06.02.13
Archival: Lock n Loll
In a past life I wrote about music. At one publication I took up an interest in rock and roll from the Land of the Rising Sun. They love it there, the enthusiasm of the young for it at the beginning of the 21st century knew no bounds. In fact, enthusiasm was everything! We could use some of that here.
From the Village Voice, some of the stuff of which I am the most proud.
Sex Bomb Baby Yeah
When the Japanese realized their geese were well and truly cooked in the war in the Pacific half a century ago, they came up with the highly popular idea of the kamikaze pilot. However, within that cadre of certifiable fliers was an even smaller group: the men who chose to ride the baka.
The baka was not a suicide airplane with bombs strapped under its wings. It wasa bomb: a big metal cylinder with a cap on one end, a feeble rocket engine on the other, and a ton or so of gelignite and the “pilot” on a wire seat in between. The baka and its rider would be slung under the wing of a bomber, flown out to the scene of the battle, and released in the general direction of a U.S. ship. Theoretically, the rider was supposed to “fly” the baka into an American ship, making a big, smoking hole in the ocean. In practice, the baka did not fly. Instead, it dropped like a stone. Baka riders hardly ever hit anything, unlike their more successful brethren who flew actual kamikaze airplanes. But the explosions could be mighty impressive. You might even think of the baka as an unsmart smart bomb.
I am told baka means “fool.” Anyway, long before Slim Pickens rode “Dear John” down to the Soviet countryside and into film history hollerin’ all the way in Dr. Strangelove, young Japanese men had been there, done that, for real. On Collection, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant strike me as the living heirs to the baka riders. They dress relentlessly in black, appear to be patent nutbags, and miss the target a substantial part of the time. But when they don’t, there’s one hell of an explosion.
Collection, a bit over half of which is near unlistenable bombastic r&b greasechain, cries out to be strapped, after the fashion of the baka, under the wing of a massive distribution company in search of competition to smite—or at least to irritate mightily. But “Boogie,” which is not a boogie, sports a fine melody, as does “World’s End (primitive version),” coupled to Wilko Johnson guitar. You see, I liked “Sukiyaki” as a tyke, and have been looking for replacements ever since. Don’t laugh!
The intrigued might also seek out “Hotel Bronco” from last year’s Gear Blues, which is reminiscent of Alfred E. Neuman’s sublime “It’s a Gas!”—published as an acetate-coated cardboard single in Madmag eons ago—except with guitar exchanged for Farfisa and “Sonova beetch!” as blurted lyric.
If TMGE had been alive in 1967, Mike Vernon would have worked overtime to sign them to Deram, they’d have had an instant residence at Klooks Kleek, and someone would be working on an omnibus CD complete with liner notes as we speak. Inspirational to children and many geezers too, Collection gives heart to all who have recorded or ever will record their Marshall dreams in an incomprehensible hybrid of fractured English and some other language.
John Toland’s The Rising Sun tells of the leader of a kamikaze force, presumably including some baka riders, who radioed a message to his superiors saying, “I will crash into and destroy the conceited enemy in the true spirit of Bushido . . . ” Then he went to his doom off Okinawa.
Thee Michelle Gun Elephant bring that spirit to rock and roll. “I want my motorcycle . . . ah ha . . . oh yeah . . . ah ha!” some crazy man sings jubilantly —as the Collection rocket bomb, now not totally unnoticed, goes plunging into the sea.
Dump-Truckin’ Japanese Turdcore Act Bowels for Dollars
Americans believe constipation to be a fearful evil. The superstition is dressed up in evening TV ads for psyllium that treat it as religion. Purges make one wholesome, and there can be nothing better in life than to be a laxative addict.
It was a belief while growing up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, too, and what the stiff-necked Pennsy Germans feared they wished upon others. As a consequence, shit jokes—specifically, those in which inferiors suffered the revenge of laxatives or brown-stained toilet paper pasted to the shoe—were a source of glee. Indeed, one of the favored local artists was a “Professor Schnitzel,” who recorded 45s of comedy routines sprinkled with such tales.
The Japanese metal band Bathtub Shitter are a natural antidote to Pennsy Dutch, striking the world’s heevahavas in their intellectual center, the bowels. Lyrics from Lifetime Shitlist are not the crazy Jap-lish they seem, instead employing themes of elimination as metaphors for life. “Persist poor shit” and “Breeze from the hole, snore of the God,” rants the singer; is it Shakespearean or just cookie monster metal growling?
