![]() ![]() I can’t imagine liking Twiggy Twiggy or Shiritori o suru Koibito-tachi without knowing any Japanese. Also my Japanese is not great, but it helps to at least know what the songs are about and catch a few phrases. I can’t say what I would have done differently, though, since the whole point is the Japanese approach to appropriation of western culture. Maybe I just got older and less rockist, but I think it also has a lot to do with consistency of each album’s sound, and maybe track sequencing. I bought Made In USA way back when, liked it OK but didn’t get into them until years later when I picked up a used copy of Happy End of the World, on a whim. It’s that Matador’s repackaging for the American audience made it impossible to hear what the point was. My problem with P5 is not so much that they released too much material (I’m a Stereolab fan, so I’m used to ignoring releases that don’t look worthwhile). Thanks for this, it’s very useful and I’ve added a few things to my shopping list. See this is maybe why the P5 catalog is amazing: so many versions of the same songs so everyone can be satisfied with something. ![]() Wow, I hadn’t heard the single version, but I vastly, vastly approve the minimal album version. One of the few P5 songs where I prefer the single. I hadn’t listened to it in a long time, and I was vaguely fond of “America de wa.” I should edit that Quora post!Īny thoughts on the Single vs Album versions of Such a Beautiful Girl like You? The single version is far and away better in my opinion. Ha, I’ve actually thought a lot about that, and yes, I was totally wrong. I think I am starting to understand P5 now. I thought it was okay on first listen but I think I need to reappraise. Your opinion of the last album sure had changed! Hi there, I read your Quora post a while ago and downloaded all the albums you mentioned there so I could get into P5. David Marx (Marxy) - Tokyo-based writer and musician - is the founder and chief editor of Néojaponisme. (D) - An Orientalist failure for masters of mukokuseki Internationalism An ignoble ending for the band, and probably not a coincidence that Nomiya Maki barely appears on the songs. The only non-arguable bright side is the extension of Happy End’s throwaway “AIEUO” hiragana syllabary ditty into a fully fledged Disney symphonic song for the ages. Pizzicato Five throw all taste and class out the window and just go “Kimono” and “Sukiyaki Song” until you want to burn every album in their entire catalog. By taking Japan as a theme, Konishi produces a recursive error, like the scene where John Malkovich goes into his own head. I could maybe extract some good quotes from the lyrics of “Fashion People” (Nigo!) for a nonfiction book, and I am partial to the mambo-beats of 1960s cover “In America” but the rest is beyond cheesy - like a “JAPAN COOL” poster hanging in a provincial gift shop selling salty green tea. This record is really, really, really, really terrible. (A) - The groovy, moogy Pizzicato Five we should all remember Other interesting sound experiments include the mega-blown out mixes of “Weekend” and “The Great Invitations,” the Austin Powers trend convergence of “Playboy Playgirl,” and minimal stutter snare of “Such a Beautiful Girl Like You.” If you remove the skits, this is one of the more consistently good efforts and a sound for the ages. The band recovers with “A New Song,” P5’s best use of the moog synthesizer in a bright and shiny Hugo Montenegro pastiche. And then we get to Konishi’s great weakness in sequencing his own albums, forcing the least exciting song into the prime #2 spot in this case, the boring “Rolls Royce” goes on for eight full minutes. The album starts with the excellent “La Dépression” - a cheery joke about Japan’s own economic despair. Here we begin the final, mature years of Pizzicato Five, a period in which the band finds a unique, yet timeless sound rooted in 1960s analog with the speed of late 1990s electronic music. ![]()
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