Review Summary: (500) Dregs of Summer
Once upon a time, Mass of the Fermenting Dregs were everything palatable and exhilarating about Japanese rock. Their mix of ear-rending post-hardcore, ear-worming indie and eerily well-integrated shoegaze was attractive in itself, but their chief appeal has always lain in sheer blood-rushing euphoric energy. You’ll be hard pressed to find a larger-than-life flurry of breathless cheer than vocalist/bassist Natsuko Miyamoto, whose melodious holler and almighty diaphragm are the most reliable locus of heart and soul any band could ask for. The results are there to see: MOTFD’s first EPs
Mass of the Fermenting Dregs and
World Is Yours are still J-rock benchmarks and their tenacity as an international live act is stalwart. However, their career plateaued forever ago. Miyamoto’s songwriting inspirations slipped on their stolid debut LP
Zero Comma, Irotoridori no Sekai (2010), which was followed by a lengthy timeout and a solid-but-safe comeback
No New World (2018). The band’s appeal has been consistent, but each successive release has confirmed that their defining statements as a studio act lie firmly behind them.
In this light,
Awakening:Sleeping feels more like a courteous foot in the door than an unlikely renaissance. It casts its net across a whole spectrum of promising directions, each haul little more or less than passable. “No need”, say, showcases a competent band in full catchy-rock gear, but its repetitious hooks scan as oddly perfunctory, a fatal hair short of the vitality they reach for, while the nostalgic “Birds and Rhythm” never quite owns the well-worn melodies it recalls from the sunniest side of ‘00s J-rock. That’s not even to start on the zaniest elephant in the zany, zany room: “1960” is an extended instrumental that restores some measure of the epic scope the band have hardly touched since 2008’s towering “Endroll”, but loses itself as a circuitous jam and never complements its meander with a firm payoff. As for more immediate cuts, both “Helluva” and “MELT” are welcome shots in the arm, but each is too fleeting to hold the floor on its own terms and too abrupt to translate in sequencing; quite unlike
No New World or any past MOTFD record, it’s generally ambiguous how any of these songs are supposed to sit together.
Awakening:Sleeping pans out as such as a somewhat mismatched patchwork of individually
adequate odds and ends; it gets by on the floor of the band’s ever-respectable quality standards, but barely so much as raises its gaze to the ceiling. The one hint of an alternative trajectory is the opener “Dramatic”, a swoon of a song that nods to shoegaze and kicks the album off on an uncharacteristically dreamlike note that the band never substantiate elsewhere. It’s a shame. Out of all these songs, it feels the most in-step with their present wavelength, perhaps because its thoroughly lovely current of jangly instrumentation is the freshest vein of inspiration, but mainly through the sheer strength of Miyamoto’s performance. Her snapshot of finding and losing oneself on the path of memory resonates with a depth that nothing else here quite reaches; she sings with palpable conviction of a series of ifs and whens, theres and heres, and memories and fates, all of which smacks of good ol’ heart-twinging record-selling moment-making
mono no aware. In this case, it’s a sense less of the preciousness of the present, and more of the bittersweetness of having somehow arrived there at all. Anyone with a more pertinent representation of Mass of the Fermenting Dregs in 2022, by all means write in.
