25 Japanese Albums of 1974, pt. 2

Part 2 of 2, #12-1, plus honorable mentions and other albums

Welcome back! See Part 1 for general commentary, along with #25-13.

One thing I didn’t mention in the previous installment: Shy Thompson wrote a nice write-up of ‘70s Japanese folk on Shfl as I was putting the first half of my list together.

12. Hiroshi Tanaka & Yoichi Fuwa: Untitled White Album / 田中寛・不破洋一: 題名のないホワイトアルバム

[Discogs]

This sprawling, eclectic assortment of folk-pop is worthy of invoking the Beatles album that inspired it—or at least the remastered Esher demos—from two artists who only pressed 100 copies in 1974 and have been given a deluxe re-release treatment by First & Last Records. The reissue offers a second LP of unreleased tracks from the same recording sessions that are mostly as strong as the first.

11. Takeshi Terauchi & Blue Jeans: Tsugaru Jongara / 寺内タケシとブルージーンズ: 津軽じょんがら

[Discogs]

This is my favorite of four albums released in ‘74 by electric guitar trailblazer of the Eleki genre Takeshi Terauchi with his group Blue Jeans. Terauchi combined a surf rock instrumental style with melodies from shamisen music. For a wider sample of his work, check out the recent compact career sampler Eleki Bushi 1966-1974, and a great write-up in Bandcamp from Patrick St. Michel.

10. Carol: Carol First / キャロル: キャロル・ファースト

[Discogs]

Carol adopted the iconography of Rebel Without a Cause and early rock ‘n’ roll starting in 1972 — you can see a live performance of them doing “Johnny B. Goode” in this clip from 1973 (there’s also a feature documentary from 1974 that I haven’t found online yet). This album isn’t just straight-ahead pastiche, though: there are elements of glam, Queen-like pomp, and post-Beatles Lennon-esque songwriting.¹ But these elements are downstream from a resolutely tender treatment of rock’s past that may have some musical similarities, but seems very spiritually dissimilar, to what you’ll find brewing in “back to basics” proto-punk: no snarls or irony or blood. It sounds like Carol absorbed rock ‘n’ roll directly from the source and skipped, or maybe just ignored, some of the evolutionary steps between the genre’s pioneers and ‘70s rock writ large. They remind me a little of early Sha Na Na, before the act had totally hardened into shtick.

9. Original The Dylan: City of Sadness / オリジナル・ザ・ディラン: 悲しみの街

[Discogs]

A delightful and brazen Dylan forgery. “Original the Dylan” is a one-off alias for a group of musicians from a folk group called The Dylan II. The Dylan II started as a folk duo (Masaji Otsuka and Hiroshi Nagai) who met at the Dylan café in Osaka in the late 60s, and went on to sing Japanese translations of Dylan songs before producing albums of original material starting in 1972. Like many artists on this list, their career only spanned a few years, and they put out a final live album in 1975.

8.  Yonin Bayashi: Ishoku Sokuhatsu / 四人囃子: 一触即発

[Discogs]

A great album from a group of prog prodigies who mastered the entirety of “Echoes” by Pink Floyd as teenagers and were only 20 when they made this. But the album’s secret weapon is its deceptive pop economy: there’s a tangible avoidance of the ballooning indulgences of prog in this period, even if things are generally shaggy and sometimes shambling. There are points where they give you a chorus like Boston (they hint at something like “More Than a Feeling” on track 3, “Omatsuri”) or keyboard runs that are closer to the forthright hookiness of the Doors than to indefinite noodling.

7.  Brain Police: Bad Boy / 頭脳警察: 悪たれ小僧

[Discogs]

Zunou Keisatsu (Brain Police) is hard to classify — the, er, brainchild of singer/songwriter Panta and drummer Toshi, named after the Frank Zappa song they sometimes covered to open their concerts. They had a reputation for controversy and strident leftist agitation in their early work.² On this later album, their style ranges from sneering garage to acoustic folk-pop, though even in their softest songs you get vocals well harsher than the norm in the Japanese folk zeitgeist. The material may be more transgressive than I’m capable of understanding, with some of the shock lost in translation — their lyrics were frequently radical enough to get banned from Japanese broadcasts, and their live performances are said to have been wild and occasionally obscene. The band proper didn’t make it long past this album, though Panta went solo for many years, and the group reunited in the ‘90s. (Panta passed away last year.)

6. Sadistic Mika Band: Black Ship / サディスティック・ミカ・バンド: 黒船

[Discogs]

Sadistic Mika Band was a married duo, Mika Fukui and Kazuhiko Kato, whose burgeoning reputation as a premier prog band in Japan caught the attention of Pink Floyd producer Chris Thomas. The band recorded Black Ship with him in England, which led to an affair between Fukui and Thomas that ultimately caused the marriage (and the band) to break up soon afterward. Their canny ear for the era’s various zeitgeists, a mix of glam, prog, and funk-rock, initially got lost in the shuffle of my broader year survey—it was the one album whose reputation online got me to listen again (it was a grower). It has a critical reputation as the Japanese album to beat this year, and in some ways it is the most 1974 album on this list.

