Fish Out Your Placenta and Pop It In a Blender

Salt 5 “Get Up! Rapper” – I honestly can’t recall which song introduced me to the wonders of J-Pop, but I would like to find out so that I might shake its antropomorphized hand. In terms of providing the purest mainlines of sugary-sweet pop ever, it’s very hard to trump the Japanese. Salt 5, rather than being a pop group unto themselves, is made up of members from various groups that operate under the larger Hello! Project banner (which also consists of pop giants such as Minimoni and Morning Musume).

At least, these are the facts as I understand them. The main hinderances of delving deeply into J-Pop, for those of us who live smack dab in the middle of the non-metropolitan US, are the language barrier and lack of domestic availability. The better P2P programs can circumvent the latter problem, but an inability to distinguish kanji from katakana will keep the avid English-speaking fan from learning much about J-Pop via the mostly Japanese fan sites. I would posit, however, that the biggest obstacle that this music faces in finding widespread popularity even among the newly pop-friendly enclaves of the underground is that so much of it is pop turned to 11. “Get Up! Rapper” is a mild Splenda kick compared to the hyperactive sugar rush of, say, “Minihamuzu no Ai no Uta” by Minimoni. Which, as I’ve come to discover, is maybe just a little too sweet for the uninitiated. But if this sounds like your cup of Jolt, I can’t recommend further J-Pop exploration highly enough.

Bumblebeez 81 “Microphone Diseases” – Bumblebeez 81 (or simply Bumblebeez, as they’re known in their native Australia) have made an appearance on Fluxblog before, months before the release of their Printz album (a collection of two prior EPs) in the US. Since that time, a video for one of the weaker songs on the album (“Pony Ride”) has aired on television and, between negative reaction to the video (which led many to erroneously dub the ‘Beez as nothing more than a cut-rate Beck clone) and album reviews that mostly range from mediocre to awful, it would seem to the casual observer that the band could easily be written off as a dud.

Which is why I was happy to see that Anthony Miccio (a former Fluxblog guest writer) gave the album a positive review in Stylus and put it high in his 2004 Pazz & Jop poll. It makes a body feel just a little less crazy when there’s another guy who’s seeing the same shit.

So, yeah: I’d put Printz pretty high up on my list of albums from the past year. And I’d put “Microphone Diseases” even higher on my list of songs of the year. I played it almost weekly on my college radio show from the time I first discovered it and never got tired of hearing it. Like the album as a whole, it’s an admittedly derivative and slightly amateurish affair, filled with ramshackle beats, bratty, tossed-off rhymes, and a boundless, energetic sense of fun. Which is pretty much the criteria that most of the bad reviews I read used to warn away listeners. In my world, that’s practically the formula for good times. (Click here to buy it from Amazon)

Deric Holloway maintains the visuals for Fluxblog. He is currently an art student and hopes to put his training to work in making Fluxblog a feast for the eyes as well as the ears. Tron In Morocco is his fledgling music blog.