Review Summary: Just a reflection of a reflection of a....
Despite coming from the same subversive Tokyo noise scene that birthed other landmark acts such as
Merzbow,
Boredoms, and
Hanatarash, The Gerogerigegege were the most shrouded in oddity. While the aforementioned bands were equally as confrontational to conventional music norms, with live shows involving bulldozers and destruction of entire buildings, Gerogerigegege were more or less trolling the music public rather than trying to affront them. With a bizarre history involving releasing an album worth of dead Southeast Asian pop singers songs, or an overweight salaryman engaging in gay sex and masturbating whilst onstage, the band was more or less a myth; concluding their first era in 2001 with the seeming disappearance of their main member, Juntaro Yamanouchi, for nearly 13 years. In 2016, after a long absence, the band returned with the acclaimed “Moenai Hai”, which saw the band return to their noisy, deafening style of experimental music. The hype for their next album was incredible, with many distros and record shops selling out within weeks, before and then after the release of their 2019 full length project, titled “Uguisudani Apocalypse” that summer.
A collection of 12 untitled instrumental tracks, the album marks a departure from the eardrum rattling return of Moenai Hai, into a lo-fi produced experiment in funk, jazz, soul, and disco music. Each track is succinct and minimal, packing melody into a short concise pounding of different styles. Described by Juntaro as a “soundtrack to Uguisudani Station”, it is an ode to a section of Tokyo known for high rent prices and convenient living standards. This album captures this feeling -- with its lofty lounge music influenced tracks (Track 1, 3, 4), as well as the sound of the Japanese bubble era -- with its disco ball inflected track such as Track 11. Spread within there is a splattering of other influences done to almost perfect imitation -- like the
Motorhead influenced punk on Track 6, or the elevator muzak on Track 5. The mere spread of different styles is almost staggering, with no one song being in the same genre as the last, the album keeps you hooked from the first note, and doesn’t let go the entire time.
Instrumentally, as would be expected for an album that is so adventurous, there is an incredible amount of variety. Bossa nova, funk, punk, jazz, lounge, etc. Despite this, the one instrument that comes up quite often is saxophone, which The Gerogerigegege have utilized in varying degrees for quite a while. The expansiveness of the genres makes it almost unbelievable it’s all the same album, but the recurrence of the saxophone ties it together a singular way in an otherwise grab bag of music. The ability to recreate entire musical genres is impressive enough, but the additional source of coherency is the almost genius production on this album. The crispy, needle-on-the-record warmth that prevails throughout this entire LP invokes the sense of what it is the intention was -- a sonic experiment in storytelling. The glamorous Ginza restaurant lounge music, the bubble-economy funded escapades of 1970’s/80’s Tokyo, the almost excitingly mundane muzak of an elevator ride to your corner office. Despite having never experienced any of this, the album allows the listener to feel what it was like , through the instrumentation and production.
With this, in just 30 years, the Tokyo music scene has gone from cutting-edge to in need of a sharpening stone, trading in ingenuity for trends and Western appeasements. Despite this, there are countless bands whose entire existence would not be if not for bands such as The Gerogerigegege, and those bands wear their influence on their sleeves. This album went under the radar of many, but the ones lucky enough to hear it were left basically floored by the ingenuity of a band in their late 50’s releasing something more appealing and quality than a band 20 years their junior. The Gerogerigegege have never been easy to predict, their albums and styles are all chosen from what seems like random manic thoughts. To many this would be a turn-off, but to fans of experimental music this radical departure from social norms is exactly what many crave. There may never even be another Gerogerigegege record, and if so, this would be an almost perfect capping to a bizarre and entertaining clinic of a career -- of how to be as outrageous as possible, and still have quality.
