25 Japanese Albums of 1974, pt. 1

Part 1 of 2: #25-13

This is a two-part series. Part two is available here.

A funny thing happened while I was doing research for the latest Brad Luen year poll (1974): I tripped and fell down a rabbit hole.

I’ve written before about scenes and regions that seem to be in ferment: genres, styles, or groups of like-minded artists who all seem to be pushing their art forward with such force that you want to devote all of your time and attention to whatever is happening in that corner of the world. As I skimmed through 1974 albums, it seemed to my ears like there was ferment in Japan that stood in stark contrast to the alleged malaise, and relatively poor critical reputation, US and UK albums of this year have to the sorts of people who design or participate in year-based pop surveys. So I gave up my serendipity-fueled album-hopping for a while and focused only on Japan, and I ended up shortlisting 60 albums.

I am close to totally ignorant about the wider culture that produced all of this music; I just listened to a lot of songs and followed my muse. My research in this process is post hoc, information gleaned as I try to write up blurbs. So consider this by no means an exhaustive or even a coherent survey: I may be missing huge albums and artists and trends that any decent textbook would require (let me know!), and I’m sure there are plenty of blunders and blindspots. But I’m not in the textbook business — I just enjoy sifting through giant heaps of music, and there was a lot going on in this heap. As usual, my goal is only to help you fall in love with a few things you’ve maybe never heard before. I hope you will!

(Style note: I’ll list the English spellings and translations along with Japanese artist names and titles as best I can, with links to Discogs and any place the full album is streaming. For first name/surname order, I try to use whatever appears in English on Discogs.)

25. Shrieks: Dolphin Song / シュリークス: イルカのうた

[Discogs]

The first thing I had to grapple with when listening to Japanese pop music in 1974 was that almost every sonic signifier of “ugh, NEXT!” in my survey of critically acclaimed albums actually worked in Japanese music: The Band’s bloodless consolidation of country/roots/rock, the lukewarm curdle of soft rock, the dying gasps of hippie folk and psychedelia—it all sounded, er, big in Japan, and not just in the popular sense, though it was that, too. It sounded fresh, exciting.¹

After the fact, I’m looking forward to reading a few books and essays to get a broad sense of what was happening in Japan during this period.² (Feel free to recommend some.) But no historical context will explain why I could hear the difference: why it is, for instance, that when, say, Shrieks do country and folk and soft rock, it all has such crispness and promise in it, when elsewhere in the world it can sound so lumpen and lifeless. You’ll find a ton of lively albums in my also-ran list (a lengthy post-script in the next installment) that run a similar playbook, even if they lack what I hear as the unique charisma of the Shrieks duo, a married couple who were the last ones standing from a larger folk band formed in the late 60s and started to split up in the early 70s.³

My guess is there is a lot of potential or implicit liberation in escaping or ignoring the specific social class dynamics of American music in the mid-70s. In 1974 Japan, styles mix freely in ways that are more cordoned off in America: you can just sound like the Carpenters, the Commodores, and Creedence in the same song and not think twice about it. I mean, why would you?

24. Mighty Salad Syndicate: Soul On! / マイティ・サラダ・シンジケート: Soul On!

[Discogs]

There are also sounds that in Japan feel rigid in a way that likely preserved them—I frequently hear Japanese funk music on my current Spotify playlists that has the same feel of a perfunctory party that you get with Mighty Salad Syndicate, a group of I-guess-legendary Japanese funk artists who have credits all over a whole network of funk groups that I have little interest in tracking (there seem to be plenty of people online who do that already). But a perfunctory party can be a dependable one, and this album of covers is eminently dependable if you’re into that sort of thing, which I sometimes am.

23. Eiko Shuri: Jumping Flash / 朱里エイコ: Jumping Flash

[Discogs]

This bold and brassy pop collection presents my first challenge in trying to describe the sonic features of Japanese vocal pop. My sense is that in lots of solo vocalist and idol (or proto-idol) Japanese pop, when any hint of the blues appears, as it does on this album, the arrangements are still kept resolutely square, so that any burr or growl or melisma tends to add texture without necessarily adding any bite.⁴ That means that you need a boatload of personality to get any blues through unmuffled, or else you need something like Eiko Shuri’s commanding but chameleonic presence to turn every song into a master class in technical aplomb.

