Robyn Writes

J-Pop Sunday: Utada Hikaru

Hi everyone! I’m hijacking the column this Sunday in order to talk about the queen of J-Pop. That’s right – Miss Utada Hikaru.

Absolute goddess Utada Hikaru right there

Quick Guide
Act Name: Utada Hikaru (better known as Utada in Western territories, or Hikki by her fans)
Line-up: Hikaru Utada (宇多田光)
Years Active: 1996–2011 (currently on hiatus)
Genre: Pop
Robyn’s Choice Tracks: Simple and Clean (2002), Passion (2006), Nichiyou no Asa (2006) Flavor of Life (2008)

You could pretty much say that music was in Utada’s blood. She was born and raised in New York City, and her father was a record producer, while her mother was an enka singer. When Utada’s career truly began in 1996, she did her recordings with her mum under the name of Cubic U. Her first record, Precious, came out under this name, and was in English! In fact, Utada has had three English albums, not to mention a number of EPs and singles. Utada didn’t make her debut in Japan until 1999, but it was a big one. First Love is the best-selling record in Japan to this day.


The eponymous single from First Love is a ballad

On the whole, First Love is a pretty 90s affair. While it doesn’t have the musical depth of Utada’s later albums, it’s still a good listen. And if you go digging for the videos, there are some ridiculously awful special effects.

However, it wasn’t this which introduced me to Utada. I find out about most of my J-Pop from anime or video games, and this was no exception. In 2002, Tetsuya Nomura approached Utada Hikaru and asked to use her song ‘Hikari’ in his new game, Kingdom Hearts. She re-recorded it for the game, and in English-speaking territories, it became ‘Simple and Clean’:


The opening track to Kingdom Hearts, which is a mashup of Disney and Final Fantasy. In other words, the bomb.

It was ‘Simple and Clean’ that would open her up to a whole new audience, especially in the West. It’s such a beautiful song, and when juxtaposed against the dream-like opening of the game, her vocals seem even more impressive, if that’s even possible. She positively has the voice of an angel. Although she’s perfectly suited to both English and Japanese, I find that I tend to prefer the Japanese versions of her songs. I’m not sure why, they just seem to flow better. Utada was featured again in the next Kingdom Hearts game with her song ‘Sanctuary’, but the original Japanese version, ‘Passion’, is far more impressive.


Strange anime lady is having a grand old time here.

‘Passion’ is my favourite Utada song, and it’s taken from Ultra Blue, my favourite Utada album. I love ‘Passion’ because it’s so unlike anything else she’s ever done. As soon as that guitar kicks in, you know you’re getting into something good. Utada always manages to create so much atmosphere in her songs, but nothing even comes close to ‘Passion’. Essentially, if you listen to no other J-Pop album (but why wouldn’t you, we’ve shown you some cracking bands), then at least listen toUltra Blue. It’s full of pop goodness. Virtually every track has a different feel and as a whole, the album showcases just how talented a songwriter Utada really is.

Utada’s last Japanese album was Heart Station, and it’s a whole load of fun. It’s pretty much what you’d come to expect from Japan’s biggest star, and final track ‘Flavor of Life’ is a joyous, life-affirming affair. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find a video of the original version, but Utada also included a ballad version on the album.


Utada performs with a pretty cool string section in this slowed down version of Flavor of Life

She released the English album This Is The One in 2009, which had a greater influence from R&B, rather than the electro-pop that she’s famed for. It received generally good reviews, although it wasn’t quite as successful as her previous Japanese efforts. This was to be Utada’s last full album release, and the last one released under the name ‘Utada’, before she announced a two to five year hiatus in 2011. However, in between that, she released a few singles, and bizarrely enough, appeared on ‘London City’ by UK rapper Devlin. Remember him? I don’t, but sure enough, there are some samples from ‘Passion’ on that.

Hopefully, we’ll see a return from Utada Hikaru soon. After all, if Kingdom Hearts 3 finally makes an appearance, it’ll need a new theme tune…

More Utada Hikaru:
Facebook (English): https://www.facebook.com/Utada
Twitter (Japanese, with occasional English tweets): https://twitter.com/utadahikaru
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/hikki

Punk is Dead and I’m Telling Everyone: Birmingham Punx and Nephilim Tattoos

Something a little bit different today…
This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for my MA. It’s going to be included in a much larger collection of personal essays that I’m working on, and this is the opening to one of them. Hope you enjoy!

“In a city that swells with so much hate, you seem to rise above and take its place, the heart pumps until it dies – drain the blood, the heart is wise!”

The Distillers – Drain The Blood

 

“Are you alright there, lovely?”