5. Chikara Ueda & The Caravan: Rock Impulse! Exorcist / 上田力とザ・キャラバン: Rock Impulse! Exorcist

[Discogs]

(LP 1)

(LP 2)

But enough of critical respectability. This is one volume in a whole series of Rock Impulse! albums, long sets of instrumental fusion covers from bandleader Chikara Ueda that are such crate-digger catnip that this particular record goes for well over a grand on Discogs. This iteration of Rock Impulse! is similar to the rest of the series, which dates back to 1972 — the collections recycle tracks and should maybe technically be classified as variations or compilations.³ (I think this one’s worth it for the Exorcist song alone, though.) The Caravan project was over by 1975, and Ueda went on to do increasingly square fusion into the ‘80s with a group called The Power Station, then shifted his focus more recently in the ‘00s to ultra-smooth interpretations of Jobim.

4. Candies: Season of Tears / キャンディーズ: なみだの季節

[Discogs]

Candies is an early idol group, by some accounts considered the first female idol group, put together in a style reminiscent of reality TV singing competitions: the trio (Ito Ran, Tanaka Yoshiko, and Fujimura Miki—known as Ran, Sue, and Miki) ) were selected as “mascot girls” for NHK’s Kayo Grand Show singing program and later debuted with a single in 1973. Candies sound more forward-thinking musically to my ears than other idol or proto-idol material I heard, at least on the five originals that open the album. They seem in tune with early disco, but specifically the generalist dance-pop that would emerge from disco, like “Dancing Queen” two years later. If Candies were the first true idol group, that would probably also make them the first protestors of an exploitative idol system: in 1977 they effectively ended their contract with Watanabe Entertainment by falling to the ground during a televised performance to an audience of thousands and refusing to budge until they were carried out by security. A hasty “farewell tour” soon commenced.

3. Gedo: Gedo / 外道: 外道

[Discogs]

Almost missed this one entirely because a later line-up of Gedo has flooded streaming services with different songs using the original artwork. But accept no substitutes (i.e., listen to it on YouTube): for a few years in the mid-’70s, Gedo was the hardest-rocking band Japan. They only recorded one of their early albums in a studio (1975’s Just Gedo); the rest are documents of their live show, including this one. They mix MC5’s style of alternately crowd-pleasing and crowd-threatening party rock with a thick layer of bass sludge that the live recordings help emphasize. You can practically feel the spit in your face. It’s great.

=1. Chie Sawa: 23 (Twenty-Three Years Old) / 沢チエ: 23

[Discogs]

=1.  Ema Sugimoto: Emma Is Love / 杉本エマ: エマは愛

[Discogs]

My top two albums are basically a tie for #1, and they both capture incandescent Osaka ingenues for the only time in each of their musical careers. Chie Sawa is an elusive lounge singer about whom I could find almost no information (I learned her uncle was a bass player). She appears mostly to have been a muse for arranger Makoto Yano, who sounds like he’s aiming for Gainsbourg, and lyricist Yasui Kazumi, a poet and songwriter with a pretty-sounding 1971 spoken word album. Twenty Three Years Old finds a satisfying midpoint between singer-songwriter and chanteuse, with Sawa sounding like she could be playing the piano in a folk-rock combo but then stretching out across the top of it like Michelle Pfieffer in Fabulous Baker Boys.

Ema Sugimoto was a cover girl from age 14, a model and actress who careened through every imaginable pop medium in her brief heyday in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Her singing career was short-lived, but she seems to have been involved with the production process enough (according to her wiki page) to write the lyrics for nine out of the twelve songs, many of them covers of international hits sung in Japanese. She sounds electric — she chuckles through the opener and then aces the performance on any genre thrown at her with an air of disaffected restlessness; she’s an artist, but also sounds like she’s itching to grab her check before the ink dries. Does that make Emma Is Love the Paris Hilton’s Paris of 1974 Japanese albums?

***

Honorable Mentions

Bread and Butter: Barbecue 

Yumi Arai: MISSLIM

Fukinotou: Fukinotou / ふきのとう: ふきのとう

Off Course: Goin’ My Way/Off Course Round 2 / オフ・コース: この道をゆけば ⁄ オフ・コース・ラウンド 2

These are four albums that almost made the cut. Bread and Butter is a sleepy, goofy folk-rock-pop-etc. album I saw mentioned in a few places that exemplifies a general tendency toward Muppetcore in certain strains of Japanese folk that I neglected to mention in my blurbs (I intend this term as a compliment, but fear it won’t scan as one). Yumi Arai is a much better-known singer-songwriter than the ones who actually made my list. Fukinotou is a Simon & Garfunkel-esque duo that decided to make the softest imaginable Neil Young album. Off Course goes heavy on slick group harmonies, with hippie folk-pop that I appreciate as a technical exercise in getting a sound that’s far past its expiration date to sparkle again.

