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Blotto
Singles Collection 2004-2007 |
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Tracklist |
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01 - Attack to Prize!!!
02 - Ghostwriter
03 - Accidents, Don't Be Panic!!!
04 - It's a Closing Sentence
05 - The Eternal Allergy (The Album)
06 - John Graham Mellor
07 - Phantom Limb Music!!!
08 - #2
09 - One Point and Twenty-one Gigowatt!!!
10 - Urggggh!!! |
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Review |
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Former punks make good on their roots, hit bold new direction: it's a familiar storyline that rarely fails to warm my heart. Having come from the same background, it's never too hard to recognize musicians who grew up with that fundamental DIY punk ethos (and of course, I'm speaking of the great nebulous "punk" state of mind, unconstricted by arbitrary genre rules). They exude it like a scent, a waft of danger and volatility.
Nabekawa Mitsuyoshi and Akimoto Takaji, founding guitarist/singer and bassist of Bandwagon, slather themselves with it like bad cologne. Formerly members of the ho-hum Yokohama pop-punk band Oatmeal, they formed Bandwagon in 1999 and, like many Japanese bands, underwent a long gestation period of local activity, writing and refining before finally recording their first album in 2003. The Equipment!!! was a fun, upbeat slab of indie punk, fusing late '90s Deep Elm emo melodies with engaging, technically impressive songwriting. 2005's New Music Machine Extended Play!!! EP was a forward-looking but flawed effort that saw the band add electronic and dance elements, but overreached and ended up perhaps a bit too silly. Fortunately, with their second album, The Weekenders!!!, Bandwagon learned from the mistakes of its previous EP and utilized their new tricks in a much more cohesive and impressive whole.
The centerpiece of Bandwagon's sound in releases past was certainly the twin guitar attack of Nabekawa and Ikeda Keisuke. Careful scrunity reveals a subtle lead/rhythm relationship between the two, but this is almost certainly due to Nabekawa's vocal duties leaving him with only so much concentration for guitar - by and large, both guitars complement each other with equally complex harmonic and rhythmic figures. If anything, however, their previous album was a better showcase for pure guitar riffing, owing to Ikeda's now-hefty usage of keyboards. So between vocals and keys, the guitarists have plenty of distractions, but this works out perfectly fine in the end, for The Weekenders' strength lies in the variety of its instrumentation.
New Music Machine, with its handclaps, synthesizers and two-hand hi-hat disco beats made it clear that Bandwagon had discovered dance-punk. It also largely abandoned the poppy melodies and scales of their first album in favor of a more boisterous, varied approach. As mentioned above, this didn't always pay the highest dividends, but it apparently gave them enough options to settle on a theme for The Weekenders, a dire minor key motif that they use almost exclusively throughout the album. In a Venn diagram comparing melodies, the two full lengths would not intersect. This melodic theme is put through a ringer of gaudy keyboards and guitar effects at rapid and unpredictable intervals. The rhythm section is more aggressive here than ever before, and Nabekawa's not-particularly-angelic singing voice finds its greatest range yet. From a craftsmanship perspective, the band is as tight as its ever been; a melding of early Liars post-punk exuberance, Dismemberment Plan polish and Q and Not U funk.
What's always been most impressive about Bandwagon to me is the enthusiasm of its players. I'm not speaking to the apparent urgency of their exclamation-in-triplicate song subjects -- though I could spend paragraphs expounding on the brilliance of titles like "Sparkle!!!" "Urggggh!!!" and "Eeeexcellent!!!" -- but to how completely written these songs are. There's not a second of time wasted in the arrangements; they zip at full speed and take unexpected twists and turns without ever looking backward. Not only are the members of Bandwagon talented, but they clearly get bored easily, and their solution to this problem is to cram every song full of as many riffs as possible. In fact, they're so exhaustively packed that listening to the album from start to finish can be wearying, especially because only dub-heavy "John Graham Mellor" could even be loosely considered a "downbeat" tune -- the rest are full throttle.
This drawback leads into what is easily the biggest pitfall of the album: variety is very hard to come by. Heads already caught in its spell have plenty of elaborate, vibrant details with which to keep themselves amused, but if a first-time listener doesn't like one song, he probably won't like any of them. However, it's the type of cautious pandering to hesitant audiences in the hope of addressing this issue that the punk philosophy is supposed to stamp out of you. The Weekenders!!! is a refreshingly single-minded album that is clearly comfortable with itself. |
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