Glenn, my artist for the day, is a big guy. He’s over six foot, covered in ink from top to toe, with a good solid number of facial piercings. He’s also wearing a fluffy brown cardigan and has been wittering away about his new puppy for the past twenty minutes. I smile and nod and he continues with his work. My arms are stiff and I’ve had my shirt off for longer than I would usually consider acceptable in a public place, but that’s the only discomfort I’m really feeling. The needle going into my skin over a thousand times a minute isn’t as much of an issue as I’d first thought it would be. My housemate Kate, my partner in crime, lies in the booth opposite. She is yelping with pain at every invasion. Her artist is constantly shushing her, telling her to lie still as he inscribes the words ‘Wrap Me In Waves’ in beautiful cursive script on her ribs. The guy on reception peeks into my booth to take a look at the work in progress. “That’s fucking awesome,” he grins. “Hey, you part of the fanclub? Look me up on the website.” He holds up a piece of paper with his username on it. I usher him away, and say I’ll take it later, trying not to move.

After an hour and a half that feels a lot more like half a day, Glenn stops and puts the tattoo gun down. “I’ll just take a photo on me phone so you can see it properly, alright?” he drawls in a thick Birmingham accent. He takes a quick snapshot and dangles a phone in front of my face. It’s exactly what I want, so I thank him, I pay the rest of the balance, and go and wait for Kate while the receptionist makes not so subtle passes at me. She comes out twenty minutes later. “Let me see, let me see!” She lifts up my top and gasps. “Oh, I’d be so pleased to have that on me forever.” That happens to be the nephilim artwork from AFI’s album, The Art Of Drowning, released in 2000, their last on Nitro Records before they moved to a major label. The script on her ribs is taken a song by a British electropunk outfit called My Passion. When I tell my mother via a sheepish phone call in McDonalds later, she laughs and says that I couldn’t be president of the university’s punk society without a bit of ink. When she sees it in the flesh, she complains that it isn’t feminine enough and asks me to cover it up on my wedding day.

And it all began so fleetingly, back in the year 2001, where I am ten years old. In the summer holidays, we have real satellite installed, as opposed to the knackered old box and dish that we had acquired from my father’s friends by less than credible means. No longer am I forced to endure MTV Deutche and its strange take on rap music, its constant repetition of Nelly Furtado and that one industrial band that set fire to themselves. My sister would scream in terror whenever their video played, but she’d never have to suffer that trauma again. We had real Sky now. I tentatively pick up the remote control. Its buttons are alien, but I recognise a standby symbol when I see one. The TV turns on and the first thing that pops up is MTV 2. At first, I think it’s a woman with a fairly deep voice, spitting legend into the microphone, but I notice that the fishnet top the singer is wearing is fairly transparent and has a chest far too flat to be female. He wears an inordinate amount of makeup and his hair is longer than mine, drawn messily in front of his face in a long and imposing peak. A few moments in and I am in love. I stare, enraptured, as he sings and screams and writhes on stage. He sings a line, and then his bandmates follow with a “woah-oh-oh-oh”, thrashing wildly on their instruments. The song ends too quickly, far too quickly for me to figure out what’s happening. I am sitting on the floor, jaw wide open, until my little sister runs in through the front door and tells me to come outside because the Mills and the Venns are having a big fight in the middle of the street and I really shouldn’t miss it because we’ll have to take the side of the winner when it’s all done. I never see the video on the TV again. When I get the chance, I wait for the internet to log on, the modem beeping and hissing as it connects to the world, and type in the only lyrics I remember – “Once there was a boy who had a vybrent glow”- into the search. The answer is The Boy Who Destroyed The World by AFI.

That memory hits me vividly as a friend sits next to me on the bus and slaps me on the shoulder, unaware of the fresh mutilation upon it. The sting pulls me out of a stupor. I swear loudly, I take the headphones off and my eyes flicker down to my iPod. The AFI discography sits there patiently, waiting for me to choose a track. In between bouts of conversation, I filter by genre, and a stark realisation hits me. AFI haven’t played punk rock in ten years. They stopped being angry kids, found themselves in their thirties and cut their hair, traded in the fishnets for Gucci suits. Because punk is dead and it’s time to grow up.

So, we got hacked yesterday.

Yep. As it turns out, some bot that’s been hijacking various WordPress blogs managed to get in. Thankfully, nothing was damaged or deleted, there’s no malicious script running behind the scenes and we’re all good to continue now.

However, I will be stepping up the development of the new theme from here, as I think that’s where the vulnerability is. So, fingers crossed, we’ll have a new look and new stuff up and running soon!

xoxo – Robyn

Artist Spotlight: Milk Teeth

Milk Teeth hail from Bristol. Possibly. At least, according to the tags on their Bandcamp releases. The truth is, Milk Teeth are pretty hard to nail down. I stumbled upon them at a standard hardcore gig at the 2 Pigs in Cheltenham. You know the type – couple of okay bands, couple of absolutely dire bands but they’re all local so you play nice and pretend you like everyone. But these guys were not your standard hardcore band. Instead, four kids who looked like they’d just stepped out of the 90s slung their instruments on and started to play post-hardcore inflected grunge that ripped the whole room a new one.

Undeterred by the terrible breakdowns and dirge-like vocals of their peers, Milk Teeth came out swinging with something completely different. Keen to make sure that I wasn’t just overawed simply because of that difference, I went onto the internet, found a handful of songs and ended up spending my afternoon with them on repeat.

