Ah, Umi Da - TsuShiMaMiRe

I've been struggling to get a hold on my Spotify backlog recently. To some of you the concept of a 'Spotify backlog' may seem pretty alien but when you have as voracious an appetite as I do for any and all music, you need some sort of way to make sure you 'get around' to it all. I fired into my later-listening playlist this morning and recalled that I had planned to listen to a few bands somewhat adjacent to Shonen Knife (who I saw live last year! That was a good time!) and first up was TsuShiMaMiRe. A couple of albums in, so far, so good. I can really enjoy this!

Then I got to Ah, Umi Da. Holy shit.

Ganpei no ue no ippon yubi socho (1 finger boss on the hill) is a short and chaotic introduction to the sort of thing you're about to experience, before you get thrown into TIME LAG which hits a lot of the same notes in terms of noisy garage rock and roll but with just... More of everything. More melody. More guitar. More thumping vocals that make you wish you were seeing this in some sort of cramped hall somewhere.

I certainly don't wish to imply that the album peaks there, nothing of the sort - it just so happens that out of a series of absolute bangers it is far and away my favourite track on the album. It spoke to me and my personal sensibilities in a way that not many songs can. Bless you is a more rhythmic, catchy sort of jam with a light dash of surf rock that cannot fail to get your head banging and/or foot tapping. Kenaku shopping (Bad mood shopping) flips between psychedelic punk and pop rock. Mr.Yamaguchi feels like it's constantly keeping you in suspense as to where it's going to go next. Fast and heavy, slow and thumping, aggressive, relaxed. Who fucking knows? The rest of the record is similarly unsettled but never becomes boring and you'll be left by the end of it with a sense that you really should check out the rest of TSMMR's catalogue. Which, you know, you should.

spotify • bandcamp

_{Thu 18 Apr 2024}

This site is still actually under construction. I have a few more things I want to do to the skin and I need to get a content zone sorted out, an archive, that sort of thing. I can't tell exactly how long all of that is going to take but I'll be chipping away at it over the coming weeks. For now, this box is mainly just to test a few features of the style like image size, paragraph spacing, etc.

What can you expect here when the site is complete?

Well, I'll be writing mostly about things that interest me that I want to share or even just remember experiencing for myself. As I've gotten older and as access to media and art has increased, I've found it more and more troublesome to keep track of it all in my head, remember things to recommend and who to, that kind of thing. So in lieu of social media (which I have completely dispensed of now, thank God) this will just be a place to talk about the things that interest me.

As to what those things might be, think music (often weird Japanese indie rock & punk, city pop, fusion, ska, power metal), Asian TV and film (J-drama, anime, Hong Kong cinema), video games, manga, cars. I have a lot of things that interest me, so just expect a fairly eclectic mix. There will be a lot of Gunbuster mentions, of that much you can be sure.

I do this as an exercise in desire to keep the Internet personal. I'm not exactly breaking new ground with this opinion but I feel like social media has become a bit of a swamp of nothingness, devoid of any real substance, drowning in 'content'. I'm sick of 'content'. I want substance, context. The way the Internet used to be. Making a little personal corner of it seemed the best way to do that, I don't know.