Month: June 2003

Reprise 9 46835-2
1997.11.11
Well, there’s only one reason I borrowed this from the library, and that was for Enya’s first, and best, fluke hit “Orinoco Flow”. Yeh, but did I listen to the rest of the CD?
After one aborted listen, having to stop after the horrific “Anywhere Is,” I tried again and made it all the way through. Talk about the law of diminishing returns. It’s an example of an artist totally misunderstanding what made her first hit so good. There’s fifteen other tracks here that have the “Enya” sound–smooth multitracked vocals, crushed digital velvet, quasi-Celtic mysticism, slow tempos–but none of the idiosyncracies of “Orinoco Flow.” There’s an erratic rhythm in the verses, a grand pomposity to the use of kettle drums, and the lyrics are mostly onomatopoeia. Who cares if “From Bissau to Palau – in the shade of Avalon/ from Fiji to Tiree and the Isles of Ebony” means anything? It sounds good. And don’t forget the last hanging chord, like a question mark.
The other songs make sure all the ambiguity of “Orinoco Flow” is solved. The chords are sunnier, the songs finish with major chords. The lyrics get dippy. “Sail away, sail away, sail away” conjured up some sort of wanderlust. “Anywhere Is” features a melody programmed by kazoo, and words such as “The moon upon the ocean / is swept around in motion / but without ever knowing / the reason for its flowing / in motion on the ocean” are trite, especially if you know the sing-song way it’s sung.
And if anyone develops a drinking game based around the number of times Enya uses the factory setting “tolling bell” sound (as first heard at the beginning of “Do They Know It’s Christmas”) then the chap who puts this CD on will wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.

You are now looking at my CD collection. With a day spent restoring my crashed drive (see the main page for that story), I spent the down time doing something I’ve been meaning to do since 1996: sort my CD collection into a manageable alphabetical order. I was stuck in the house anyway. I always used to keep my collection in order, but the bigger it got, the lazier I became. Since coming to the Mills Compound in December, this has been on my to-do list. I knew it would take some time, and it did.
Most of my CDs have had their cases tossed and replaced with thin poly bags that hold both booklet and J-card. (You can get them at Bags Unlimited.) So what you are looking at is a fraction of what it could be.
I sorted ’em into alphabetical piles on the floor and took this picture. You can see the piles for B, C, and F are the largest, the reason being my obsession past and present for The Beatles, David Bowie, Beck, Elvis Costello, and The Fall. The P pile should be bigger as an extra three feet of Pizzicato Five CDs were already sorted and on the shelf. The “Various Artists” pilie was big enough to divide into two, and next to that there is the Soundtracks pile, the Jazz pile, the Classical pile, and below that Video Game Soundtracks, and VCD (mostly porn, apparently. Where did that come from?) And do you really care about this?
Anyway, it’s all sorted now and shelved away. At last I know where everything is.

IMME Records IMME-1001
1996.08.01
Second only to Pizzicato Five, Flags was my favorite Shibuya-kei band back in the rosy days of ’96-’97. Produced by Tetsutaro Sakurai, they were his side project to Cosa Nostra, and featured five girls of different looks and personalities that he used to sing his Todd Rundgren- and Laura Nyro- inspired pop. There was Harry, the spooky, arty one; Aki, the girly one; Maria, the one who sounded like Kahimi Karie; Emiko, the earthy, fun one; and Rio, the slightly older, glamorous one. Or that’s how they seemed to me.
After buying all four of their releases and all six of their singles, I had given up on even finding their rare CD-ROM mini-album combo from 1996, let alone being able to afford it (Japanese collector prices being astronomical). Imagine how I almost choked on my Raisin Bran when I saw this at Tokyo Recohan for something like $7. It was a no-brainer.
I was slightly disappointed to find out that the six songs here are not new, despite the titles I’ve never heard of. They are actually all remixed versions of the songs found on their second album MOR from a month before, with English lyrics instead of Japanese. Some sound like demos–all the sounds I know are in place, but they don’t fit together as well. “Wonderland,” the English version of their best song “Nowhereland” (a song I so loved that I ripped off the title for my movie), is awkward and blocky, one take short of being brilliant (it’s interesting to compare and contrast, of course). It’s like those albums you discover only in your dreams–it sounds like them, but something’s quite off.

The QuickTime movies that accompany the songs are the usual bland Japanese promo variety, with usually one or two set-ups and no imagination of what to do for the entire 5 minutes. Only “Wonderland” gets any sort of treatment, with the band vogue-ing and being subjected to several digital effects. The dancing doesn’t suit the music, though. Mostly the videos prove what I always thought, based on the very few publicity photos I have seen of them: Emiko (left) is the cutie (she also has the best voice). After their 1997 album Cream they vanished into the ether.