Eiko Shuri’s talent for studied interpretive pop singing was likely honed by a Beatles-in-Hamburg stint touring the US in the mid-60s as a teenager, where she quickly mastered the American Top 40. Success in Japan didn’t come until 1971 when, after building a small residency for herself as a solo artist in Vegas, she signed to Warner’s venture into Japan (via a co-owned regional label with Pioneer), and put out several LPs of originals and covers between ‘72 and ‘78 as stylistically wide-ranging as this album. But she seems to have been locked in as what Pop Pantheon would call a “working class pop star,” never really breaking through with a major pop hit.

22. Hill Andon: Page 1 / ひるあんどん: ページ ★ １

[Discogs]

Page 1 appears to be the first and only page from Hill Andon’s solo career, which is a shame, because his basement approach to folk-rock—like CSNY recreated in a stoner teen’s bedroom with a four-track—stood out in the piles of better-produced folk-rock I came across. He seems to be on Twitter; if I were bolder I’d pitch an interview.

21. Tulip: The Love Song I Made for You / チューリップ: ぼくがつくった愛のうた

[Discogs]

A 60s sunshine psych-pop group whose #1 hit in 1972, “Kokoro No Tabi,” got an unlikely Me First and the Gimme Gimmes cover.⁵ But from the material of theirs I’ve now heard, this extremely Brian Wilson-pilled album is the keeper. The semi-ironic Beach Boys harmonies really sell things, always just on the edge of sincerity, though I have an admittedly tough time reading sincerity or lack thereof in Japanese music. (Perhaps this is just my ignorance showing. But it’s also part of what makes it good!)

20. Mops: Exit

[Discogs]

I was ambivalent about Japanese funk earlier on the list, but when the imitative approach is taken to rock, it usually works for me—there’s an interesting integration of chops, schmaltz, and weirdness. Mops is one of several major “group sounds” bands from the 60s with English names (The Tigers, The Spiders, etc.) that did to the Beatles what the Beatles did to the early rock ‘n’ rollers: cram the influences through a sieve until something new-enough comes out, distilling a sound that is galling plagiarism and electrifying novelty at the same time. Mops’ ingenuity is captured on their tour de force garage album from 1968, Psychedelic Sounds in Japan, but for some reason I was drawn to this scrappy collection of live performances from 1974, which documents the dregs of their sieve, the little discarded bits of a zeitgeist that’s finally out of juice.

19. Virgo: Two People / 乙女座: ふたり

[Discogs]

This album intrigues me because it plays around in an absolute graveyard of soft pop styles and makes a Monster Mash out of it. But I need to point to some alchemy beyond any dimly perceived sense I have of differing social frameworks: it’s not like they’re using different cheesy piano plinks or goopy string sections or cloying harmonies than anyone else. There’s a certain “yes and” quality to it all—you can also bring in a prog synth solo or a multi-minute guitar jam and swing right back to something more saccharine, and none of it feels like a big deal.

This is the only album the Otomeza (Virgo) duo (Yumi Mizusawa and Kyoko Furuya) ever released, and there’s not a ton of information on its production. On Yumi Mizusawa’s Wikipedia page you’ll learn that after early success as a child actress and then singer (she grew up in a stage-and-screen family), she met Furuya at the Yamaha Popular Song Contest (Popcon) in 1973. They released a few singles, then this album, and then called it quits.⁶

18. Yosui Inoue: Two-Colored Top / 井上陽水: 二色の独楽

[Discogs]

Always interesting to see which names at the top of my personal list were actually popular. Inoue is about as close as my list gets to populism: his previous album in 1973 was the first Japanese LP to sell over a million copies just in Japan, and this one did well, too, topping the charts in Japan for ten weeks.

Inoue recorded in L.A. with studio musician royalty that included Spector wall-of-sound architect Jack Nitzsche and Ray Parker, Jr. That said, even though it sounds distinctively slick, I couldn’t tell you what differentiates it from other well-produced folk-rock of the period. I’m glad something genuinely popular made it through, but I always seem to wind up throwing in my lot with the never-was crew, somehow as a matter of taste rather than principle.

17. Akiko Kosaka: Akiko Kosaka’s World / あなた: 小坂明子の世界

[Discogs]

Where Eiko Shuri is a deft orchestral pop surfer, Akiko Kosaka is more like a candle flame flickering at the center of busy arrangements that always threaten to smother her without succeeding. I think the two singers have opposite approaches to the sort of emerging idol pop style I heard a lot in my survey: one clearly formed in the crucible of competing with muscular American pop, and the other more attuned to Japanese melodic pop—there is just about zero blues in Kosaka’s melodies, for one thing, but the songs all have a distinctive melancholy, and are in their own way “bluer” than the blues might sound.

