Review Summary: Revisiting their early material, The Pillows are re-energized after two mediocre albums.
By mid-2004, you couldn’t fault a Pillows fan who might feel that the band had lost their way. Their last two albums – Thank You My Twilight and Penalty Life – weren’t awful, but they were disappointing in light of the stratospheric standard the band had set for themselves on previous efforts. The group was in desperate need of something that would evoke the power of their late-90s output, and – in a surprising move – they delivered, with the self-cover album Turn Back.
Turn Back, as its title suggests, revisits older tracks from early in the band’s history. For many artists, this might seem like a cheap excuse to cash in, but here it’s surprisingly effective. The Pillows’ sound had transformed so radically from their first few years of existence that revisiting some of these old songs, many of which hadn’t been played live in about a decade, is genuinely intriguing.
As Liberty kicks off the album, it’s immediately apparent that The Pillows haven’t lost their knack for a good performance: originally a short demo from the mid-90s, Liberty is fleshed out into a full-blown song that marries Sawao’s tremendous songwriting of years past to their present-day penchant for propulsive power anthems. The guitar tones don’t sound as good as the smooth sound of their Living Field-era recordings, and the synthesized horns could have been omitted, but otherwise it’s a strong start to the album.
1995’s Tiny Boat was a terrific jangle-pop single that was never released on an album, which is a shame considering it’s one of the greatest songs the band has ever written (certainly among their pre-Lostman recordings.) The new recording of the song that’s present on Turn Back is nearly as good and serves as the album’s centerpiece. Rather than play a note-for-note cover of the song, the guitar and bass parts are re-written to fit the band’s present musical style. The result is that Turn Back’s rendition complements, rather than replaces, the original song. While Manabe’s tone doesn’t sound as good as on the single, Jun Suzuki’s bassline is arguably better than the original.
Ano Koro Ni Modotte appears for the first time on Turn Back, but it’s clearly a product of the writing sessions that produced Moon Gold or White Incarnation. It’s the best sixties-inspired song that The Pillows have presented in quite some time, and even if it’s not especially remarkable on its own, it fills out the album without being filler. You And Me And Mr. Moon is the second-most obscure cut of the album, the B-side to the group’s debut single, If You Sing In The Rain. The original was a hazy, expansive slice of dream pop, while the remake is driven by the crunchy guitars and Yamanaka’s raspy vocals; it’s the biggest divergence from the original song of all the tracks on Turn Back.
Want To Sleep For is a forgettable track from Moon Gold. It’s a fine performance, and an improvement on the original, but it would’ve been nice to see a remake of a better song from the band’s back catalogue – like B-side Lorelai, or Dear My First Step. Fortunately, Turn Back ends on a strong note with Our Halley’s Comet, one of the first epic songs the band ever wrote, from 1991’s White Incarnation. Jun Suzuki’s bassline, once again, expands upon the original version of the song, giving it a noticeably different drive in comparison to its predecessor. The rest of the band sounds just as good, and the track greatly benefits from Yamanaka’s improved vocals.
Turn Back highlights the difficulty of evaluating The Pillows’ catalogue. While it’s absolutely true that the band didn’t find their identity before discovering alt-rock with 1997’s Please Mr. Lostman, it’s much harder to say whether it was ultimately a good or bad thing for the group, overall. The band’s early work sometimes feels awkward and silly, but there’s a very high degree of musicianship (particularly from Manabe) that distinguishes it from their later works. With the advent of their alt-rock sound The Pillows did lose some degree of musical sophistication, but in the process discovered the identity they’d been searching for all along.
Listening to Turn Back highlights the ambiguity: in terms of musical style, The Pillows have certainly changed, but not necessarily for better or worse. Ultimately it comes down to the songwriting involved, and it’s clear that in the midst of some of the band’s weaker efforts, the songs from their early years hold up quite nicely and make Turn Back worth a listen, even for fans who don’t care much for the rest of their post-2001 output.
