In February 1995 the two set off on a successful 14-stop tour of Europe and America. Shortly before the release of the next album Overdose in the same year, Keitarō Takanami quit the band, leaving Konishi and Nomiya as the only remaining members. This was quickly followed by a full-length album, Made in USA, a compilation of tracks from their last three Japanese albums which sold 200,000 copies worldwide. The band’s American debut came in 1994 with the release of the EP Five By Five on Matador Records. The catchphrase “A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular” captured the group’s ironic stance and eager attitude. Shibuya-kei known for eclectic and energetic compositions that often pay homage to late 1960s English-language pop music. Shibuya-kei peaked in the late 1990s and declined after its principal players began moving into other music styles.Popular in Tokyo in the 1990s. Flipper’s Guitar, a duo led by Kenji Ozawa and Keigo Oyamada (Cornelius), formed the bedrock of the genre and influenced all of its groups, but the most prominent Shibuya-kei band was Pizzicato Five, who fused mainstream J-pop with a mix of jazz, soul, and lounge influences. This was partly because many of its bands were distributed in the United States through major indie labels like Matador and Grand Royal. Unlike other Japanese music scenes, Western audiences did not necessarily cross over into anime fandoms, but rather indie pop enthusiasts. The genre was strongly influenced by 1960s culture and Western pop music, especially the orchestral domains occupied by producers Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and singer Serge Gainsbourg. Emerging as Japanese retail music from the Shibuya district of Tokyo, artists purveyed a cut-and-paste style that was inspired by previous genres based on kitsch, fusion, and artifice. It was an eclectic form of pop music and an aesthetic that flourished in the mid to late 1990s. Pizzicato Five were the spearhead of a Japanese music genre known as Shibuya-Kei. Since we take requests, and since you asked, here is a sample of a band who were huge throughout the world, yet didn’t do nearly as much in the U.S. Pizzicato Five in concert at the 1998 Roskilde Festival. – Pizzicato Five – In Concert At Roskilde Festival – J– RTS Coleur 3 Rebroadcast – A joyous record.Pizzicato Five – Gave the world Shibuya-kei and never looked back. While P5 may be in with the lounge crowd, they never feel superior to their cheesy predecessors avoiding the sometimes smug, reactionary irony of the new exotica, Yasuharu Konishi's diverse influences are held together by his all-embracing love of the pop spectrum. Pepper's pomp to '60s R&B horns to symphonic dancefloor beats to introspective pastorals. Singer Nomiya Maki puts her unpretentious stamp over everything from Sgt. Keyboard timbres run the gamut of the Pizzicato imagination from faux-harpsichord to spacy funk. Think Burt Bacharach without the self-pity, with a smidgen of Motown and Stax. Hookier and more danceable than their previous album, this is a welcome return to songwriting for the dynamic duo. Playboy & Playgirl begins with the kind of collage-heavy imagined soundtrack that marked Happy End of the World with that out of the way, they get back to the inspired, eclectic popcraft that is their strength.
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