Of the two, Kosaka seems to have had more success on the same label in a similar timeline: she won grand prize at the same Popcon where Yumi Mizusawa and Kyoko Furuya met in 1973, and on the strength of that single (“Anata,” the lead track on this album) was signed to Warner Pioneer and had a decent run of albums for the next few years.

16.  Kan Mikami: BANG! / 三上寛: BANG!

[Discogs]

I immediately marked this down as “freak folk” on the strength of Mikami’s strangled warbles in the long, paranoid-sounding opener. I was impressed with how much vocal grain he maintains even in more staid songs that follow, but to my delight, things eventually get weirder. The album was built around a set of jam sessions with jazz improvisers, with an eye to the avant-garde, and things break down completely into a musique concrète mess on the title track centerpiece. Mikami’s straddling of avant and pop is uneasy throughout, like you’re watching Tom Waits’s entire career arc at war with itself in the middle of one of Waits’s ‘70s crooner albums.

15. Tadaaki Misago & His Tokyo Cuban Boys: This Is Cuban Rock Sounds / 見砂直照と東京キューバン・ボーイズ: This Is Cuban Rock Sounds

[Discogs]

A solid album from Japan’s longest-running Latin jazz band, with Cuban fusion that I think benefits from the unrelenting tightness of Japanese big band arrangements, the same quality that made a lot of the funk I sampled feel a bit clinical. I once used the phrase “you could bounce a quarter off of these songs” in a derogatory sense (to describe garage revival band Mooney-Suzuki working with the Matrix in 2004), but here it’s a compliment.

14. Magical Power Mako: Magical Power

[Discogs]

Probably the closest thing on my list to outright experimental throughout, a mix of noise, spoken word, shamisen, and ambiguously piss-taking folk and pop snippets, including one with a children’s choir that’s deranged but retains a hint of sweetness. It’s the first album from longtime Japanese “outsider”-style provocateur Makoto Kurita, who has released albums regularly ever since and has been name-dropped by Harmony Korine and Julian Cope.

I can’t think of anything else from the year that’s quite like it: I re-listened to the Residents’ Meet the Residents in my 1974 review and it seemed feeble in comparison. The tightrope walk between sincerity and irony is something I’d like to understand better from a cultural standpoint, but regardless, I can still hear the balance coming through in a way that’s working for me more than obvious sneering probably would.

13. Kunihiko Sugano: Portrait - The World Of Kunihiko Sugano / 菅野邦彦: Portrait

[Discogs]

Pretty much every form of Japanese jazz I tried, from the most free/experimental to the most buttoned-up, sounded great to me. (I was reminded that my jazz piano teacher in high school only made any decent money touring Japan.) There were several great post-bop albums and even a few corny vocal jazz albums I enjoyed—though I wonder if I could find comparable albums in other countries if I just set all the fusion to the side. This is my somewhat idiosyncratic personal jazz highlight from the survey: a remarkable solo piano album by Kunihiko Sugano, followed up the same year by its sequel Portrait 2 (streaming on Apple Music). An incredible mix of classical precision and expansive jazz arrangement, like if Keith Jarrett actually slapped (sorry, Keith).

***

Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

1. I’m reminded of how K-pop charted an alternative path for millennial US and UK teenpop music as it withered in the west: bypassing the confessional rock boom but keeping the parasocial diary-peeking, integrating rap and hip-hop without the accompanying radio format or social class tension, refusing the face versus faceless dichotomy in assembling groups.

2. By most accounts, this is the long tail of the Beatles touring Japan in 1966 and more broadly a “turning the page” cultural era for artists born in the aftermath of WWII. But get back to me about it when I’ve read a book.

3. Those also-ran albums — also-ran from a taste not commercial perspective — include one by the group former members of Shrieks joined after leaving, Kaguyahime. Their 1974 album featured a song that Iruka, of the remaining ‘74 Shrieks duo, then had a solo hit with.

4. This is a problem that’s not unique to Japan. A lot of even relatively straight 70s blues has a similar terminal smoothness to it that seems to create an uphill struggle for singers to signify — to pick a somewhat random example, I noticed this in an album I liked but wanted to love, Fenton Robinson’s Somebody Loan Me a Dime.

5. That is, the Me First and the Gimme Gimme Japanese EP seemed unlikely to me, not that I know much about about the band beyond chuckling at a few covers now and then.

6. Yumi Mizusawa put out a Simon & Garfunkel cover album in 1971 called The World of Yumi Mizusawa and Paul Simon, which I would love to hear, but the only audio evidence of which I found online was an original Christmas song tacked on to the end.