Review Summary: The LeetStreet Boys deliver an asinine unintentional self-parody of otaku culture, but the effort is not entirely in vain.
Question: Can you make an enjoyable meal out of terrible ingredients if you eat them in the right order?
Answer: Otaku Hearts is a horrendously-reviewed and maligned album by the tragically hilarious band The LeetStreet Boys. For the uninitiated, the LeetStreet Boys are an "anime otaku band". What does this mean? Essentially, it's anime and pop-culture themed lyrics set to music that is generally a blend of pop-punk and power metal.
Why is this band so lampooned? A few main reasons, in ascending order - the production quality, the vocal performances, and the lyrics. Oh god. The lyrics.
There's plenty to make fun of here but I'm not interested in going for a total evisceration of this record. For one, it's not a particularly useful way of approaching art, and secondly, I don't actually believe it deserves it.
Let's talk the nuts and bolts. What's going on with this album? Well, the vocal performance is really not a high point. Lead singer Matt Myers chooses to affect a shrill, thin timbre, without warmth or breadth to the recording. Autotune abounds, and the constant nature of the pitch correction means that while the performance is fairly robotic, at least we aren't wincing at intonation errors from Myers' one-note delivery. I see many people complain about the level of autotune on the LeetStreet recordings, but I think the alternative was probably far worse. What is more offensive, however, is the constant twee accent Myers affects - think Tom Delonge of Blink-182 mixed with, appropriately, every single dubbed anime you've ever seen.
Production-wise, this album absolutely falls short of its peers in nearly every way (except one, but we'll get to that in a second.) The drum sound (all samples) is truly awful, with the snare calling to mind Metallica's St Anger. The kick drum is absent except for its lowest frequencies, leaving a massive gap in the middle of the frequency spectrum where a drum kit should be. The cymbals are absolutely ear-fatiguing and I felt myself getting a bit of a headache after a full one-sitting listen. The programming of the drums themselves is pretty uninspired and generally falls into 'generic power metal drummer' patterns. The sample library is audibly limited to the point where snare rolls sound like machine guns firing, and not in the cool Dave Grohl way either.
There are a few generic synth pads, pianos, arpeggios borrowed from the MUSE phone-it-in playbook, and very orchestral MIDI-sounding opening/closing tracks. However, the core of the remaining instrumentation of this album is composed by guitars. Their tones range from average to pretty damn good. Fortunately, the guitars are easily the best feature of this record, and by a lot. As in, a LOT. An extraordinary amount. Some of the guitar playing on this record is truly mind-blowingly impressive. Who plays it? It's unclear. There's a video of a guy called "One Take Riz" on the Boys' YouTube channel astonishingly recording one of the solos on the track "Expert Mode" in, you guessed it, one take. Whenever the guitars feature on this record, they shine with Steve Vai shred-tastic-ness.
Readers really eager to watch LeetStreet incinerated in real-time will probably want to hear about the lyrics, though, and there's plenty to say about them. This is the album's biggest weakness, but depending on how you look at it, also its greatest strength. The term 'cringe' has kind of taken on a life of its own in recent years, and I feel it would be trite to use it in this review, so I'm going to go for more targeted descriptors.
Otaku Hearts is a record covering two main subject matters: chicks and anime. Often both are discussed simultaneously. Some of it is purely masturbatory, veering towards Poe's Law - just take the song "Cosplay Girlfriend", a tune sung to the singer's ex-flame talking about how he randomly bumped into a cosplay-loving woman and she immediately fell in love with him, fulfilling his every fantasy and talking about how much she hates his awful ex.
Writing this, I realise how words genuinely fail in describing how much this comes across as the daydream of a 14-year-old. If you were given a writing prompt that said "Imagine you are a vexed, anime-obsessed high schooler who has just been dumped by his girlfriend of two weeks", you could literally not write something more accurate than this song. Observe the chorus:
"I've got a new cosplay girlfriend.
She's fun and she's better than you.
Feels like my whole life's a whirlwind.
Every time I see her, she's always somebody new".
This song has a cheaply animated music video available on YouTube. To read comments on it, you have to travel to other sites that link it - the ones on YouTube are wisely disabled. Observations include the pointed "Ew, this gave me the heebie-jeebies. Talk about obsessive idolization...", and the less articulate but more concise "This is awful and I want to die."
Sadly, this level of superficial lyricism is basically present for the entire record. Lead single "She's So Kawaii" is a great example of the way the LeetStreet Boys cram every single anime reference, tired meme, and bubbling idealisation of women and relationships into basically everything. There are a couple of notable exceptions, including the horribly-aged and completely transphobic "Lady Is A Trap" (Yep, not touching that one. Safe to say the lyrics, joke or not, are in extremely poor taste and I'm surprised a lot more people aren't really pissed off about it, and rightfully so.)
There is a pleasing reprieve, however, on "Expert Mode". This tune easily has the best guitar work on the album (which is saying something - the guitar on this record is genuinely great) and it's catchy as hell. The synths are electrifying and the song structure is varied. A song about playing a video game is a welcome departure from endless autotuned anime references and internet memes. Contender for the best tune on the record, but get this - it's got some serious competition.
Yes, you read that right. There are MULTIPLE songs on this hilariously asinine record that are worth relistens. You see, dear reader, the beauty of music is that it can be composed of rubbish ingredients and still be enjoyable. This record has problematic, tiresome lyrics, uninspired production and mixing, and infuriating lead singing. Its drums make me want to throw up. The image of the band is emblematic of the most isolated, inept elements of otaku culture. It is a parody of itself. I really like parts of it.
The aforementioned "She's So Kawaii" is paced in such a way that the chorus is really catchy and its chord progression is varied enough to separate the sections into really nice little chunks. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, you know the drill, and oh! here's a short-n-sweet little guitar solo played with impeccable taste. "Cosplay Girlfriend" WILL get stuck in your head, and you'll shake your head and laugh AT its themes while laughing WITH its lovingly crafted dynamics - big and anthemic on the chorus, low and groovy on the verses. Hey, there's another nice guitar solo in that one too! All the guitar on this record is great.
It's a great representation of the ephemeral nature of songwriting that by applying consistent, properly paced structure to these saccharine ridiculous pop tunes. Whoever is truly behind Otaku Hearts understands that you can go far just by creating structure and variance to song sections. The content itself doesn't really matter. It's all about the order you feed it to the listener. This shows up in the album structure itself - the album follows a traditional progression with more introspective tunes in the last third, pumping power-pop in the first few tracks, and yes, even an orchestral intro (it sounds stupid because the MIDI samples suck but it shows initiative, dammit).
I can't in good faith rate this album above 'average' overall (there's just slightly too much boring anime-themed genera, some infuriatingly pointless tracks, and "Lady Is A Trap" is just appalling), but there are absolutely tracks on this that are not just good, but great. It reminds me of the pure unashamed manufactured stupidity of 5 Seconds Of Summer's delicious and easily-dismissed first record. There were some absolute bangers on that record and there are some absolute bangers on this.
