Search - Omoide Hatoba :: Kinsei

Salvador Dali meets the Ramones & Eno in Osaka

TUCO H. | Los Angeles, CA | 08/19/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Buy this record now! It's annoying as hell if you're not in the mood for it, but strangely soothing and 'ambient' in its hilarious, cathartic ferocity: in short, one of the weirdest MASTERPIECES of pop-culture sophistication I've ever heard in my life. Only a country as psychotic as Japan could've produced a band like this (or the Heavy Metal group Zeni Geva, for that matter!). The guys in Omoide Hatoba damn near make Captain Beefheart sound like a normal person! But though Beefheart's weirdo act mostly gets on my nerves, there's just no denying the extremely high artistic, and yes! even musically ground-breaking level these Samurai-Punk 'Dadaists' have managed to reach. They all-out take chances nobody else would, combine all kinds of loud, evilly novel electronic noises and make wide-ranging boundary-less Punk-Pop out of it, and yet their whole thing isn't 'artsy' or contrived sounding like John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Laurie Anderson, Ronald Shannon Jackson and some of those kinds of 'experimental' artists. Omoide don't sound like they're doing this to impress you! They're doing this because it's the most natural thing to them. When they do it, because of their cultural background or whatever, it sounds natural, inevitable, NOT FORCED. They seem to have discovered that sticking your neck out as far as possible in every direction of pop-music and then exploding all those cliches in one big burst of energy is the purest, most natural form of expression! Some of Zorn's stuff is similar but the psychotic purity of attitude and all-out kamikaze-inegrity of Omoide Hatoba is on a much higher level than Zorn's self-consciously neurotic and much more commonplace artsy doodlings in this direction. Hatoba are MASTERS OF SOUND, and they achieve so much subtle variation in this department in the most advanced, cutting-edge ways possible that there's even a song consisting of 1 chord played repeatedly for 7 friggin' minutes over a simple, driving beat that they manage to make absolutely electrifying. Not that the rest of this record is in any way simplistic; but it is not exactly ultra-complex either, it's just a masterfully-mediated, controlled chaos-salad of pop-rock-punk-funk-reggae-jazz-and-Japanese-folk COMPLETELY UNLIKE any other. It's maybe the only truly 'progressive' record I've heard in a long, long time, but only in the sense that it manages to cover a lot of diverse post-Beefhearthian ground without rehashing any established, 'hip,' western pop, rock, or even punk ways of approaching material. Instead you get the extremely rare combination of totally original approach without its usual concomitant of pretentiousness."

Buy this

Joe Ferrante | 08/25/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"buy this cd no matter what you might be thinking.this is as good as music gets. oh boy, i just can't tell you how wonderful the music on this cd is. buy it."