A memory that has pursued me into middle age is one of sadism disguised as care by my mother. The damned woman became possessed of the idea that my brother refused the call of nature while playing outdoors. This led to fever, she insisted, so the common cold became an excuse to administer enemas, which generated screams—half in discomfort, half in humiliation.
The Bathtub Shitters know something like it. While nutbag vocal muttering is all over the record, part of the time the BS mouth is in a studio duet with an exaggeratedly childlike shrieker who sounds like my brother did, cowering in the bathroom.
A strong scent of ’80s Brit-midlands metal emanates from the band; BS cover Witchfinder General’s “No Stayer,” although the listener will have to know the original to recognize it without the cue card. Hell, Bathtub Shitter’s best numbers aren’t even extreme. The title track is pretty guitar chamber music, pinched from some source I can’t precisely identify. It’s immediately trumped by a hot r&b riff, “Escapism to Refresh,” one of this year’s better metallized grooves.
Bathtub Shitter want you to regain “Control of Own Hole,” good advice for a citizenry more interested in minding everyone else’s. “Sober lifes will stop [the] bowels” is another shot at an American shibboleth—temperance, this time as a complement to regular cleansings. Perhaps BS describes your life. Would I shit you?
Wild East
Japanese hard-rock acts are generally pitilessly annoying in some way. Instructive example: Church of Misery, a stoner metal band doing concept EPs on serial killers, in gibberish. To get the slightest enjoyment from them it’s necessary to grant a “get out of jail free” card to whatever feature sticks out as beyond wretched while understanding it’s the result of a great desire to be perceived as enthusiastic and earnest.
Guitar Wolf were basically awful at the American greaser lock ‘n’ loll they venerated. The band’s fringe audience, having never heard the real thing, was ill prepared to grasp their shortcomings. Dressing up like Link Wray and seemingly Vaseline-coated for dramatic rock-action poses, Guitar Wolf always looked like they delivered the goods. And while the trio had a genuine commitment to loud noise, the rhythm was ramshackle, the tone horrible. Eventually, on “UFO Romantics” and “Loverock,” honed reflexes and an animal cunning made some of the Wolves’ unintelligible blurts—like “Shinkansen High Tension” and “Jett Beer”—really invigorating. Accidental evolution or purposeful development? Who cares; on the anthology Golden Black, it finally works when you turn it up enough.
Electric Eel Shock’s Beat Me beats you over the head with ludicrous titles: “I Can Hear the Sex Noise,” “I Like Fish but Fish Hate Me.” The prizewinner in the fools’ hall of fame is “Don’t Say Fuck,” a self-defeating gem which spews the F-word ad nauseam. But the band aims squarely for early-’70s hard rock/metal tunefulness and achieves it, notably in the slash of “Scream for Me.” Last year’s Go USA featured “I Want to Be a Black Sabbath Guy but Should Be a Black Bass,” which was solidly in the Birmingham way even though the title screamed stay away. For this year, the Eel Shocks redo “Iron Man” and dare to affront consumers of dogma by switching between re-creation and a sliced funk delivery. It’s a winner because the Iommi/Butler/Ward tonal magic is preserved.
Circumcised! Down & Dirty!
Loudness were described as furnishers of “brain-destroying” music in Tony Jasper’s sometimes accidentally amusing 1983 book The International Encyclopedia of Hard Rock & Heavy Metal. It was a compliment, the longstanding Japanese band’s high-water mark in print. Subsequently, they were never taken seriously in the West. Martin Popoff, accountant-certified compiler of thousands of metal reviews, dismissed them as “just foreign and weird,” adding, “…they still remind me of Bruce Lee and Godzilla movies.” Damning Loudness with faint praises, Popoff doled out failing scores for Thunder in the East and Lightning Strikes, albums mainstreamed at an American audience in the mid-’80s.
The gimmick was to sell Loudness as a cock-rock and party-metal act, a role for which they were patently unsuited. For this purpose they were eventually adorned with a stateside frontman, Mike Vescera, pilfered from a fourth- or fifth-string U.S. metal band called Obsession, Loudness’s native singer having been deemed too “foreign and weird.” It didn’t help much. Vescera lasted a few records before continuing on as a journeyman, trading marginally upward into Yngwie Malmsteen’s band.
