Review Summary: A heartfelt masterpiece of 1990s alternative rock, Little Busters shows The Pillows at the height of their creative abilities.
For a band with a twenty-five year history, it’s remarkable how long it took for The Pillows to develop their musical identity. Formed in 1989, their early releases were enjoyable, if uneven, exercises in Smiths-influenced jangle pop that peaked with 1992’s White Incarnation. The Pillows proceeded to experiment wildly following the departure of their original bassist, Kenji Ueda, and their next releases Kool Spice and Living Field incorporated everything from jazzy guitar pop to fusion, blues rock, and reggae.
With Little Busters, the seed that sprouted on 1997’s Please Mr. Lostman comes to fruition. Little Busters was the crunchiest, most direct, and stylistically unified album The Pillows had ever made. The album’s slightly-fuzzy production sounds more authentic than other major-label Japanese alt-rock, and suits the band’s newfound fondness of fuzz pedals. Opening track Hello, Welcome To Bubbletown’s Happy Zoo is oddly enough the album’s low point, a grungy punk song of the sort that the band doesn’t quite master until an album or two later. Sadly, much of their recent music (reflective of a Weezer-like decline) sounds more like this album’s opening track, with its silly English lyrics and uninspired grunge riffs.
It’s immediately eclipsed by Another Morning, with its outstanding guitar hooks and vocal performance from Sawao Yamanaka. Yamanaka’s voice is remarkable for how much it’s changed over the course of the band’s career, from its awkward, yawning inflection on the early records to the squawk of the mid-2000s releases. But on Little Busters, Yamanaka’s voice is at its very best, perfectly synchronized with the warm nostalgia of his lyrics. Yoshiaki Manabe’s lead guitar weaves in and out of Sawao’s vocals, contributing at least as many memorable hooks to each song (such as the excellent wah-pedal solo in Another Morning.)
In the transition to a straight-ahead rock band, the only real loss is in the rhythm section: Tatsuya Kashima, whose bass contributed so vitally to songs like “Beneath The Same Sky As That Day” and “Something Like A Romance,” is comparatively indistinct on Little Busters. If Kashima seems restricted by the alt-rock format, drummer Shin’ichiro Sato is liberated by the return to his punk roots, even though it affords less opportunity for intricate playing than the last few albums.
The Pillows are occasionally likened to The Beatles, if The Beatles were a mid-1990s Japanese rock band. And on tracks like One Life – surely a contender for the best song Yamanaka has ever written – the comparison seems apt. A languid pop song with a hint of psychedelic flourish, One Life’s lyrics represent Sawao’s songwriting at its peak, and the song brims with the wistful melancholy that characterizes The Pillows’ best work. The mood present throughout Little Busters, and captured so perfectly on One Life, shows the band in harmony with their greatest creative instincts, with lush, thoughtful chord progressions flowing into a soaring chorus and guitar solo. This is the sound of a band that’s fully mature, but which hasn’t lost touch with a childlike sense of wonder that imbues their best music with such power.
Although Little Busters is most immediately appealing for its collection of power-rock anthems, the more subdued, melancholic songs like That House and Nowhere encapsulate the crucial, missing element from later Pillows releases: a sense of loss and desperation. The Pillows’ greatest success isn’t necessarily their willingness to explore these emotions with the authenticity lacking in later releases; it’s the way that they seamlessly knit these songs between upbeat anthems and, in the case of Hybrid Rainbow, combine them into a single whole. Hybrid Rainbow is undoubtedly the album’s centerpiece and emotional climax, representing Sawao’s songwriting at its most authentic, and Manabe’s lead playing at its farthest divergence from his roots. The danger in trying so hard to tug the listener’s heartstrings is that, if it fails, the band sounds inauthentic and manipulative. Fortunately, The Pillows pull it off majestically.
Even amongst a whole album of memorable songs, Blues Drive Monster stands out. For those who’ve heard the band’s later albums the song loses a bit of its impact, but at the time, The Pillows had never written such a gigantic-sounding song. Its supersonic chorus and guitars eclipse the scope of anything the band previously attempted, giving the listener the sense that this was the kind of song they wanted to write at their formation, nine years earlier, but simply didn’t realize that they were born to create this kind of music.
But conversely, they were also born to write songs such as Like A Lovesong (which is the missing link between their early jangle pop and stadium rock) and particularly Patricia, a leisurely, nostalgic tune that’s driven by some of Manabe’s best guitar playing on the entire album. Like the rest of the songs on Little Busters, it would make an excellent single in its own right, but works best as part of the greater whole, as does the final, titular track (imagine if The Who covered Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”)
With Little Busters, The Pillows succeeded in creating an alternative rock masterpiece that would, if there was any justice, be recognized as one of the greatest rock albums of the 1990s. With well-written songs and lots of great guitar playing, it hits all the notes that an iconic rock album ought to. In the end, though, Little Busters stands as a great record because it’s the sound of a band discovering, at long last, their true sound. And that struggle, with the context of all their preceding music behind them, lends Little Busters a heartfelt character that would be lacking if the band had emerged on the scene in 1998 with their sound already fully developed.
