WAKUSEI ABNORMAL - Nandemonai Kyouki

The facts speak for themselves: a new generation of Japanese musicians is emerging, elbowing its way to claim its own space, eager to sweep away the staleness that engulfs it. Put like that it sounds like a statement of the obvious, but one key detail is missing: these emerging talents, raised alongside the definitive seal of all j-pop (Ringo Shiina's “Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana”) and everything that followed from it, are now spreading its cult, riding a wave of highly personal reinterpretations and an arty attitude that breaks the monotony of a scene that has largely fallen into the abyss.

We already touched on the subject regarding the explosive Yasuha Kominami (now fresh off her first full-length album), and it's worth reiterating all the more for Wakusei Abnormal, who among the disciples of the Apple of Fukuoka are perhaps the ones who have best grasped her lesson, especially in its band-based incarnation. Clearly smitten with the incandescent art-jazz-pop-rock of Tokyo Jihen, and determined to keep moving down that road so abruptly interrupted by its frontwoman, Alex Taneko and Tena Ondine (the pen names of the two eccentric cohorts) burst onto the stage without warning, ready for anything except compromise. For our part, we couldn't ask for more.

Halfway between furious garage/punk instinct (vocally speaking, the two can almost put sacred monsters like Afrirampo to shame) and a granite-like prog shell (after all, with such elective fathers of the genre...), the two young women, with a flair and compositional attitude among the most incendiary around, pack into barely twenty-five minutes of mini-album a catalogue of solutions and devices worth the career of quite a few j-rock scene veterans. In the two-and-a-bit minutes of “Nusutto”, the opening track, this double-track approach becomes evident, with the duo shifting melodic gear no fewer than three times, amid relentless swerves and syncopation, and drums that carve openings toward jazz; all of it seasoned with screams and whoops that almost seem to want to sweep away everything interesting underneath.

But it's precisely in never crossing the threshold of this ridge, in never giving in to gratuitous racket, that Wakusei Abnormal prove so fascinating: beneath the fiery, overflowing vocal interplay of Alex and Tena (who sometimes join forces in feisty duets, see “Inu”, the most Nineties track of the bunch), who are in any case also solid performers, emerges the profile of two first-rate songwriters, with some of the most interesting harmonic ideas around in a while. It also takes a good deal of nerve and courage to break the frantic rhythm of “Tsukiyo Kaisuiyoku” and slip in a piano motif, before picking the main theme back up as if nothing happened. Likewise, the frenetic jazzy psychedelia of “Kamisama Gokko”, held together by a wildly scrambled sense of meter, ends up dissolving into a long coda for bass and percussion, with the voice doing pretty much whatever it pleases. Not bad, for genuine newcomers.

In conclusion, if “Nandemonai Kyouki” is simply a calling card, an introduction to what might await us in the future (not even that distant, given that a second mini-album is due out in October), the hopes of finding ourselves in front of two shining gems of Japanese rock are very high. If they keep working this razor-thin line, there will be nothing to worry about.

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25/09/2013