Review Summary: With only a few good tracks amongst a sea of dullness, this is one piper that ain't worth following.
The fairy tale of the Pied Piper of Hamlin tells the story of a man who comes to a European Everyvillage to deal with the epidemic of rats, only to be jilted of his pay and get revenge by stealing the children away with his hypnotic melody. As a title for a Pillows album it’s unintentionally hilarious because even a brain-damaged child wouldn’t follow Sawao and his motley entourage anywhere if he was subjected to this leprous amalgamation of songs.
Pied Piper is a shameless, soulless, commercial album of sub-rock designed to be mindlessly blared from the speakers of convenience stores and daycare center reception desks, a bovid regurgitation of the Japanese music money machine. It’s the kind of album that gets a huge display at Tower Records with dozens of CDs that nobody buys. I pity the folks whose first exposure to The Pillows comes with this cartoon parody tripe and not the incendiary magic of Please Mr. Lostman or Smile. Pied Piper is an album for the Japanese salaryman wage-slave manacled in soul-shackles, trying to convince himself that he Has A Life! By making a purchase of Superficially Attitudinal And Rebellious Rock Music that’s about as convincing as making Sonic The Hedgehog tell kids to wear helmets white roller blading. Pied Piper is the auditory equivalent of chalk-flavored valentine heart candies: bland, manufactured, and devoid of soul.
Look, I’ll go ahead and get this out of the way: there are a few decent songs on Pied Piper. Across The Metropolis has a nice guitar riff and chorus, despite its muffled production, and despite the fact that The Pillows do this same type of song better before and after this album. And the singles are good: Tokyo Bambi has a nice bassline and is actually a better version of what the earlier single Terminal Heaven’s Rock tried to pull off, and Ladybird Girl is a pleasing slice of power pop that would have been welcome on My Foot (replacing one of the two or three crappy songs on that album.) Even New Animal is a decent single with a few good hooks in it.
But otherwise, Pied Piper is a middling, half-baked serving of processed pink meat-goop. Rarely will you hear a more tedious and forgettable blob of so-called alternative rock. One gets the impression that The Pillows have been fully sublimated into the Avex Hive-Mind by this point; and what’s worse is that they actually have the audacity to feature a song called No Surrender (which is a terrible song, by the way.) Speaking of song titles, eight of these eleven songs follow the same stupid (adjective) (noun) format of song naming. Oh, the album cover is lame too; and it’s actually one of their better covers with Avex. Everything about Pied Piper’s packaging and presentation feels hollow and artificial.
Maybe it’s not fair to blame The Pillows as a whole: this creative miscarriage is almost certainly almost entirely Sawao Yamanaka’s fault. The others in the band are competent, playing their parts well, and there are nice drum fills, basslines, and guitar leads, but it doesn’t matter if you wear Gucci and Prada when you have a cancerous tumor throbbing at the base of your hypothalamus. Sometimes Manabe plays some bad lead guitar riffs, but really, the worst I can say about the other members is that, in their passivity, they do nothing to check Sawao’s lame-ass impulses. What’s especially frustrating is that this garbage is what’s released on iTunes in the US, while The Pillows’ best music remains almost unavailable (by legal means) for fans living outside of Japan. It would be much better to have the band’s 1997-2001 back catalogue available than this hernia-inducing claptrap.
As disappointing as Pied Piper is, things will have to get worse for The Pillows before they start to get better. Bad, for The Pillows, is far from offensive – The Pillows never manage to reach the level of unpleasant banality that their closest career trajectory counterparts in the west, Weezer, have done over and over again. From another band this album would be dismissible, but for a band like The Pillows who have set the bar for themselves so high, it’s hard not to be disappointed by Pied Piper.
But there’s a pervasive sense that it’s not a result of the group running out of steam or musical ability – it’s just a matter of Sawao getting lazy and going through the motions. Because as The Pillows will later prove, they’re still more than capable of brilliance, sparingly placed within middling albums, like food to a starving North Korean prisoner – just enough keep the victim alive, but perversely, ensure his continued suffering between morsels.
