Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - "Happee Mania" - Peelander-Z

And with this, we reach the end! The last installment in this blog series! This is far from the last Japanese album I’ve added to my collection, even if we are limiting the discussion exclusively to physical purchases (which admittedly have gotten much rarer over the years). We are, however, reaching the point where I’m struggling to come up with more unique things to say about the rest of the albums I own. I’ve already said my piece about the pillows twice by now, so it’s a bit hard to think of anything else to write about buying copies of Good Dreams or My Foot at conventions. I don’t really have anything to say about the Noir soundtrack that wasn’t already covered in the blog for Fiction. There’s no amazing tale behind that one time I went out and bought a copy of the Read Or Die soundtrack, aside from the fact that I actually MEANT to get that one because I’d learned to read the freaking track list first. It’s mostly repetitive at this point. HOWEVER, there is still one milestone I’ve yet to cover, one major moment of my weebness blossoming into a full nerdy flower: the first time I ever bought a CD from a Japanese band I’d actually seen in concert.

Now, you need to understand that I’m not a massive concert-goer to begin with. Remember, I was raised on a steady diet of Oldies Radio, my default setting is listening to artists who haven’t been active (or at least relevant) for decades. I was taken to a handful of Contemporary Christian Music shows as a kid, went to a few indie shows in college, and have seen The Protomen outside the bounds of MAGFest, but that’s about it. The vast majority of concerts I’ve been to happened at MAGFest, and even then I wasn’t really going FOR the concerts. Generally speaking, I experience music in the form of sitting in my room, cranking up my van stereo, or walking around with my earbuds in. Call me a philistine, but I tend to prefer consuming music in more relaxing terms than jumping around and bumping into a lot of sweaty people. That said, I obviously HAVE seen a lot of shows at MAGFest, and even attended a few at other cons. I was going to conventions for years before my first MAG-trip, after all. Technically, my first “concert” by Japanese artists was all the way back at my very first Animazement, where some of the voice acting guests had a performance during Opening Ceremonies. The big deal for THIS blog, however, happened at the last day of Anime USA 2009. I’m wandering around Sunday afternoon, totally exhausted and delirious as usual, and hear a tremendous amount of noise coming from one of the larger event room. Stumbling in, I found myself unexpectedly confronted by my first taste of Peelander-Z.

Now, a case could be made that Peelander-Z might not qualify for this particular blog series. Their membership is of Japanese decent, obviously, but the BAND is technically an American creation, formed over here to capitalize on The West’s whole “LOL JAPAN IS SO WEIRD” fascination. Certainly, the concert I saw was stuffed to the brim with crazy costumes and wacky props and over the top colorful insanity. I was too burned out by the con to have properly processed much of ANYTHING at that point, but I most definitely wasn’t prepared for this. And I mean that in a good way.  This concert was honestly a fantastic way to wrap up a weekend; so much so that, after the show, I eagerly grabbed a copy of the new album they were hocking: Happee Mania. It wasn’t until a day or two after getting home that I finally got around to listening to the CD… and I think it was at least a full year before I ever listened to Happee Mania again.

Yeah, this was very much a purchase driven by my memories of the show, and without the visual element of the on-stage theatrics, I found the music a bit… lacking. This is hardly new, I’ve very rarely listened to Urizen outside of the context of their MAGFest shows, but with Peelander-Z it hit me especially strong. I’ve never been a massive Punk fan, and Peelander-Z is all about the noisy guitars and artless screaming vocals and extremely lo-fi production values. I remember feeling physically worn out when I finally finished my first listen through the album, and I can remember several attempts to revisit it only lasting a track or two. I held into the CD, since I’m a packrat, but it was more of a trophy of my congoing adventures than a serious addition to my music collection. Probably the most telling thing is that, when I was first putting together the list of albums I’d be covering in these blogs, I went looking for it in my iTunes library and it wasn’t there. Happee Mania was so low on my priorities over the years that I’d never even bothered to rip the CD, and I normally rip EVERYTHING. I’ve still got multiple “greatest hits” albums by 60s artists who re-recorded their songs in the 80s, which I only bought by accident and will NEVER listen to again, but they’re still lurking in my iTunes library. The fact that I deliberately skipped over Happee Mania is a MAJOR insult coming from me.

Especially since, upon finally listening to it again, Happee Mania holds up a LOT better than I remember.

Admittedly, that’s a low bar to clear, given how little I cared about Peelander-Z in the first place, but Happee Mania totally pulls it off. Heck, that’s another good reason to be wrapping up this blog series here: it’s nice to end on a high note, and I can’t imagine ANYTHING else I own being this much better than I remember. Consider this my apology for the generally underwhelming coverage of Fiction and Clicked: a chance to see me pleasantly surprised by something that’s honestly better than I’d remembered. See? SEE? I’m not ALWAYS a grumpy cynic!

