Review Summary: Periphrasis V: Yakousei Is Not A Genre.
1. 夜行性？I Wear Sunglasses At Night.
Chartered music journalism is a tough cartel - the checks and standards imposed on your typical hapless penmonkey by vast, threatening, external bodies would reduce most conscientious humans to broken dreams and ash. All critics wear bulletproof earplugs and, like, really hecking thick spectacles as a standard and not a choice, for the challenges are deadly, never-ending and forever unpredictable.
Case-in-point: the yuppie layman’s superdatabase Rateyourmusic.com recently saw fit to canonise the thing known as ‘yakousei’ as an official real music genre. In real life. And also online. Forever.
Can you begin to imagine the fallout? My traumatised mind is forever stuck at the following day at the office: top brass shrieking at each other in a woebegone frenzy and frantically Googling lists of artists that they had no intention of ever listening to, only to straighten their ties and pelt out memos that pompously retconned entire swathes of J-indie and made the sternest conceivable ultimatums re.
re-educating our audience with immediate effect. Well, here we bloody are! The powers that be have determined that I must either shill out a Handy Newcomers’ Guide To Yakousei or spend the rest of my days operating a pizza machine. I have no recourse but to oblige, but let me tell you in advance - this shit was way more fun to write about when it was just ‘that popular thing the popular Japanese artists are doing’ (see: my review for YOASOBI’s
The Book) and, for reasons that will soon become apparent, I do not believe that a narrower frame of reference does this style any favours. I also do not care that basically all other subgenres started out the same way. History is shit.
2. Yak-urself
tl;dr yakousei is energetic, instrumentally dense Japanese indie pop that you
could dance to if you so pleased, but are far more likely to encounter within the comfort of 1) your bedroom, 2) any short-order Japanese restaurant, or, ideally 3) a karaoke booth. The near-impossibility of the latter two in any country other than Japan presents a significant obstacle to its global appeal and a significant indication of its overseas audience. Yakousei remains largely monopolised by the trifecta of artists that popularised it in 2019 (YOASOBI, Yorushika and ZUTOMAYO), all three of whom offer a concentration of tendencies generally prominent in contemporary J-pop: extremely upbeat funk-inclined pop-rock turbocharged with relentless piano spam, glossy production, and exuberant female vocals: these things in conjunction now constitute a genre because three groups played them the same way at the same time and made it big enough to get aped. Wham.
Anyhow, as fresh(ish) music snapshotting the introverted whimsy of ’20s Japan, yakousei’s style is unimpeachable and its success speaks for itself. As a contender for the Next J-pop Boom that demands international attention, though, don’t hold my beer. While extremely infectious in small doses, the homogeneity of YOASOBI’s songwriting has been thoroughly and rightfully critiqued (almost impressive given that their discography contains under 20 actual songs), and Yorushika are forever on the bland side of things. Both acts are enjoyable but strike me as overly lightweight, plus I’m ambivalent about Ado’s efforts to transpose the same tropes into full-on J-pop (even Seiko Oomori’s “counter culture” toed the line a little). This remains the basis for my scepticism towards the genre, but when the commission for this report was brutally shoved under my hapless, writerly jowls, I realised that I had never given the third founding band ZUTOMAYO any time of day whatsoever. Desperate to affirm my credentials (i.e. prove myself right), I hit play on their 2019 debut in anticipation of a breezy one-and-done. To be continue
3. ずっと前大好きな台所のように
d immediately. Shit damn! Without wanting to be contrarian (pah), if YOASOBI and Yorushika are the most popular of the core yakousei groups, ZUTOMAYO are easily the best. On all counts. Except production, maybe. Don’t call me. So! To get this critical introduction (
re-education!) in order, the name of this band is ZUTOMAYO, which is an extremely generously romanised localisation of ずっと真夜*でいいのに。, which translates as
I’d Dig Eternal Midnight, or whatever. ZUTOMAYO was originally a semi-secret band, with the identities and faces of all its members concealed (including during live performances); the sole known member today is still singer-songwriter ACA-ne. This is fortunate because her contributions in both departments are by far the band’s strongest suit on their 2019 debut
Hisohisobanashi, all due respect to whichever mysterons recorded the album’s torpedous instrumentals.
