The Tokyo Concert Experience

  It’s been a while since my last show at an Arena of this size. Ariake Arena was built to host events for the Tokyo Olympics, so it is pretty much brand new. I really like that feeling of anticipation when walking through the large round corridors searching for your gate and walking past those enormous gaps -the gates. Getting a peak of what’s going on inside. Passing food vendors, restrooms, etc, until finding the actual gate, walking in and the huge contrast of the full illuminated arena with the stage. It’s a really cool experience.                          My seat was the cheapest, so I sat way up and luckily for me I was at the end of a row with a wall next to me I could lean on when inevitably everyone will stand once the show starts. The amount of cosplay, furry hat, shorts and tie wearing patrons was larger than I expected, as well as the generational gap...

  In the Edgar Wright documentary The Sparks Brothers, there’s a scene that shows a concert at a small venue here in Tokyo, maybe Club Quattro, and the warm reaction of the crowd, implying that in Japan, Sparks has a strong dedicated fanbase. It is true. I remember they coming here almost annually for a while. Not for nothing they chose to do some of the initial promotion for their new album Mad! here as well. You can’t help but draw the similarities between them and Cheap Trick. The quirkiness in the contrast between the sort of goofy oddball looking member and the adonis type one is an obvious one, but also both bands have delivered powerhouse pop material. The difference, in my opinion, is that unlike Cheap Trick, Sparks had the ability to evolve and adapt their sound with the times without ever sacrificing their personality.                          It is fa...

  In the nineties, when rock was king, according to some, the biggest band of them all hailed from Washington State. No, it wasn’t Unwound . It was another one we all know that to this day has its nameprinted on t-shirts worn by people whose parents might not even had been born when they were active. Seattle, Olympia, Aberdeen, Tacoma, that whole area shaped popular music in that era, modern culture even, to an extent, Unwound operated within that space and were able to stand out among the bunch. They were quite possibly among the most experimental and interesting groups that came out of that scene.                          Their first recordings definitely were grounded on grunge and its post-punk emo offspring, but soon they developed their own sound embracing electronic influences and a more ethereal approach to their music. By their last album, L eaves Turn In...

    In the early 2000s the band Mogwai was at the peak of their critical acclaim. One of their best albums started with a song that sampled an Iggy Pop interview he gave in Canada in 1977. The sample quoted him over a slow guitar arpeggio saying that “punk is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators of music. It takes up the energy, the bodies, the hearts, the souls and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it. It’s a term based on contempt, fashion, style, elitism, satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock and roll…” It painted a clear picture of the confrontational, anti-establishment, constantly innovating and somewhat contradictory stand of an artist like Iggy Pop.                          Musically he, along with the rest of The Stooges, issued a similar statement thirty years prior on the first song off of their fi...

  In February 2011 I was in Berlin on a business trip. I remember going to a huge record shop near Checkpoint Charlie, like the ones that were fun to visit back when entertainment was still being sold in stores and picking up the latest PJ Harvey album the week of release. Because of how busy I was, I couldn’t listen to it until getting back home. On first listen it immediately became one of my favorites. I’d say it is a strong contender for album of the XXI century, at this point. Let England Shake is a concept album but not in the traditional sense of telling a story or following a character. It establishes a theme and provides eloquent commentary on each of its songs. Not to be hyperbolic, but, honestly, ‘eloquent’ is an understatement. It is poetic and extremely moving. One of my favorite lyrics in it was inspired by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Jagged mountains, jutting out / Cracked like teeth in a rotten mouth. / On Battleship Hill I hear the wind say / “Cruel nature has w...

    Not so long ago there was a big TV campaign from one of the two huge beer brands in Japan, I forgot if it was Asahi or Kirin, that used the song Why Can’t We Be Friends? In Japan, especially in the mainstream, things are much more appreciated when they are labeled as ‘safe’, this assumption doubles or triples when they are of foreign origin. This concept of ‘safe’ is in reality a sort of twisted sense of ‘non-threatening’, that makes, for example, someone that looks like Elon Musk embraced and admired. Of course, this is only my perception and I could be completely wrong, as I’ll prove later regarding the song discussed above. But when that song was used in that commercial, at that time, it reinforced my eschewed idea that War was sort of a "safe" take on seventies funk. I was embarrassingly wrong, but for years I held on to that idea until I caved in and listened to the album The World Is a Ghetto . It was a revelation and now I consider it one of the best funk albums ...