One of the reasons why I started a blog that deals partly in Japanese rock and pop was because so much contemporary music in the UK and USA these days bores me. In order to continue finding stuff that’s new and interesting to listen to I decided to look further afield and naturally the idea of Jrock caught my attention straight away. Very few Japanese bands have seen great success abroad however; while the Mad Capsule Markets and Dir en Grey have acquired a cult following, Jpop and Jrock have received little attention from listeners or the press. I was recommended Soft Ballet a while back but it wasn’t until I discovered Jpopsuki that I was able to sample their material.
Soft Ballet are a three-piece synthpop/industrial outfit comprised of Maki Fujii, Ken Morioka and Ryoichi Endo; their first album was released way back in 1989 when new romantics and dark-wave synthesised music were popular in the West but for some reason there are hardly any English language news, reviews or interviews around at all (even their Wikipedia page is a stub at time of writing). I find this surprising because, although they went through a hiatus period during the late 90s and their last release was in 2003, Soft Ballet have a sound that could really catch on internationally. In a nutshell they sound like a Japanese Depeche Mode…and I love it.
I must admit that I’m not a huge fan of horror stories; they’re often derivative and/or dumb teen-orientated efforts so it takes a real classic of the genre to get my attention. I much prefer something more psychological than supernatural anyway because the nature of what’s frightening is more convincing – generally speaking the closer it is to reality, the scarier I find it to be. I’ve