if anybody knows any music consisting of japanese girls singing over dated synths and not much else going on, please respond immediately. bonus points if she can't sing
here's my manifesto
(four youtube links)
really any kind of pop (synthpop or otherwise) that's heavily informed by post-punk without actually being post-punk itself is great. here's one of the greatest songs ever made (fact checked by me)
(youtube link)
4, 9, 7, 7, and 7. Didn't enjoy the first song, but the next three Japanese singing over old synths songs come off to me like representatives of the three best ways you could use the given limitations.
Song 2 is... unsettling. Belted vocals, very rough synths, and simplistic percussion smashed together into a genuinely frightening yet accidentally beautiful art piece. Halfway between cyber-Shinto ritual gone wrong and a love song howled by a frenzied woman at the home of a man who will never love her back.
Song 3 is unique among the four of these songs in that the singer is actually quite good, which, juxtaposed with the outwardly serene yet secretly chaotic and disorienting half-SNES, half-1980s glam rock soundfont backing track, creates an auditory sensation I could only compare to a sweet but very fizzy soft drink.
Song 4 starts off as a gentle song, but interspersed with slightly unsettling design choices, including escalatingly dramatic percussion, multiple singers performing like they were in a parade, and wind SFX. The end product is a march through the spirit world, as artificial serenity meets the loud marching of the dead and the dutiful recitation of the lyrics of life.
OMD's "Of all the things we made" was the least unique of mochi's shown off songs, but I thought it was still pretty good. It tows a very delicate line between its pop and punk influences. It feels like a very transitional song; energetically similar to Steve Reich's Pulses.
They're different genres, obviously, but they have the same "train ride" heart to them.
Anyway, I don't want to talk about that song as much as I want to talk about the three songs listed and analyzed below. They're each of fairly different genre, but they have a similar fundamental character, to my ears.
Song 1: Jane! by The Long Faces
Jane! is a tragedy in the guise of a peppy indie rock song, although any amount of thinking about the lyrics reveals this pretty quickly. Less important to this conversation are the lyrics, though, and more important to me here are the instruments and resulting backing track; it constantly introduces new melodies, harmonies, chord progressions, keeping the listener on your toes as the song transitions from Morrissey over The Red Hot Chili Peppers to the best indie rock song I have ever heard. The Long Faces are a really sweet band, and although they haven't release very much of it, what they have put out is pretty excellent. I really recommend the Documentaries EP from them.
Song 2: We Will Never Get Along by Steakfry
Oh, Steakfry. May you rest in peace. And so may real incelcore, now that Fried by Flouride doesn't really release anymore, Shooter got kind of boring 2 years ago, and everyone else started calling it bedroom punk or e-punk or whatever normaltrooney thing it's called now. Now, Steakfry is not a character I imagine has a fantastic reputation among AFers (if they ever cared), with song titles like "Fuck Optics", but We Will Never Get Along is probably the only actually really good incelcore song besides I Just Wanna Go Home by Chadpilled (note that that song sucks, I just really really like it for reasons I will get into when I post it someday). WWNGA has it all; heavy distorted guitar, a range of beat lines, and a simple, but honest and enjoyable lyrical performance. I thought it best to present it alongside Jane!, however, because they share the same variance and constant introductions of new melodies; every few dozen measures, the songs change their pace, melodies, and percussions in ways that both maintain the flow and atmospheres of the songs while keeping the listener engaged and attentive.
Song 3: 怨霊COSMO by Suimega
Onryou Cosmo is the outlier of the three songs, sharing almost none of the characteristics of the first two besides MAYBE a guitar. The song itself is a breakneck menagerie of supersonic synths, chopped and shotgun-blasted drum breaks, and a guitar solo fit for an outer-space dogfight. Suimega's songs all sound extremely similar, but he is a master of his craft and they're all at least very good. Onryou Cosmo, in its own distorted, Ableton-carved way, does possess a key similarity to Jane! and WWNGA, besides a fantastic guitar solo; every minute or so, it feels like you've been thrusted into a new solar system, with its own quirks and new additions to the space battle the song has dragged you into. These dramatic shifts fall in line with the dramatic changes of Jane! and WWNGA, although Onryou Cosmo's are much more, well, dramatic. While most music has varying and changing segments within it, and "durr they change things up in the songs" is not a real justification for placing these three songs in the same "category" these three songs energetically align in my head, and all of my writing is merely an attempt for me to understand why that is. Each of these songs feels like an cautionary tale, in their own way; Jane! is the story of a woman's uncertain but certainly unpleasant fate as her life of crime and manipulation abruptly collapses around her. We Will Never Get Along is a bright and energetic lament of failed love and the resentment that forms when a relationship begins to come apart. Onryou Cosmo is on a much larger scale and much more ambiguous, but the distorted drums and synths combined with a tempo the song itself isn't entirely comfortable with, create the feeling of a song weighed down by its own technological limitations, as if it were meant to be a faster, more intense song but reality itself kept it from achieving its desires.
Someday, I will have a strong enough understanding of music to actually be able to properly analyze the music I love, but for now, I am reliant on instinct and what feels right when I write it down.
TL;DR I like the three songs I demarcated a lot, please don't go into as much detail as me if you don't expressly want to.
(edit; fixed embeds)
