Reviews

Mesh-Key

Aunt Sally Aunt Sally LP+7″ reissue

Osaka’s AUNT SALLY formed after then-teenage vocalist (and later avant-garde icon) PHEW traveled to London for a SEX PISTOLS gig in 1977 and returned to Japan inspired to start her own band, but the familiar “PISTOLS as Rosetta stone” trope is not at all evident in the deconstructed art-punk of their 1979 self-titled album (and only official release), now back on vinyl for the first time in a couple of decades. The eponymous track “Aunt Sally” and “フランクに (Frank Ni)” both trace lines parallel to ROSA YEMEN as Phew cryptically chants over spindly tom-tom tumble and scribbling guitar, while “すべて売り物 (Subete Urimono)” is Rough Trade-ready with an early FALL-ish combo of repetitive, rumbling bass and rudimentary keyboard stabs; that’s about as close as AUNT SALLY gets to anything approaching trad punk (which is to say, not very). The rest of the LP is even further untethered from capital-P punk conventions—rhythm is all but discarded for the delicate, guitar/vocal-centered “日が朽ちて (Hi Ga Kuchite)” (think Odyshape-era RAINCOATS, stripped of drums and realized three years earlier a continent away), “ローレライ (Loreley)” inverts the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” into a dark and unsettled freeform psychedelic sprawl, and the slinky no wave bass groove in “Essey” is cut through with some unexpectedly bright keyboards and sing-song vocals. The initial pressing of the reissue also includes a bonus 7″ with two raw, wild live recordings from AUNT SALLY’s 1978 debut gig at Kobe College (a particularly unhinged version of “Subete Urimono,” and the non-LP synth punk stomper “Panorama-tou/Cool Cold,” completely unreal!), which makes for an essential acquisition even if the original LP wasn’t currently fetching triple-digit prices—get in while you can. 

Inu メシ喰うな! LP reissue

Mesh-Key pulls out yet another mind-bender from the vaults of rare Japanese punk—this time it’s メシ喰うな! (“Don’t Eat Food!”), the 1981 LP from Osaka’s INU, who started in 1979 as a group of frustrated teens reacting to what they viewed as empty, trad rock’n’roll posturing from many of the Tokyo Rockers bands occupying the inner circle of Japan’s early punk scene. Tracks like “つるつるの壺” (“Lift the Lid”) and “305” hit a razor-hooked, almost GENERATION X-ish beat that bleeds between first wave punk and new wave, with a killer animated mile-a-minute delivery from vocalist Machizo Machida (a.k.a. Kou Machida, actor and award-winning author after his time in INU), while the unsettling death-drone crawl “夢の中へ” (“Into Dreams”) and junkyard clamor of the title track are laced with more than a bit of PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED circa Metal Box, and the no wave scratch of “気い狂て” (“Gonna Crack”) and contorting stop/start twitch of “おっさんとおばはん” (“Old Man, Old Woman”) establish INU’s clear affinity with their more caustic compatriots of the era like FRICTION. The provided English translations of Machida’s lyrics really illuminate the no-future desperation at work here, if it wasn’t already apparent in the music itself—“Today follows on from yesterday / Will tomorrow just be more of the same?” (“フェイド・アウト”/“Fade Out”), all the way to “Japan’s history is a crime drenched in blood” (“ダムダム弾”/“Dumdum Bullet”). Get it or regret it.

The Rabbits The Rabbits LP

Sometimes the most genuinely out-there sounds are made at the hands of musicians who think they’re playing it straight—Syoichi Miyazawa, the creative force behind Tokyo’s the RABBITS, apparently had little contact with the vibrant underground punk and experimental scenes surrounding him in late ’70s/early ’80s Japan, starting out as an acoustic singer/songwriter before his vision independently evolved into the warped, jagged free-punk mindfuck on display here. Outside of a handful of flexi appearances, this is the first RABBITS material on vinyl, collecting tracks from two self-released cassettes (1983’s X1(X) and 1984’s Winter Songs) recorded with a cast of collaborators that Miyazawa tried to mold according to his exacting, freaky aesthetic. If there’s connections to be drawn between the RABBITS’ caustic art-splatter and various noisenik antecedents, it’s not because Miyazawa was in any way influenced by or even aware of any them, which only makes the resulting racket even more surreal—“Bāchan No Bājin de Ittemiyou” is a fiery meltdown of desperate wails, looping, cavernous bass, and sheet metal guitar clang slathered in blown-speaker fuzz, crawling through the debris left behind by Japanese no wave practitioners like FRICTION and PABLO PICASSO; the menacing post-punk grind and anguished, echoing vocals of “Bye Bye” and “Yasai” twist into distorted funhouse mirror reflections of PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED’s Metal Box; “Seiteki Ningen” is a pounding, frayed-nerve industrial punk nightmare that could unsettle early CHROME. I wouldn’t bother listening to other punk bands either if I was producing something this wild…