Lost in Translation

So here I was all excited. The comment thread to the Assault post a couple of weeks ago has just been exploding with comments in Japanese. Foolishly assuming that maybe I had caught the attention of either HG Fact or maybe the band, I spent a couple of days trying to find a decent translation. Sadly, my musical genius is not being bruited across the land of the rising sun. But if anybody is taking a vacation to Tokyo and wants to know how to find "women who provide the sex" for "very modest renumeration" just ask me because now I know more than I care to about the for-pay Japanese sex trade or at least more than I'd picked up from copy of In the Miso Soup. So yeah, grindcore and hookers. The peanutbutter and chocolate of the blogosphere.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Assault

Assault
Assault
H:G Fact
2001
Are you like me? Do you obsessively read Jon Chang’s liner notes for the Discordance Axis albums and become enraptured in his thoughts on font? The guy wrote a song called “Typeface,” f’chrissake. It’s good to know I’m not the only one who’s ever geeked out on font design and what it says about us and how they can manipulate our mindset. (C’mon raise your hands if you’ve watched Helvetica or if it’s still bouncing around your Netflix queue somewhere). Such is the power of the visual art, eh, Sunyata?
The point of all that being, I bought Assault’s self titled album a few years back completely unheard for two simple reasons: it’s Japanese and the interesting typesetting looked like something Chang would cook up (it’s not) considering his visionary design work for bands like 324 and Asterisk*.
I may have been wrong on the art, I was right to trust my instincts when it comes to the Japanese. Assault revel in the strain of no bullshit hardcore that will never go out of style as long as there’s a pissed off teen in a basement somewhere. No experimentation, no chug-a-lug breakdowns, just furious punk storming straight ahead. The songs have some metallic heft to them and just a sheen of melody in spots (“Method’s” moody opening) but they’re assaulted with reckless, energetic abandon that prizes punch over precision. Bullet-belted and leather pantsed guitarist Osamu looks like he stepped out of a bad Possessed or Destruction cover band circa 1991 while Kaoru slaps away at bass strings that sound like slackened phone lines and drummer Kentarou recklessly bangs at his kit. Frontman Satoru has such a charming Engrish delivery as he barges through a song like “Victims for Jackyls” (or “Veectimsssssaahhhhhh for Jackuuuulssaaahhhhhh”) that you can’t help but bang along.
Assault hit it and quit it in an easily digestible 20 minutes that makes multiple rotations of head down bangers like “Go for Lust” and the Motorhead-inflected “Object of the Attack” mandatory.

I know nothing about either the band or the album beyond that. It’s Japanese; it’s hardcore; it makes me smile.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Slight Slappers

Slight Slappers
Tomorrow…Will the Sun Shine Again?
H:G Fact
2005
The line “Tomorrow, will the sun shine again?” appears in Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2002 execution gone wrong flick Alive (itself based on a manga by Tsutomu Takahashi). I don’t know if there’s any direct connection between that and this platter of exquisite punk noise from Japan’s finest purveyors of power violence, but I just thought I’d throw it out there.
Everything about Tomorrow is raw, with a blown out production that highlights every pick squeal and cracked cymbal crash, but Slight Slappers manage to fight through that skateboard injury sound to craft genuinely hummable tunes. If the scabs were scraped off of “The Ocean, August and Blue Memories” and the song was re-recorded with cleaner guitars, it easily could be the hook for one of those annoying Carnival cruise commercials and just maybe they could stop abusing Iggy Pop’s junky odes.
For an album that’s less than a dozen minutes long, Tomorrow is laced with those kinds of touches. The headlong punk of “Sweet Box” drones off into a swirling melodic maelstrom that in turn segues into the bouncing faux-pop opening of “Flystar.” But the pinnacle of the Slight Slappers’ distorted melodi-punk approach is the close out title track, another commercial jingle candidate as performed by a power saw quintet with gently draped guitar lines of the sort Ben Carr bangs out with regularity.
Man is the Bastard famously coined the term West Coast Power Violence, but if they’d taken a moment to look to their right, there was another potent power violence storm brewing just across the ocean.