04.18.23: Notes on Midori

Screaming. Sure, it sounds easy. But it's also incredibly dangerous.

So there’s this defunct jazz-punk band from Osaka called Midori. If you search for them on the major streaming platforms, you’ll turn up some katakana — ミドリ — and an anime girl with her titties out. Don’t be alarmed. You’re in the right place. This is the cover art for the band’s second album, released in May 2008 and titled — say it with me now — aratamemashite hajimemashite midori-desu.

Oh? What’s that? You think “jazz-punk” sounds obnoxious? You think the cover art is giving crazy and depraved? Well, the music is giving it in spades. Get a load of the swing-time psychosis on “Osaru” and “Himitsunofutari.” Behold the Jekyll-Hyde type situation in the singing on “Suki” through “Yukikosan.” This thing is all over the place! Even by the standards of a misfit scene, Midori is pretty unruly and rather impressively deranged. The commenters over on Rate Your Music are very amusingly split on declaring this album (a) irredeemably amateurish or (b) goddamn iconic.

I’m not going to translate any of these titles or lyrics because, for our purposes, they don’t really matter. Mariko Gotō is the lead vocalist, and for the most part I have no idea what the fuck she’s on about. I love her though. I love her voice.

There’s this old anime series called Excel Saga, about a weird scream-y girl named Excel who merrily serves a benevolent world-conquering overlord named Il Palazzo. The series was senseless slapstick that notoriously culminated in a loud, lewd, hyperviolent spoof for its finale, titled “Going Too Far,” which never aired on TV in Japan. Excel’s English dub actor, Jessica Calvello, famously over-committed to the bit and damaged her vocal chords in the taping for a mid-season episode; she then had to be replaced for the remainder of the series. Mariko is Calvello, essentially — except she’s Japanese, she’s invincible, and she’s irreplaceable.

Mariko’s previous band, Usagi, was a more conventional punk outfit. Her more recent solo output is, frankly, tepid, and she’s really struggled, commercially and personally, in this latest phase of her career. In any case I wish her the best. Like I said, I love her voice.

I don’t have any big authoritative insights into Japanese rock. I’m still walking the first mile of that particular journey. I got into Number Girl a couple years ago, inspired — if I remember correctly — by a stray comment about the band’s third album, Sappukei, on Tim Rogers’ eight-part, ten-hour video review of Cyberpunk 2077. The rest is search history.

---

I’m going to spend the rest of this post conflating a few different styles of Japanese rock of the past couple decades. Forgive me; I got into music journalism as a rap critic, and you become a rap critic specifically so no one ever expects you to know or say anything about guitars. Anyway I get the sense that these scenes are in fact largely defined by fuzzy distinctions and promiscuous intermingling. As always, I’d love to hear from readers, via comments and email, who can talk about their own experiences with these scenes.

---

Number Girl is a Japanese post-hardcore band, and Sappukei, released in July 2000, is a tremendous album — sweltering, sexy as hell. The availability of Sappukei on streaming services is somewhat limited in the U.S. The algorithm will inevitably move you along from Number Girl to Ling Tosite Sigure, one of the more popular post-hardcore bands, and one I’d in fact recognized from the opening credits of Psycho Pass.

Ling Tosite Sigure employs both male and female singers and covers a range of vocal styles. In general Japanese post-hardcore gets as grimy as Girugamesh (otherwise associated with metalcore and visual kei, and prone to pivots from one album to the next) and as mellow as Haru Nemuri (otherwise associated with j-pop and art rock). I prefer the more feminine stuff for the most part. Though, most recently, as in all this past weekend, in yet another scene transition, I’ve instead been digging the neck-snapping noise rock of Melt-Banana.

I love Midori. I crave Midori. I suppose the closest I’ve gotten to snorting that substance in some other form — though without the swinging piano, unfortunately — is Otoboke Beaver. They’re a punk band from Kyoto, and in recent years they’ve earned a great deal of acclaim in the U.S., deservedly so. These girls are a pack of zooted werewolves ransacking a 7-Eleven. Otoboke Beaver is the sound of a woman fighting with her boyfriend, her boss, her landlord, her arresting officer, and her mom, all at once, and winning. There’s a lot of Kansai slang but also a lot of English lyrics on Itekoma Hits and Super Champon, so it’s all a bit more immediately legible to Western audiences compared to Midori. Get a load of “George & Janice.”

This is peak camaraderie. Girls wishes it was Otoboke Beaver. My sister is flying to Paris to see Beyoncé in concert at some point in the next several months; I would, in the right economic climate, fly to Japan and take a bullet train to wherever to behold this band. It would be an honor to be mauled by the directionless limbs of a properly excited fan in this crowd; I imagine a young Japanese woman who stands just a few inches above the minimum height requirement for roller coasters, weighs less than a MacBook Pro, and yet somehow manages to send me to a hospital with ocular bruising. This woman in the crowd and later the nurses at the hospital would of course tell me what I once told you, about Midori. Don’t be alarmed. You’re in the right place.