So, as it turns out, Milk Teeth are Olly (drums), Becky (bass/vocals), Chris (guitar) and Josh (guitar/vocals). They started out in the summer as just Josh and Olly before they recruited the others and found the perfect mix. “Milk Teeth comes from a Japanese Voyeurs song… maybe,” they say, and it’s hard not to hear a hint of influence from the neo-grunge revival that Japanese Voyeurs brought about, something the band admit themselves – “As you would expect, you’ve got Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Japanese Voyeurs, Daylight, Title Fight… but at a band, we listen to a wide range of music so the sound we get is an amalgamation of all the bands we listen to.” When asked if they’d side with punk or grunge, they said “It’s pretty hard to say for us as we do encompass both styles heavily in our sound, but as we have to choose, I’d say grunge because none of us have a mohawk!” Basically, Milk Teeth are the band I wanted to be in when I was 14. Hell, they’re the band I want to be in now.

Take ‘Vanilla’, for example. Three minutes of hyper-distorted grunge, with vocals that sound more like Touché Amore than Nirvana, which has an atmospheric approach to melody that’s unrivalled by any other band in their field at the moment. It’s visceral, haunting and engaging, an effect that’s achieved through a fairly tight-knit approach – “Songwriting-wise, one of us will usually come to practice with a riff or a full song and we’ll jam it out between us. Changing parts, adding sections and so on until we have a full song. It’s a very shared affair.”

On the EP Smiling Politely, you can see this organic approach really come into fruition. It’s a fully accomplished record, full of serious riffs, punk attitude and extremely 90s guitar effects. It’s a far more balanced record than their earlier material and Becky’s vocals are featured more on ‘Forty Six’ and ‘Swear Jar’, her sweet verses countering Josh’s angst-ridden screams perfectly. It’s refreshing to see a band as raw as Milk Teeth, but with the musical know-how to back it up. Smiling Politely is simple, but accomplished, and the crowning example of that is ‘Wizard Battle’. These guys know how to throw down, but also how to craft a tune.

The 90s aesthetic that’s present in the songs spreads into their stripped-down live appearances too, although the band haven’t modelled themselves on anything in particular – “We’re all kids of the 90s and that decade spawned some of our favourite TV shows, movies and music, stuff we still love today. Consciously, we haven’t set out to recreate anything, but there are definite influences and similarities to bands of that era. It’s music we grew up with, and there’s definitely a resurgence of 90s influence currently; we just lucked out with it coinciding.”

That resurgence might well be to their advantage, as big things are on the way for Milk Teeth. Recently starting to work with Ian Dickinson of Sink Or Swim Management has been a particular highlight – “Yeah, we are fucking stoked on that! Ian is a hell of a dude and completely understands how we want to grow as a band! We already have things we are working on with him – I ain’t gonna tell you what – but it’s good, so keep an eye on us!”

However, they can reveal that they’re working on new material and playing shows in-between – “We are currently writing new material and are already playing a new song in our live set. Hoping to get in the studio around Christmas time if it all pans out and yes, lots of gigging! Come check us out; we promise a good time!”

Milk Teeth are Olly (drums), Becky (bass/vocals), Chris (guitar) and Josh (guitar/vocals). Their EP, Smiling Through, is currently available on cassette and MP3 from their Bandcamp page.

Review: The Way They Run – Safe Haven [EP]

You don’t normally associate big hooks and harmonies with Swedish punk rock. Fast? Yep. Lots of woahs? Possibly. Generally crushing and anti-capitalist? You got it. The Way They Run certainly combine a few elements of these, along with a much more melodic vibe that’s more akin to American heavyweights Hot Water Music and Samiam than their contemporaries. The question is, does it pay off for new EP Safe Haven?

I’m pleased to say that it totally does. From the opening chords of ‘Eyewitness’, that classic Midwest feel starts to come through, but as soon as Claes starts singing, it takes on a life of its own and becomes something much more. The EP as a whole is totally solid – there’s a great rhythm section, lots of punchy riffs and a production level that’s not overpolished but still lets everyone shine through. Looking past all the sweet harmonies and backing vocals, Safe Haven definitely has a bit of weight behind it too. ‘Between Wages’ takes inspiration from a heavier scene, and there’s a fantastic bit where the guitar gallops and Claes sings “I bite my lips, I clench my fist, and I fade away” before launching into a tune-heavy chorus that evokes images of abandonment and loss. It’s powerful stuff, and it’s threaded a little more subtly throughout the rest of the EP, but The Way They Run are best when they’re frank and open. And before it all gets too deep for you, the EP’s closer, ‘Cross Bearer’, finishes on a sweet little breakdown that’s enough to melt the heart of any hardened punk.

There’s a couple of moments on first listen where songs start to lose their potency and feel over extended – ‘Between Wages’ is the longest track on the EP and definitely seems guilty of this at first. But this record is certainly a grower. Give it a chance and soon enough, you’ll find it playing on repeat for days.

4 out of 5 high fives!