Hm. According to…my own internet presence…I’ve gone completely insane as of a few years ago. I’ve just been looking through what is the backlog of records I should be in the process of reviewing, if I’m taking this project seriously, and uh…it’s not looking too good. But I know better. The truth is, I’ve been insane most of my life maybe until…today? I dunno, people can snap and go insane one day, not always traumatically, just a lot of little things build up sometimes. Why can’t it work the other way around? I’ve had a few good night’s sleep in a row and things have been generally ok…maybe that’s all it took. After…so many years.

So anyway, in Japan, it’s Buddha’s birthday today, or yesterday, since it’s already tomorrow there. Some people think it’s in early December. It’s not really important. But you’re supposed to spend the day in mindful reflection, I guess, which in what you’re supposed to be doing all the time, but it’s like every other religion pretty much in that most people aren’t taking it very seriously most of the time.

So here we are. I’m picking this one unrandomly out of the pile.

Hey, I’m glad I have a blog. I would not have remembered this album. I’m trying to reorganize my files and it would take years to get to this listening to this again. Goddamn mess. What the hell do you expect from a crazy person? It made my Best of 2012 (altho it came out late 2011), which should really be a best of albums I already reviewed, shouldn’t it. Well.

First of all: could we just call this album “self-titled”? We could. It is. But you know what the deal with this band is? They’re fuckin’ cool. It’s a good thing. It’s a band. That’s why you start a fuckin’ band, to do something cool. Look, if you put some unicode bullshit in your name that has to be copypasted every time, you’re kind of a cock. Granted. Some would say double slashes are just as pretentious, but it ain’t. It’s just the right amount. So the name of this album just looks better in this format so I’m using it, but let’s be clear that it a self-titled album and we’re not going to say “why-tee-slash-slash-ess-tee” in conversation, if it comes up. Which it should. Also acceptable at this point would be “the album” or, in the future, “the first one”. OK.

This band has a whole live element I don’t know much about, it’s supposedly “operatic”. I only get this from the first track, Raccoon Song, which is the most forgettable. I had literally forgotten about it. This is definitely against the general common sense “rules” for new bands, which is to put your best song first. But another of those rules is to not make the cover some kind of incomprehensible artwork that does not even have the name of the band on it, but like, a picture of the band. That makes sense. But man, fuck making sense. This cover rules. There’s no way I could not listen to a record with this cover. I would be so bummed if it wasn’t great. What the fuck is that thing? Fuckin’ cool, that’s what.

Also, there’s only 7 songs that average out to average length, for a total of only about 31 minutes. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a full album, but how many songs do you need. More than 1 or 2? NO. It’s just about perfect. If you can’t say something in under 45 minutes, you don’t have anything to say.

And what are they saying? Absolutely nothing coherent or intelligible as a real message. JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. (Or not, get off my back, I’m just not-crazy today.) The only words I can make out on this album are in Japanese, a language I don’t believe any of the members actually speak. They translate to “I AM STAR CAT.” YES.

This is the single I guess, Hoshi Neko. The big stand out with a with a phased intro and the catchy Japanese hook. These are Canadians, btw. I assumed at least one was J-Canadian but apparently not. The bandcamp page uses the tags “chinese” and “iroquios”, so it’s intentionally mixing things up. Seems like some of the references are Buddhist and some are Native American…maybe. Maybe they are just making some of the shit up out of thin air. You can totally do that when you work on something cool. It’s not like fucking fan fiction. There’s no canon!

The other songs are also pretty good put not as pop. “Operatic” outside of whatever the live show consists of is squarely within the concept and sound more or less of “rock opera”, altho this is usually a bad thing in my opinion. They make something that works. I think they achieve the effect by making music that is more like soundtrack music than part of a musical.

Reverse Crystal is like a more-rocking out/less Kraut Stereolab with those same kind of high-register, unintelligible, repeating vocal phrases, and even a long second-half pop drone coda but with a lot of cymbal bashing, and it’s got like an Iron Butterfly organ solo in there. Great.

A Star over Pureland is the only explicit Buddhist reference I can find apart from the name, which most people(?) will people recognize from the Boredoms’ Eye Yamantaka (it’s not his real name). Altho if you want to get into it, these are reference to competing schools of Buddhism. Yamantaka is mostly a Tibetan thing. Pure Land is a like a Buddhist afterlife which not all Buddhists believe in. No, there’s no way to prove I am not looking this up as I go along. Oh wait, there is Pure Land in Tibet. I did just look that up. Well, there you go. There’s some Tibetan cymbals and horns in there. I knew that. I know stuff. Guitar freak-out on this track is cool, but it’s clear the keys are more their thing. It’s definitely the climax of the show, but as far as songs and general moods go, they are best and building up the tension than actually exploding. Or resolving. But it all seems worth it for the parts that work.

You know what, Crystal Fortress Over a Sea of Trees could also totally be a Tibetan thing. I don’t know that much about the Tibetan stuff. But I do know it has another killer organ solo. The particular synth rhythm track they use sounds a little out of place. It’s like we’ve been in something like a 70s horror movie and now it’s like Knight Rider all of sudden. Doesn’t quite mesh. Ends with some vague chants. Maybe that is in Tibetan. Usually done by dudes of course so it doesn’t sound anything like the standard stuff, or maybe it’s not that at all. Questions, with answers, that I am not going to try to find out. It just doesn’t matter. %