This Week: Cute Japanese girls rob the pop music library, the Flaming Lips tell us a bedtime story, and the next Big Thing stares down the hype.
PuffyAmiYumi
An Illustrated History (Bar/None)
In Japan (where they're just known as Puffy), Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura are superstars. They've sold 14 million albums, hosted their own TV show and licensed everything from action figures to shoes. It's not hard to see the appeal. Sexy-cute and equipped with faultlessly catchy tunes, the Puffy girls gleefully ransack the pop bazaar, stealing everything that's not nailed down. Their songwriter svengalis—producer Tamio Okuda and former Jellyfish drummer Andy Sturmer—provide them with what seems, on the basis of this compilation, like an endless supply of genre-hopping bubblegum melodies.
Drawn from their last four Japanese releases, the songs on An Illustrated History segue effortlessly from '60s guitar pop ("That's the Way It Is") to bouncy string-drenched disco ("Electric Beach Fever") to hot Miami techno ("Sign of Love"). There's also a rumba, a Randy Newman-style piano sing-along, surf music, girl-group harmonies, and pounding garage rock. Along the way, they nick guitar lines from "Day Tripper," the Shirelles, Roger McGuinn, "Sleigh Ride" and what sounds like the entirety of Who's Next. But the thievery is so blatant and the whole enterprise so high-spirited that it feels more affectionate than mercenary. As for Ami and Yumi, their voices are sweet but rarely cloying. Even though most of the words are in Japanese (and when they're not, you wish they were), you don't need a lyric sheet to tell they're having a lot more fun than your average manufactured product. The songs don't necessarily stay with you longer than it takes to listen to them, but that's part of the charm. In a perfect world, the radio would always sound like this.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark
The Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros.)
In younger days bedtime stories took you to other lands, orange- and yellow-smeared backdrops of distance and time, where foreign creatures and daydream dialogue could roam about the imagination unrestrained. In understated, electronica-inspired melody, the new Flaming Lips album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is such a story of cinematic, dream-inducing possibility.
The first portion of the album initiates a childlike wonder with lyrics like "I don't know where the sunlight ends and the starlight begins." We find ourselves surrounded with tracks about robots who "learn to be more than machines" who "feel a synthetic kind of love" and songs about their rival, the young heroine Yoshimi who, with sonic battle cry, launches into reverberating electronic attack.
The latter portion of the album counters the earlier narrative with a maturation of subject matter: "Is to love just a waste?" Though every bit as filled with wonder, these songs muse over both introspective and worldly themes. Highlighting the album, "It's Summertime" and "In the Morning of the Magicians" talk of love and possibility. Subtle synthetic melody and an ethereal layering of Wayne Coyne's vocals accompany these tracks in daydreamy deliverance.
Toward the end of the album answers begin to arise. Lessons like "the sun doesn't go down it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round" let us know that the yellow and orange will soon melt back into the world we knew before. As a "man who's from the future" tells us on the penultimate track of the album, "All we have is now. All we ever had was now." Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' understated melodies and innocent, evocative narrative take the listener to a place only paralleled by words read above bedtime covers.
—Liz Tapp
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Master (Touch And Go)
I keep having these discussions with my record geek friends about when the next Big Thing will break in rock 'n' roll and what it will be. You see, music geeks are always waiting for something new and exciting to happen—something that can capture that giddy anything-can-happen feeling that made rock 'n' roll such a cultural force.
Music critics take it one step further by trying to discover the next big thing. So, you get advance hype on groups like the Strokes (which can rarely live up to the raves) and some after-the-fact buzz (the White Stripes).
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are getting similar press, and like the Strokes and the Stripes, they mine '60s and '70s garage rock for inspiration. So are they the next big thing? No. But they're damn good. On this five-song EP, they lace each song with tension, making one hell of a fierce stomp with just drums, guitar and voice. Lead singer Karen O alters her voice from angry sexual frustration to tender yearning. She starts off "Bang" panting, while Brian Chase thumps along on drums and Nick Zinner engulfs them both with buzzing guitar.
They know they're being set up for a backlash (every band anointed a next Big Thing gets it whether they're really a Big Thing or not). On "Our Time," she purrs, "It's our time to break on through/ It's the year to be hated/ So glad that we made it." And, of course, Big Things never give a damn what anyone thinks—they just do whatever the hell they want and let us feel their energy. That's why we keep waiting.
—Joe Tarr
August 1, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 31
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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