Other albums by category

These are the other albums that caught my ear, sorted roughly by genre category and then even more roughly by preference. YouTube full album or Spotify links provided where available. (Here’s a playlist of all of the albums on this list available on Spotify.)

Pop & singer-songwriter

Mayumi Itsuwa: Stare at the Time / 五輪真弓: 時をみつめて

Hiroko Hayashi: Maiden / 林 寛子: 乙女

Lily: Taeko / りりィ: タエコ

Sumiko Yamagata: Melodies Come from My Heart / やまがたすみこ: ～やまがたすみこフォーク・アルバム第3集

Naomi Chiaki: Stained Pattern / ちあきなおみ: かなしみ模様

Ohashi Junko: Feeling Now (First Album) / 大橋純子: フィーリング・ナウ

Makiko Takada: Makiko First / 高田真樹子: Makiko First

Agnes Chan: You And Me Concert / アグネス・チャン: あなたとわたしのコンサート

Izumi Yukimura: Super Generation / 雪村いづみ: スーパー・ジェネレイション

Sumiko: Rainbow / やまがたすみこ: 虹

Folk/rock

Matsaka Hara: The World of… / はつくにしらすめらみこと：原正孝の世界

Wasaku Araki & Akira Yamada: Wasaku / 荒木和作 & やまだあきら: 和作

Kaguyahime: Three Story Poem / かぐや姫: 三階建の詩

Happy End: Happy End Live!! / はっぴいえんど: ライヴ!!はっぴいえんど

Teruhiko Aoi: Nikolasica / あおい輝彦: ニコラシカ

Susumu Sugawara: Susumu / 菅原進: Susumu

Meiko Kaji: Go Away, Go Away, Melody of Sadness / 梶芽衣子: 去れよ、去れよ、悲しみの調べ

Harimau: Tiger / ハリ: 猛虎

Niningashi: Heavy Way / ににんがし: Heavy Way

Higurashi: Street Breeze Season / 日暮し: 街風季節

Shin Otowa: Memento / 音羽信: わすれがたみ

Vineyard: Vineyard / 葡萄畑: 葡萄畑

Grape: Forget Me / グレープ: わすれもの

Ryo Kagawa: Out of Mind / 加川良: アウト・オブ・マインド

Minami Ranbou: Musashino Poet / みなみ らんぼう: 武蔵野詩人

Yoshi Ogura: The Longing Left Behind / 小椋　佳: 残された憧憬

Kyozo Nishioka & Haruomi Hosono: Machi Yuki Mura Yuki / 西岡恭蔵 & 細野晴臣: 街行き村行き

Kenji Endo: Kenji / 遠藤賢司: 賢司

Keitaro Ikuta: Bridge of the Wind / 生田敬太郎: 風の架け橋

Kenichi Nagira: Kenichi Nagira’s Quirks / なぎらけんいち: なぎらけんいちの奇

Tetsuo Saito: Good Time Music / 斉藤哲夫: グッド・タイム・ミュージック

Kimihiko Sato: Short Story / 佐藤公彦: 片便り

Jazz, funk, fusion, psych, and experimental

Oki Itaru: Shirasagi / 沖至: しらさぎ

Takashi Mizuhashi Quartet: Who Cares

Toshiko Akiyoshi & Lew Tabakin Big Band: Kogun

Kunihiko Sugano Trio +1: Love Is A Many Splendored Thing

Kohsuke Mine: Out Of Chaos / 峰厚介: Out of Chaos

JA Seazer: Death in the Country / J・A・シーザー: 田園に死す

Tomita: Snowflakes Are Dancing

Taj Mahal Travellers: August 1974 / 西岡恭蔵 & 細野晴臣: 街行き村行き

Eddie Ban & Orient Express: Part 1 / エディ潘とオリエント・エクスプレス: その1

Tranzam: Funky Steps / トランザム: Funky Steps

Jo Kondo: Sen No Ongaku

Mari Nakamoto with The Shouji Yokouchi Trio & Yuri Tashiro: Little Girl Blue / 中本マリ と 横内章次トリオ・ 田代ユリ: リル・ガール・ブルー

Nobuo Hara and His Sharps & Flats: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

1. Revisiting Queen was interesting in the 1974 survey — they were much scrappier and harder-rocking than I expected, veering practically into metal at points.

2. Their “revolutionary trilogy” of early songs is “Take a Gun!,” “World Revolutionary War Declaration,” and “Red Army Soldier’s Poem”

3. The earliest Rock Impulse from 1972, credited to Godzilla & Yellow Gypsy, is different: more guitar-god instrumental rock than fusion, and it rocks harder than the fusion stuff. There are two 1974 LPs that share a lot of tracks, and several selections on both of those albums are also on a 1973 LP. I think the album qualifies for my list, though I don’t have a hard and fast rule for how much material needs to be from 1974 before it’s just a re-release with bonus tracks — I suppose I need to devise a Fame Monster rule.