Review Summary: Midori Part III: Shimizu
Hello! Welcome to today’s retrospective on Osaka’s (in)famous jazz/punk quartet, whose on-stage intensity and ferocious disregard for genre boundaries brought them a brief but potent career putting whatever they saw fit to tape. Along with its two neighbouring full-lengths (
Second and
Aratamashite…),
Shimizu is what I’d consider an outright
essential Midori release; all their albums/EPs are worthwhile, but this is where they really nailed it. If
Aratamashite was an unlikely magnum opus that showcased the band’s curveball energy and dynamic flair to their fullest and
Second was an intimidatingly proficient exhibition of songwriting and musicianship,
Shimizu falls somewhere in between. The Midori of
Second were a tight, visceral band, but it was on [i]Shimizu[i] that their sound became something outright fun (while maintaining their past standards). It’s a perfect transition EP in between two powerhouse albums.
The major development from past work on
Shimizu is found in how bizarrely catchy its tracks tend to be, even when the band is at their most aggressive. Aitte Kanashii Ne / Love is Sad and
Exotica Dance are both the kind of tracks a casual listener could sing/yell along to, with simple vocal hooks (“Ai, ai ai shiteru!”) and structures that are at once exciting and unpredictable, but also make the prominence of their infectious choruses and bridges abundantly clear. This is something that was lacking on
Second, which for all its strengths was somewhat dynamically homogenous and masked much of the complexity in its sequencing.
These tracks are the two major takeaways from this release, both displaying the full scope of Midori’s sound in an entirely satisfying manner. Of the two,
Exotica Dance edges it out as the steal in my opinion: it’s up with
Doping Noise Noise Kiss,
Yukiko-San and
Bonyo vs. Boyo / Mediocrity vs. Vastness as one of their most balls-to-the-wall intense tracks and, like those other tracks, it plays with structure and pacing in a manner that’s continually engaging but always bizarre. It switches between a lurching verse and a scream-a-thon chorus but later flirts with a hilariously poppy bride and a harmonic minor guitar solo, covering a good deal of ground in a characteristically deranged and thoroughly entertaining manner.
Also worthy of mention is
Inu Hashiru / Run, Dog, perhaps the most traditionally ‘punk’ song in Midori’s repertoire. Vocalist/guitarist Mariko Goto’s instrumental contributions are normally auxiliary to pianist Hajime’s melodic gymnastics; here she lets loose with a paving slab of a guitar riff that drives the song from start to finish. Conversely, her vocals are a little more relaxed and melodic here, making for a strong, catchy song that shows Midori at their finest making a few subtle tweaks to their usual M.O.. With all this considered, the opening streak of songs on
Shimizu is a powerhouse achievement in and of itself (let’s forget the bemusing one-minute alternative version of
Aitte Kanashii Ne at the start); any fans should consider them essential, but they are also a perfect place for newcomers to start.
However, the closing sequence of the EP is a slight drop-off from the exuberance of its central trio.
Romantic Summer Mode, re-recorded for the EP, sounded at home on Midori’s messy, energetic debut
First and it’s still good fun here with its manic piano riff and funk-styled guitar freakouts, but it is by far the least dynamically interesting track on the EP. The other songs were realised with bounce and flourish, mixing up their pacing to great effect, but
Romantic Summer Mode fires on full power from start to finish, playing out as the wrong shade of relentless. And then there’s the closer,
Goodbye. This is a typical Midori pop number, a brand of song that can mean anything from towards tongue-in-cheek hilarity
Atashi no Uta or tepid blandness
POP. Unusually, given that these songs normally fall sharply one way or the other,
Goodbye evidences both Midori’s strengths and weaknesses in this style: it’s sweetly performed and, to a certain extent, pretty cute, but it also suffers from a lack of energy and melodic flair, ending up too short of the previous songs’ bombast to play out as a natural wind-down. These two songs are both solid enough and would fine on a full-length, but they feel a little awkward on an EP that is otherwise both ferocious and fat-free, like an afterthought to its mission statement proper.
In any case,
Shimizu is just over a quarter of an hour of peak Midori. It draws on the audacity and showmanship of
Aratamashite… and the tightness of
Second, covering all bases and for the first time evidencing the full scope of the band’s sound in a way that
Aratamashite… would later develop into an entirely satisfying full-length. An important release, then, and a great EP regardless.
