Review Summary: Footsteps, and footsteps
There are some points at which music, indispensable crutch for all things motivation- and personality-related that it is, is insufficient to keep your grip from slipping from whatever semblance of the Plot you had previously been holding onto. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you find yourself in a café trying to do some focused work in a quiet funk only to be sidetracked by a sudoku grid that swats away every one of your most calculated and (not to brag) seasoned procrastinations one by one. Not only is this grid perplexingly difficult, but it also seems to actively spite the sacrifice made by the multitudes of similar grids that have perished, mostly completed, in an aid of chalking up a little validation in advance of whatever demands your incoming career or, previously, degree have lumped onto your conscience. At around this point you ask yourself why it was necessary to prelude literally the most facile paperwork in the universe with a maths puzzle to begin with; you decide that the only thing more stupid than this decision is your inability to get those damn numbers into place - and that’s when you drop the puzzle, your pre-ordered serotonin boost disappears into thin air, your coffee suddenly turns turgid, and you ask yourself whether you’re brushing against depression
again.
It’s at this point, if you’re lucky, that an album like
Yamane comes along and tells you that no, you probably are not, you bloody diva, and it does so by sole virtue of just how painful it can be to feel positive emotions.
As far as ‘positive emotions’ go, you’ll do well to drop the traditional preconceptions of Japanese rock tropes and overblown anime OPs. There isn’t a trace of dopamine to be found here;
Yamane is as thrill-free as rock comes. Within the world of Bloodthirsty Butchers it does away with the excitement and bouncy Dinosaur Jr.-isms of preceding albums
Mikansei and all-time classic
Kocorono; within the alternaverse in general, it’s suspiciously protracted and outwardly plain. Everything about this album feels reined in and almost humdrum. The Butchers’ trademark guitar heroics and feedback marathons still crop up when required, but they’re no longer the ubiquitous force of overdrive familiar listeners might expect. Likewise, the band’s penchant for occasionally rollicking bangers is completely pared back to a low/mid-tempo groove that the album rarely subverts and never fully breaks from.
This does not sound like the best of times. For those with a preference for forcefulness, catchiness, eventfulness, immediacy or adrenaline in their jams, this album will probably land as an initial turn-off - but give it the time of day, and
Yamane is a beautifully weathered case study in making the absolute most of whatever scarcities you have to draw on. The Butchers’ trajectory since
Kocorono had seen them strip back their sound to its fundaments; to this end,
Yamane represents the end of the line. Reduce it any further and this album would barely have legs to walk on. As things stand (...), it plods along with repetitious basslines, economical guitar melodies and resolutely unmelodious vocals. Frontman Hideki Yoshimura (rest in peace) falls into that camp of great singers who just so happened to be terrible vocalists; there isn’t an ounce of tunefulness in any of his mid-range dronings, but he carries
something all the same. It’s not glamorous and it’s not appealing, but there’s a distinct emotional sincerity in his delivery that reinforces itself throughout the album.
With this behind it, that
something goes a long way. It’s a little cursive on the first few listens, probably inconsistent in which moments on which tracks it crops up, but eventually, sometimes, that something is enough to make
Yamane feel like the most encouraging album in the world. And when it hits you, that feeling is a million times more meaningful than anything an album ostensibly full of glum slow jams would ever be expected to bring to the table. It’s in how every hook here is too starched out to feel like a hook at all, relegated to the lower octaves and churned out again and again until any semblance of flashiness has been firmly trampled under foot. It’s in the way almost every fully fledged song chews over two to three ideas maximum for well over the six-minute mark, each repeat somehow as essential as the last. It’s in how even “Kaze” (Wind), by far the most upbeat track here, carries a slight sense of being performed in slow motion, every chord sustained a tad too long to feel like the carefree ode to the titular element any other band would have gone for with that arrangement. It’s in the way the megainterlude “no future” takes the greater part of the album’s brightness and seals it into a three-and-a-half-minute package that drops early in the tracklist, bittersweet as hell in spite of itself and signposting that the two belaboured opening tracks “happy end” and “nagisanite” were just a warmup act for something even more glum and meandering.
Most of all, it’s in the way the album’s final three slowburners play out as a stunning final act, almost an entity unto themselves yet perfect in how they encapsulate the rest of the album. “-100%”, “Moeru, Omoi” and “-100% No.2” are set up like a parabola, as significant for the heights they reach as the steadiness with which they settle back down. “Moeru, Omoi” is the highlight on first inspection, a noise rock miniepic that bursts into the climax the whole album had been reluctantly fishing for. This is sustained in an unquantifiably heavy, endlessly disintegrating stormcloud of clamour, feedback and wordless yells; it’s beautiful, raw and well-earned, but the real takeaway is the persistence with which “-100% No.2” rounds things off, as though walking the album down from a steep hilltop with a newfound rush of serotonin almost powerful enough to make up for the vast amount of energy it has lost getting up there. If those handclaps, almost a parody of perkiness, sound like the band dragging their feet a little, then that’s from the weight of the last fifty minutes and not at all from any disinclination to see things through to the end. This track - this ending - is every “life goes on” moment championed post-endgame by your favourite book, film, video game, or whatever - the kind that tore you apart when it made you realise that whatever impossible challenges the plot and protagonist had overcome hitherto were just a minor blip against the face of a terrifyingly indefinite, unimaginable regularity in which heroism counts for nothing and your chief virtue is putting one foot in front of the other and smiling at anyone who does the same. Bloodthirsty Butchers roll this into one beautiful traipse, all the more devastating for its lack of extravagance. Needless to say, next time you find yourself at the start of “-100% [No. 1]”, you’ll find yourself enjoying the rest of the ride out all the more for the lack of stakes over where it’ll end up, and the warmth and resilience of that chorus’ glum bassline will hit you like the firmest high five at the moment you most needed it. Each side of the parabola is hardly different from the other, but the manner in which Yoshimura and co. scale it all the same somehow feels like a monumental achievement; if nothing else, the “-100%” tracks are a tribute to this, and they accrue more weight every listen as such.
Not to drop a downer, not to mention a moot point, but this is all conjecture and projection. I have no idea what Hideki Yoshimura is singing about or what they actually wanted to convey with this album; it’s easy to imagine the
something I’ve been chasing this whole time as some magical, ineffable essence that sat at the heart of their sound and inspired them to lathe it down to such a sparse foundation, but it’s equally easy to view it as a far less mystical product of good songwriting that follows through on good songwriting’s mission and makes everything sound conveniently right. This conjecture is also wholly elective; my Japanese is probably serviceable enough to make vague sense of a lyric sheet if I looked one up, but this doesn’t feel necessary - for now, at least. The mundane sense of warmth I get from this album is strong enough that I trust it not to contradict any Cold Hard Truths or lyrical angles, and it’s nice to have a little faith in something as harmless as the general shape of a musical experience. What matters far more is that where
Mikansei once pined and stumbled over a maudlin sense of longing,
Yamane is undercut with a conviction and focus that carry it far further than the sum of its parts. If Bloodthirsty Butchers can trot out that “-100%” bassline for the fifty billionth time in a row and make it sound just as meaningful as it did in its first iteration, then maybe I can trot on one pace at a time and smile like I mean it for a change. And you know what? It turns out that sudoku puzzle wasn’t so difficult after all.