I think a big part of the reason I find this album easier to digest now is because I’ve got a LOT more context for where Peelander-Z’s whole sound comes from. Like, beyond the surface level “this is what people who’ve only heard Shonen Knife and The 5.6.7.8’s think Japanese rock sounds like” gimmick, though that’s still at play (honestly, listening to this again gave me flashbacks of that terrible jingle SYFY used for Ani-Monday). Being able to recognize more of when a certain song is drawing from some other source seems to make it a lot easier to sit through that song even if I don’t like it as much, and even allowed me to see through the crap production and noise to see where there’s actual honest-to-goodness SONGS that I’d unfairly overlooked.

The core of the whole Peelander-Z sound, though, is obviously a short, hyperactive, screamy Punk noise, exemplified by the opening title track, which is in and out in a mere TWENTY-EIGHT SECONDS. Other songs like “Boo-Foo-Woo,” “Do the Laundry” and “Me Gusta Lucha Libre” continue the trend of super-fast Punk Rock, though you can probably tell just from the titles that they’re also digging deep from the Shonen Knife barrel of silly/cutesy lyrical themes. What caught me off guard, however, were how many of the super short sound bites like “Nuts” and “Riceball-Z” actually recall artsier acts like eX-Girl or Kiiiiiii. Sure, “Artsy” is probably the wrong word to be using here, but there’s a theatricality to these bits that I never picked up on before, proof that Peelander-Z captured more of their stage show on Happee Mania than Past Me had given them credit for.

What REALLY surprised me, though, are the number of tracks that deviate from that basic 80’s Punk foundation entirely. I’m not talking about a massive genre shift here, which is part of the reason why I never noticed the first time around, they do play around with more strands of Garage Rock than I originally noticed. “P.F.C.” is built on a swaggering riff right out of 70’s Detroit, or at least 90’s Seattle trying to sound like 70’s Detroit. “Shot You!” has a crude Rockabilly vibe to it that could easily be dropped into a Guitar Wolf playlist without anybody noticing… aside from the fact that it’s weirdly too quiet (Peelander-Z are noisy, but not GUITAR WOLF noisy). What TRULY caught me off guard were the “long” songs, and it’s saying something about the rest of Hapee Mania that a five minute song like “O.E.C.” can feel like an hour-long Grateful Dead jam in comparison. “O.E.C.” retains a bit of the “Mudhoney trying to be The Stooges” Grungy vibe of “P.F.C.” but with way more of the latter than the former this time around, bringing it more in line with Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. Even more surprising are the sludgy, almost Stoner Metal elements peppered throughout Happee Mania. Only “Hooooooooooooooo!!!” really commits to the head-bobbing Stoner vibe all the way through, with “Go Ape Go” and “King Kong Gong” shifting gears back and forth between fast and slow sections. Still, that’s a lot more sonic texture and variation than I ever remembered this collection of songs having. The last thing I expected from an album Past Me had written off as rip-off of Mummy the Peepshow was to be reminded of frickin’ Boris.

Geez, look at me dropping all these band names all over the place like I think I’m cool. Must be because I know this is the last blog in the series, so I’m trying to squeeze as many “I know what I’m talking about!” moments into it as possible. Let’s wrap things up before I go trying to squeeze a completely unnecessary reference to Les Rallizes Dénudés in somewhere… dang it. The point is, I enjoyed listening to Happee Mania again WAAAAAAAY more than I ever expected to. Seeing Peelander-Z in concert (and for the record, I saw them more than once over all these conventions) puts so much focus on the goofy theatrics that I really never noticed how they could write actual songs. Of the whole bunch, I’d have to say that “King Kong Gong” and “Go Ape Go” are my favorites, since they’ve got the most going on. Even then, however, I’d have to be in a very particular mood to want to listen to them again, and even more so for the rest.

I may be willing to look more closely than I did back in the day, but this still isn’t the kind of music I can really listen to for long stretches anymore. It’s just so… NOISY. As I finish up this blog, I’m actually listening to 80’s Jazz Fusion band T-Square, which is about as far away from Peelander-Z as you can get aside from the whole “being Japanese” thing. And even if this IS your thing, there’s dozens of other bands from Japan who do all this stuff better. I mean, I name-dropped The Michelle Gun Elephant up there, and Peelander-Z is nowhere NEAR the same league as them. If you want Japanese Punk Rock, you could just as easily go right to the source and listen to The Stalin or any other better band. And if that’s not even your thing to begin with… just try to see Peelander-Z live. That unique personality and visual flair really is the one thing they’ve got going for them that somebody else out there doesn’t already do far better. The sheer silliness of their stage show may be enough to make the music work even if you don’t like it, but it does make albums like Happee Mania hard to recommend on their own. This didn’t end on quite the happy note I was anticipating.

And yeah, that’s the end. I hope you all got a kick out of my little trips down memory lane. It’s fun to pretend to be a music critic for a little while. But guess what? I’M NOT DONE RAMBING ON ABOUT MUSIC! And I’m not talking about doing more of those Far Out There character soundtracks either… although I’m totally doing more of those as well. No, I’ve got a new series of Conventional Wisdom/Japanese Music blogs in the works that should keep us occupied well into the Summer. I won’t spoil what exactly the theme is just yet, but I WILL tease you with the fact that it won’t be about whole albums this time, just individual songs. Stay tuned for more!