The other day, as I was religiously listening to my recently purchased
bootleg version of the first two Stalin's LPs (the excellent
Stop Jap
and
虫 (Mushi)) and as the outside world looked colder and gloomier than
ever through my window, I decided to have a look at what Japan was offering in terms
of hardcore punk nowadays (Ok I've talked about
Milk
a few months ago but that's all)... well at least try to have a look, because it soon became clear that it's quite difficult to dig properly into the Japanese scene without speaking the language at all...
Anyway I found this nice new
Demo
by a band called 鏡(Kagami which means Mirror) from Tokyo
and it was not very difficult as they were nice enough to write almost
everything in english (thanks!). And I quickly understood why when I realized that
the band members are strongly connected with the international world
of punk and that Kagami is not their first attempt to make it
noisier.
I know I miss many information and may mix things up a little bit (still
that language issue) but from what I understood Zie, the bass
player is also playing in
Klonns (they just released a 7'' on Black Hole)
and has
several solo projects, the singer played in bands called Yep and Do Not and the
guitar player,
named Kohei, played in
Rashomon
(a US band based in D.C) and is
also a visual artist who's worked on several punk bands' artwork (Fried Egg LP's cover artwork for example).
One thing's for sure, the Tokyo quartet knows their US hardcore
classics on their fingertips! Within six tracks (including a Government Issue cover) the band shows all their love for this era
and it works out well (because I love it too!).
The structures, the energy, the raw sound... everything is there to
take us back to the hardcore punk "golden days".
Ok you'll tell me that there are dozens of bands which drop the same kind of shit on bandcamp everyday (and you'll be right)... but I don't know I like this one...
Maybe because this demo really sounds like a young band demo, not like all
these perfectly played American demos which pop out every other
week and are just another side project of "semi-professional" members
of the US hardcore scene...
No... here I hear the hesitations of a band which begins, the
approximations of young musicians who are still a bit "clumsy" with
their instruments... so yes it lacks "sharpness" and "cleanliness" sometimes but it has nevertheless all the charm of a sound
in construction...
It's a demo after all. The beginning of something which could be soon
extremely enjoyable...
A work in progress in fact... and what's cuter than watching it grow?
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