Buck-Tick

A fundamental movement through which alternative rock permeated the imagination of at least one generation of young Japanese listeners, visual kei nevertheless had to endure the stigma of the more hardline local critics. Because of its obsessive focus on image, most bands of the genre have historically been branded as vacuous, commercial, interested exclusively in appearance rather than substance. Even granting some credit to accusations as trite and superficial as these, readers are still invited to run an image search for the bands mentioned in this article. It's hard to remain indifferent to the creativity poured into the scene's aesthetic, made up of vivid hair dyes, extravagant clothes dripping with lace and frills, feminine make-up and exaggerated backcombed hairstyles. Nor is it possible to overlook the sheer androgyny flaunted by these musicians – almost exclusively male – and the boldness with which they defied bourgeois moralistic conventions, often extremely rigid in their definite and unambiguous pigeonholing of gender behaviour and customs.

For the sake of a somewhat blunt simplification, within visual kei two main strands can be identified: one tied to metal sonorities, the other more drawn to gothic-tinged post-punk. Among the bands belonging to the first strand are X Japan, one of the earliest bands of the movement to emerge and the only one to also win over official critics [note 1], Dead End, Dir En Grey or Versailles. In the second strand we can instead count, among others, Luna Sea, Kuroyume, L'Arc-en-ciel, La'cryma Christi or Malice Mizer. The bands just mentioned display so many distinctive traits and significant variations on new wave that they would deserve a separate discussion; what really matters to this article, though, is to focus on the putative fathers of the strand and, alongside X Japan, the great pioneers of the whole movement: Buck-Tick.

Formed in 1983 in Fujioka, in the Japanese provinces, Atsushi Sakurai (vocals), Hisashi Imai (lead guitar), Yutaka Higuchi (bass), Hidehiko Hoshino (rhythm guitar) and Toll Yagami (drums), after various hardships and family objections, moved to Tokyo in search of fortune. There they managed to catch the attention of a major record and film distribution company, Victor Invitation Records; between 1987 and 1988 they built a growing following thanks to the albums "Hurry Up Mode", "Sexual XXXXX!" and "Seventh Heaven". The decisive turning point, however, came in October '88 with "Just One More Kiss", the single many consider the very first building block of visual kei as a whole. At once epic and romantic, cut through by a piercing post-punk bassline, the song serves as the perfect prelude to the album "Taboo", released in 1989 and their first number 1 on the Oricon chart. The doors to success were now wide open: the following "Aku no hana" (1990), their best-selling album, and the remix of their debut "Hurry Up Mode" both reached the top of the chart, cementing their status as idols of the masses.

Released in February 1991, "Kurutta tayou" is an essential chapter in the quintet's career: although it stalled at number 2 on the chart, thus ending their run of number ones, with roughly four hundred thousand copies sold it is the band's second best-selling album, just behind "Aku no hana".

From the opening track, "Speed", the record's coordinates are immediately clear. This is aggressive glam rock with abrasive guitars, not so far removed from the sound Suede would adopt in England a year later; such a booming, metallic sound, however, remained largely foreign to Britpop and its surrounding scene.

"Machine" further underlines the toughness of the sound, with its palm-muted electric guitars heavily distorted and treated with chorus or flanger pedals. Although, as already mentioned, Buck-Tick's music never enjoyed much consideration from official Japanese critics, tracks like this bear witness to the reasonable goodwill they garnered instead from the press closer to hard rock or metal.

"My Funny Valentine" reveals the full extent of Buck-Tick's passion for post-punk and its surrounding territory: we're not too far, in fact, from that alienated funk that made the fortune of bands such as PIL or Gang of Four. This factual inheritance shouldn't be mistaken, however, for a slavish, belated rehash of stylistic tropes. Not only is the songwriting unmistakably tied to J-rock (just think of the soaring chorus), but the very sound of the guitars is actually quite different from what characterised English independent music between the 80s and early 90s. A far from secondary factor lies in the guitar models played by Imai and Hosono: while the likes of Will Sergeant, Daniel Ash, Johnny Marr, Andy Gill, and so on, favoured brands that were already vintage at the time (Fender Stratocaster, Jaguar, Jazzmaster, Rickenbacker or Gibson semi-acoustics), Buck-Tick played guitars closer to Super Strat models, usually the domain of metal guitarists in Western music. This was a practice shared not only by many other visual kei bands, but also by key local new wave acts such as Boøwy, who curiously came from the same city and generation as Buck-Tick. Japanese brands such as Ibanez were exploding in the 80s thanks to models suited to shred virtuosity, and their availability for musicians in the Land of the Rising Sun was inevitably much easier than for American models.

The following track, "Reborn", makes this aspect even clearer, showing how dissonant riffs and guitar solos that in Anglo-American post-punk sound skeletal, come across as far more violent and full, even across the frequency spectrum, when played on instruments with different electronic components. "Angel Fish" stands out for the interplay between the musicians: Yagami marks time in the verse with off-beat snare hits, while between the left and right channels of the mix the two guitars engage in a constant dialogue.

