re back to colours – White will be out on October 1. They’ve expanded their influences since their 2020 debut Pink, which owed more than a debt to their former incarnation […]
Nagoya’s Blurred City Lights released their very good double-EP-slash-second album Utopia/Dystopia earlier this year but today I’m going back not just to last year’s debut 天使のいない街で , but to their second-ever single 「花束」 (aka “Flower”), which they dropped in December of 2022 accompanied by a simple animated video. Why that song, and now? Well this […]
When my listening habits first swung towards Japan, Plastic Girl In Closet from Iwate prefecture was in heavy rotation, in particular their 2014 album Eye Cue Rew See, though I favoured the 2022 remake of that record because… I don’t really know, actually. Advertised as “re-edited, re-recorded, and re-mixed”, presumably it’s better produced and better […]
The day the Next Music From Toyko lineup is announced is kind of like Christmas for me… at least since I started attending last year. So yeah, not that long, but considering that the traveling mini-festival is the only way I’ll get to see any of Japan’s indie rock scene live short of flying over […]
I’ve mentioned before that my descent into the deep, bottomless rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze began in early 2022 with For Tracy Hyde’s final record Hotel Insomnia, but navigating the scene over there – which goes back 15 to 30 years, depending on which thread you pull on – is no easy task, particularly when […]
Nagoya dreampop duo Blurred City Lights came just about out of nowhere last year – okay, out of their bedroom studios – with their full-length debut 天使のいない街で that ended up with a highly-coveted position on my 2024 year-end list. It did this on the strength of its vision, songwriting, and managing the impressive task of […]
It’s impossible to get into the Japanese music scene even a little without encountering the world of idols, and by extension, alt-idols, which basically is the combination of idols with alternative music genres (see: Babymetal). It’s strange and fascinating and actually quite entertaining live – I saw Planet After The Rain at a shoegaze showcase […]
If there is any place on earth that is a physical manifestation of the Japanese dreampop/shoegaze scene, I think it would be Kōenji HIGH, a venue – or live house, as they call clubs here – in the northwest of Tokyo. They regularly host showcases from label/promoters Dreamwaves and Total Feedback, and by pure luck […]
I don’t know much about re:lapse, save for the fact that all the members have previous tours of duty in other bands in the Tokyo shoegaze scene and they’ve put out a series of terrific EPs since the Fall 2021, helpfully self-titled and sequentially numbered. The first was a pleasant if rather unremarkable slice of […]
