post-punk

  • Faceless and nameless, but not without their charms. Library by Exotics is a fantastically twisted album that orbits between the worlds of power pop and electronic mutant funk. You’d think such a one-off would come out of nowhere, but there were seeds of who the Exotics were (and what they aimed to do) elsewhere.

  • An album that was born to be loved but remains surprisingly unfound, is the worst kind of album to introduce a band through. Belgian band Jo Lemaire + Flouze’s Pigmy World sounds unlike anything else in their discography but remains a stunning example of what happens when you reinvent your sound in a way few…

  • Leave it to me to create a post that’s not “evergreen” for a record that positively radiates with fun. Imagine Parliament set their mothership to Japan, and along the way picked up Gang Of Four, then decided that they really like techno-kayo music. Well, The Voice & Rhythm, led by the late, great vocalist and…

  • Who knows what would have happened in France if New Yorker Valli Timbert hadn’t met filmmaker Philippe Bourgoin, at some Chelsea Hotel, in the late ‘70s? Philippe, not pictured on the cover of Chagrin D’Amour’s self-titled debut, was the French artiste who had fallen in love with rap early on in 1979. Then, via The…

  • “If you have taste, your long neck is an asset, your small stature is an asset, that crooked smile is an asset… Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.” – Diana Vreeland (ex-editor of Vogue/Bazaar magazine). It seems highly appropriate, and better stated, to use her words…

  • ot much is known about the Japanese female/male musical duo Tolerance made up of Junko Tange and Masami Yoshikawa. Understatement of understatements, even 36 years later the forward-thinking slab of music a few people know of as Divin has yielded little in terms of discovery on how the duo came to be, and (more importantly) why/how they…

  • assively influenced by American R&B, Do You Like Japan? holds that rare thing for us as listeners: it’s a question posed in the title. Was ex-Plastics frontman Toshio Nakanishi asking us if we liked Japan or was he asking himself that same question? The answer would be hard to tell after you listen to the album. Created after his breakup…

  • ot every album reveals itself instantly. It took me a while to recognize how fascinating Tango by Matia Bazar really was. Imagine, for a second, that ABBA didn’t break up after The Visitors. Imagine that they found a way to continue on after that fan demarcation line, and boldly go wherever that new point of inspiration they had,…

  • How do you describe a band like Frank Chickens? Led by performer/artist/musician/animator/singer/theater producer Kazuko Hohki and her sister-in-arms Kazumi Taguchi, Frank Chickens still remains unlike any band out there. Using Japanese kitsch and asian fetishization as a means to facilitate some truly subversive culture prodding and oddly imaginative musical explorations, Frank Chickens’ debut We Are Frank Chickens shows you a small…

  • “Cool, no sweat funk.” – Those exact words are how the leaders of Japanese group EP-4 describe their music. Led by the imitable Kaoru Sato (vocalist) and Banana Kawashima (keyboardist/tape looper), EP-4 in a brief period in the early ’80s existed in its own playing field. Stylistically, and philosophically, more akin to dub-minded bands like The Pop…

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