Review Summary: DON’T CALL ME ~~`＊beep boop beep＊`~~ 電話しないでください〜〜〜さい〜あい〜あい
Two years on, I’m increasingly unsure how to feel about ZOMBIE-CHANG’s neurotic meltdown of a pandemic album
TAKE ME AWAY FROM TOKYO, but there is absolutely no question that its claustrophobic structures, grating production choices, and pernicious dedication to nonconsensual catchiness were absolutely perfect for that release window. Forget
how i’m feeling now - everything pop music has to tell you about #lockdownreality can be found on
…TOKYO; no-one else came close to its innovations in obnoxious stylisation and good humour. Would any of its stroke-fuel artistic decisions have packed remotely the same impact in a different context? Guess we’ll never know…
Or so I thought.
Turns out that ZOMBIE-CHANG’s new record is equally irritating, half as interesting, and very much short of the same contextual gravity. It is named
STRESS de STRESS and it contains a song called “Stress”. The song “Stress” roleplays as a stress deletion device, yet it also sounds like a total fucking headache. This is barely mildly funny. Ditto for the majority of the light-hearted cuts here: “Switch”, “Ping Pong” and “Granny Square” are all half-baked caption collages that
should epitomise effortless cool in their all-for-nothing spotlighting of low-effort hooks over (deliberately, ironically?) bland techno instrumentals. “Phone” is a notable step up because ZOMBIE-CHANG’s delivery of its mantra (see summary) is extremely fucking funny. It is also infantile; such is music.
This truth originally became apparent to me when I heard
TAKE ME AWAY FROM TOKYO’s opening line
where’s my toilet paper?, a killer combo of cabin fever and comic genius that nothing here (alas, not even the artwork) quite recaptures. Whether or not ZOMBIE-CHANG was seeking to do so is beyond my powers of hypothesis; this record’s deadpan is so pervasive that it’s hard to tell what in the fuck it
is going for. “NO to ieru genki” is the most developed song here, both in its production and in ZOMBIE-CHANG’s playful subversion of Japanese ultra-positivity tropes. It goes through multiple phases and contains multiple hooks. By some outlandishly unlikely coincidence doubtless rooted in the most chaotic cosmic fuckage ever to debase this arsehole of a universe, it is also the best song here. Makes you think.