Wounded Bird Records has been reissuing the Loudness catalog for a few years, the first releases being CD editions of American vinyl that revealed a band committing a variety of sins while kowtowing to ’80s ‘mersh metal lowest common denominators. But more recently, the label has introduced, for the first time, a few records made by Loudness after they had disappeared from stores domestically. Paradoxically, they are an artistic about-face and the best of the batch.
The material old fans know is Loudness with a wooden rhythm section; an original singer with, take your pick, impenetrable or nonsensical lyrics; or, a sleaze-rocking American vocalist picked for the hair-band audience. But after the band washed out of the U.S market, a second Japanese vocalist, with better elocution, was hired and the rhythm section replaced. Behind all of it was a wall of guitar from Akira Takasaki, the band’s one consistently “brain-destroying” component. Besides suggesting a micro-cult following that you probably didn’t know existed, four ’05 re-releases make a baffling collection that defies pigeonholing and rewards cherry picking.
Anyone trying to appreciate these reissues in one sitting is beaten senseless by the experience. Smaller slices are worthwhile, though, and the band roams so widely around metal subgenres that there’s something for purists of various stripes. Liken it to blind pigs finding occasional truffles or busted watches being right twice a day, but contrary to their meager reputation, Loudness made a few good records.
Shadows of War hits on the backside of Loudness’s American metal ride. It’s mostly awful old Loudness with accordingly cheesy album art, seemingly dreamed up by junior high boys who’ve just discovered a love for two things that don’t belong together — fire and dressing in women’s clothes. The image of the band in silks and bouffants was and is an embarrassment of the most excruciating nature. Singer Minoru Nihara wages a mighty but futile struggle with the ways of the Cinderella/Britny Fox song stylebook. On “Black Star Oblivion” it sounds like he’s shouting, “Drug store maniac!” over and over. Entertaining — but not in a head-banging way. On another tune, “One Thousand Eyes,” he makes shrieking reference to “one hundred voices,” thus creating history’s most subtle examination of people with ten eyes.
But in between the hapless choruses, the listener hears a band that’s supremely heavy when it’s not trying to succeed. Had Loudness dispensed with the sham of writing songs, always a burden, and been photographed in denim and leather, Shadows of War could’ve been great. Loudness, Heavy Metal Hippies, and Once and for All, however, are an entirely different story, the style metamorphosing from Silly MTV Hopefuls to Marauding Visigoths.
Dismissed from having to make it in the West, the band reorganized, drafting their new vocalist from another Japanese stateside non-starter, EZO. EZO was a doomed Gene Simmons “discovery” that relocated to L.A., where a Geffen Records A&R rep took a shine to them in a fit of delirium. Plodding, tortured-sounding, and unwisely dressed up kabuki style, they sold about as well as bottled horse piss.
But the trio of albums made featuring EZO’s Masaki Yamadi as frontman changed Loudness from party metallers to asphalt soldiers. Everything commercial went to a garage sale–the sissyman look, the old drummer and bass player, the Eddie van Halenism. Colors were out, the leather jacket discovered. On Heavy Metal Hippies the band is a bunch of greasy dolts coming out of the woods. Loudness and Once and for All look like black metal albums. Yamadi poses like he’s ready to chew nails. Where’d the kabuki go?
Loudness’s beats slowed down to a slinking and provocative pace. “Twisted” (from Loudness) is dark and funky hard rock; “Ride the Wind” is convincing cruising-&-chain-fights biker metal. On “Howling Rain” from Heavy Metal Hippies Yamadi makes the band sound like Guns N’ Roses for a moment.
Takasaki’s axe dispenses nothing but downtuned frying riffola. Known to be a shredder, he relies instead on knuckle-dragging rhythm and incinerating use of the wah-wah. Occasionally, the white-boy blooz float through the mix. His deathlike tone is infernally crunching, nasty enough to have influenced the underground Japanese grindcore band known for Satan-sitting-on-the-commode symbolism, Bathtub Shitter.
The syntax and general command of English improved, Yamadi and hired lyricists furnish standard street metal fare. There is, however, one peculiar slip-up that adds, maybe unintentionally, to Loudness’s unusual appeal. On the live album Once and for All, Yamadi repeatedly screams “Circumcized! Down and dirty!” Startling and absurd, it burrows into your head as effectively as a good pop hook. Is it a song about unsterile surgery? Is the singer a Touretter making creative use of a tic? Is it a joke? Yamadi laughs and goes “woo-hoo!” to the hometown crowd, so maybe it is.