http://yoshimotomusic.bandcamp.com/
So you guys well know by now that I only review free albums, but I'm going to break that for this post and this post only. Unless I change my mind later, or someone asks me to. So, as a rule for my blog, I will only review free albums I find unless a band asks me to review their album, in which case I'll do it regardless of price.
Now that I've gotten that out of the way, Yoshimoto is a pretty damn good band. It's actually my ex-english teacher's band, my art teacher used to joke about how much they sounded like Sonic Youth, little did I know of the truth behind his words. I can't really think of much else to say with this, so onto the review.
"Cascarones" is a nice, calm, misleading song. Listening to it I've sort of relaxed, the guitar work and the percussion kind of make me feel light and airy. The vocals come into the song and they're soft, calm, soothing in a way. I like this song a lot, it sort of makes me feel like I'm at some party, and everything's sort of swirling around in a Garden State sort of way. It's nice, cloudy, sleepy, and then suddenly the guitar's all in your face and excited. A nice end to a nice song. "Chair" is a pretty energetic song, the instrumentation makes it seem pretty angst-y. The lyrics feel a bit airy, I like it. The lyrical style offers a nice contrast to the distortion and speed of the song. So far the album feels like a soundtrack to a Scott Pilgram vs. The World, if the movie was based more around noise rock. I mean the whole soundtrack. Not a bad thing, I dig it.
"Private Browsing" further instills my idea that this would do well in a Scott Pilgram movie. It's nice, sections of eerie distorted guitar followed directly by sort of lamenting chaos, and again into the eerie distortion. After that the entire song seems to follow that sort of sad eerie sound. I love it, it's sort of entrapping in that "I could see myself being chased by Jason Voorhees to this and being entirely too into the music to be scared. Only advancing the chase because it'd be so cool looking with that song. "Lemmings" is much calmer from the very start, while still keeping that late-night-alleyway-shenanigans sound as the others. I've decided that's the best description I can think of, and I don't know why you would call it anything else. It's one of those songs that sounds kind of like what I imagine Network would be if it were a song. A "the media is evil" type thing, I could be wrong, but that's what I'm feeling here. "Wake Up and Die" seems like it'd be something from heavy metal band, but it feels more like intense Pearl Jam with more coherent lyrics. It's got that 90's rock drive to it, I like it personally. The break down is pretty fun in how intense it is, since it leads instead into a sort of Franz Ferdinand feel before breaking again into a noise rock appeal. I really like that, I honestly was expecting it to take a different turn. Then right back into that 90's rock feel I grew to love, overall a great song and perhaps my favorite.
"Hungry Ghost" starts off with that noise feel that's just so good. It goes into that eerie underground sound again, with the vocals having a delay and soft reverb on them that makes them just a little bit eerier. Looking back, eerie is an adjective I've used for most of these songs, so I guess it's a pretty good description of their sound, but I think I'll stick to late-night-alleyway for now, it's still pretty feeling. It's not the type of shenanigans involving entirely shady characters, but maybe a lot and one dark vigilante super-hero just taking names. That's exactly what it sounds like to me, like Daredevil just hanging out back there waiting for a scummy ne'er-do-well to walk down with a snatched purse and wrecking him.
This is the most links I've put in any review, but they're all pretty accurate to the idea I'm trying to convey. This album's great, it's kind of dark, it's really eerie, and it's really fun to listen to. Is it bedtime music? Hell no, it's not at all. It's pretty chaotic, but it's really fun too. I'd suggest this to anyone who enjoyed the review, as that kind of means that you'd enjoy the album under review. I might be wrong about that, but I'm almost positive that I'm not. Enjoy!
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