If you are interested in ‘alternative’ Japanese contemporary music (as in, stuff that isn’t in the charts or a tie-in to an anime show) you may have heard of Boris. I heard their songs for the first time around a year ago in Tetsuya Nakeshima’s chilling psycho-thriller Kokuhaku (Confessions), in which a nosebleed-inducing guitar riff cuts through the murmured vocals of Rainbow like a hot knife through butter, and the crashing heartbreak of Farewell brings the movie to a close. I was hooked from that point on.
Quite honestly they’re such a prolific band, who tour so extensively and collaborate with so many artists internationally, I would have stumbled on them eventually. It’s only a shame this didn’t happen to me sooner, so I hope this article will help you avoid that “where has this band been all my life?!” feeling that I experienced.
I realised I never said anything on here about Kalafina’s 2011 LP After Eden, despite going into the official shop in Shibuya and picking up a copy on release day. It’s a really nice record with some standout tracks, but looking back it sounds like it was trying too hard. It came out only a year after their previous full-length effort, so with that in mind I suspect that they were over-reaching themselves a bit and were suffering from the notorious ‘third album syndrome’.
There’s always that nervous feeling when you hear any new material from one of your favourite bands for the first time. If it’s different from what’s gone before it may clash with whatever expectations you may have had, and of course there’s the worry that the sound loses the special something that made you love it to begin with.
I wish it were easier for us overseas listeners to sample the eclectic and inventive independent Japanese music scene. We often have to rely on the efforts of bilingual fellow fans and/or word of mouth, which was how I discovered the instrumental five-piece mudy on the 昨晩 (the kana segment of their name is pronounced ‘sakuban’). Thanks to the wonders of the internet I was impressed enough with their full-length debut Pavilion to import the CD. Who says online music file-sharing is bad for record sales? ^_^
I first heard the songwriting of Yuki Kajiura through the soundtrack to Koichi Mashimo’s Noir but for me her style became intrinsically linked to a certain visual aesthetic after the haunting Portrait de Petit Cossette. Kalafina, her current project, is best known as the vocal group behind the soundtrack to the Kara no Kyoukai films; my love for that series aside, the ‘Kalafina sound’ is instantly recognisable yet hard to categorise.
In the space of a year or two I’ve grown to appreciate the sound of instrumentalists Mono, mainly because I’ve been a long-standing fan of experimental guitar-driven soundscapes. My initial reaction to their Gone compilation – the first time I’d listened to them properly – was a fanboyish exclamation of “Holy shit, a J-rock Mogwai!”, although in retrospect I was selling them short. It’s easy to lump bands together when something as obvious as the lack of lyrics is one thing they have in common, after all.
I’ve had a .flac version of Seventh Heaven on my HD for a while now but when I was in Akihabara I was able to pick up the legal version (I decided against the limited edition since I was worried about spending too much…). It has the prettiest CD inlay booklet I’ve seen in a long time but above all else it’s the neatest way of getting Kalafina’s best material on one shiny disc. In fact the only disappointing omission here for me is the Lacrimosa single and its B-side Gloria but it does include all the major vocal numbers from the Kara no Kyoukai movie series, plus a track or two that you won’t find on any of the OSTs.