"Jupiter", which has become one of the band's key tracks, cleverly shifts the mood, steering the tracklist away from an overly monotone trajectory. It's a spectral new wave folk piece, a sort of Japanese answer to "The Killing Moon": compared to the Echo & the Bunnymen classic, however, what we hear here is a less elegiac sound, punctuated by beds of choral vocals and ambient keyboards, torn open by an instrumental crescendo that leads to hard-edged tones completely unknown to McCulloch and co. It's also a perfect example of Sakurai's vocal style, charismatic and unique even within visual kei. While most singers of the movement favour a very clear, crystalline delivery, marked by broad and frequent use of a flawless vibrato (think of the likes of Luna Sea, L'Arc-en-ciel, X Japan), Sakurai draws on the baritone depth of his voice without dwelling too much on technicalities, alternating subdued, feverish and rasping tones to heighten the emotional impact of his performances.

If "Taboo" is the band's most pioneering album, one of the first cornerstones on which visual kei was built, the maturity and quality of the tracklist on "Kurutta Tayou" is nonetheless astonishing: even a song like "Sakura", which wasn't chosen as a single, boasts remarkable arrangement refinements, especially in the timbral variety of the keyboard parts, as well as in Imai's solo, marked by heavy use of a harmonizer pedal set to fifths.

"Brain, Whisper, Head, Hate Is Noise" plunges the listener into a psychedelic whirlwind, amid arpeggios simulating the sound of a sitar, feedback-laden guitars, a martial rhythmic pattern driven above all by the toms, and vocals steeped in flanger, distortion and vast reverb. Worth noting too is the substantial lysergic-trip instrumental interlude around the 2'35" mark: on closer inspection, the album's eleven songs display a remarkable eclecticism, one that on first listen can almost go unnoticed thanks to an iron stylistic coherence in the production.

Although not a concept album, "Kurutta taiyou" reveals from its very title ("Mad Sun" in English) a certain focus on themes of madness, paranoia and loss of touch with reality, all wedded to an imaginative, poetic literary style. In this sense, one of the most representative lyrics is that of "MAD" (nomen omen):

Sono impazzito, mi stringo le ginocchia,

mi lecco le ferite mentre la linfa scorre,

fuggendo dal vortice di una sirena.

Potrò continuare a vivere così?

Sono pazzo, la mia lingua si scioglie

mentre sogno di affogare sul fondo di un mare rosso,

ricordo solo la gentilezza e così mi addormento.

Abbraccio l'asfalto, ho un incubo febbrile,

devo scapparne

Musically, this is, to these ears, the album's most successful track, at least among the faster ones: the two electric guitars chase each other, one locked into a palm-muted riff on high notes, enriched by a pronounced short-feedback delay, the other marking out the chord progression with heavily distorted tones, edging close to industrial. The simultaneous presence of synth and electric bass and the acidic vocal filter push things further in that direction, without ever denying the quintet's taste for catchy, singable vocal melodies. Also worth mentioning is the fine accompanying video, steeped in a sordid j-horror atmosphere.

Industrial violence merges with pure gothic rock tones on the following "Chikashitsu no Melody", where Atsushi Sakurai displays a mournful, nervy expressiveness that has nothing to envy in its Albion gothic counterparts.

Finally comes "Taiyou ni korosareta": Buck-Tick prove they're not merely a guitar band, and indeed in the intro they build a driving riff carried by a synthesizer emulating the sound of tubular bells. The overall mood is once again nocturnal, but the tempo isn't as driving as in most of the album's other tracks, and the song takes its time: the instrumental intro lasts over a minute, while the first chorus doesn't arrive until almost three minutes in. The guitar duo's arrangements once again prove inspired, thanks to a steady stream of ideas, such as crunchy-toned arpeggios alternating with brief, saturated licks, while the rhythm section alone shoulders the task of supporting the vocals. Worth noting here is Yagami's clever handling of dynamics, initially weaving a pattern built almost entirely on hi-hat accents, then gradually adding touches and fills from the rest of the kit, building up to a tribal, tom-driven groove in the tension-releasing explosion of the chorus.

Once the tour in support of the album wrapped up, Buck-Tick would go on to further success, culminating two years later in the masterpiece single “Dress”, which over time became their signature song and was featured on the album “Darker Than Darkness -Style 93-”, before going on to reap further success and establish themselves as one of the most important bands in Japanese rock, alternative or otherwise.

A bitter fate: the unbreakable bond of a close-knit quintet of friends, who met as teenagers and never parted ways throughout forty years of artistic and professional activity, came to an end this past October, following the sudden and shocking death of frontman Atsushi Sakurai, felled by an aneurysm at just fifty-seven years old.

[note 1] it is to X Japan that we owe the etymology of “visual kei”. On the cover of their second album, “Blue Blood” (1989), the words “Psychedelic Violence Crime Of Visual Shock” are prominently displayed: from an abbreviation of this slogan, journalist Seiichi Hoshiko, founder of the specialist magazine Shoxx in 1990, would coin the expression “Visual Shock kei”, apt for describing the strong visual impact of the emerging bands on the alternative scene of the time. The abbreviation visual kei would later be adopted and become standard.

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10/12/2023