As a vocalist, ACA-ne holds a crucial advantage over her YOASOBI and Yorushika peers in that her voice is neither as lavishly produced nor as uncannily smooth as either. In other circumstances, this might have been a critique, but yakousei’s stifling levels of polish already lends it a cloying sense of artifice (exacerbated by its already-queasy proximity to vocaloid compositions), and the faintest semblance of grit goes a long way, even if it does comes in the form of a thinner tone and and slightly breathier delivery. ACA-ne's chops are easily up to the gauntlet of contorted phrasing and perfect pitching demanded by these songs, and the subtle imperfections in her tone allow richer emotional contours that her resplendent levels of energy exploit in style. Praise be! “勘冴えて悔しいわ” (2) is a particular highlight here, the strain in ACA-ne's chorus a perfect complement that tips the song’s arrangement from a clinical Polkadot Stingray-ism to a rousing banger, while “眩しいDNA*け” (8) sees her flesh out her softer tone with no less personability.
As for ACA-ne's songwriting, it’s all I can do to hold off dubbing her the Best In Her Field without being entirely sure how many acres are in question. While the YOASOBI formula did produce a single recyclable iteration of the perfect pop song,
Hisohisobanashi is streets ahead of anything remotely adjacent to it on a song-to-song basis. The focus with which ACA-ne’s songs seek out roughly the same thrills versus the subtly different standpoints from which they approach them could form the basis of a new textbook on maximalist pop: “こんなこと騒動” (7) reinvents itself with every other section and makes for one of the most playfully complex takes I’ve heard on pop this most ardently
pop since Seiko Oomori’s 2013 masterpiece
Sennou - yes! The post-chorus of both “ハゼ馳せる果てるまで” (4) and “*義” (11) alternates ACA-ne’s shrillest exclamations with a more graceful set of counter-hooks, as though she trades roles between lead and backing vocalist; both make for absurdly catchy mainstays - yes!! “ 蹴っ飛ばした毛布” (5) makes an initial feint at balladry, but opens up as a delightfully fluid affair, weaving varying increments of jazz pop in and out of an absolute stomper of a refrain - oh yes!!! Of the two actual ballads, “優しくLast Smile” (12) is a disarmingly touching high school romance that shows a refreshing extra dimension to ACA-ne's scope, although “Dear Mr.「F」” (6) fails to fill its mid-album slot with much more than perfunctory affect.
Between this track and the rather misplaced midtempo flounder “グラスとラ*レーズン” (10), questions can and maybe should be raised regarding the 13-track, 56-minute expanse at play here. Fortunately, the flow of time poses surprisingly little issue: the album's levels of exhilaration make for such a momentous run that, if anything, it might have afforded itself more space to catch its breath than I'd consider necessary. It's rich enough to reward focused listening, but the real joy is letting the overstimulated nocturnal rush at the core of ACA-ne's vision take its course - her songs are full of individual details deployed too relentlessly, too briskly to do more than briefly dazzle a healthy attention span, but let your concentration wander for even a minute, and you'll be stunned at how frequently her shifts of pace, key, lead instrument and mood yank you back in. Her command of the upscale-sublime is electric: visualise and accelerate any panorama from a Makoto Shinkai film (
Your Name,
Weathering With You, etc.), and you’re more or less there; if you have reservations on whether the concentrated aesthetics of those gorgeous, fleeting scenes is sufficient to sustain a full-length music album, then
Hisahisabanashi is the best refutation currently available. Whether anyone needed an entire purported genre's worth of this, however, remains to be seen.
