Music log (a mlog??? or a clog…) | Perfume

Perfume are hard to explain.
That’s not true.
Perfume are easy to explain, it’s what’s appealing and engaging about them that is difficult to explain.
I shall attempt.
Perfume are three young Japanese girls who sing and dance to various styles of electronic music, mostly of the French House persuasion, with a decent helping of retro and straight electro. Yes, they dance. Their dancemoves are something akin to, but not exactly, children’s action-songs. Nevertheless, some of their tracks are ordinary, but the French House ones are actually very well produced. The girls’ voices tend to be vocoded and auto-tuned to the hilt, and whether this is a creative choice or because they actually can’t sing has yet to be discovered. The house tracks bounce along at a goodly pace, and myself, Chibi-R and A_Spec have found ourselves in-love with their sound. Sure, there’s plenty of other house out there that is better and smoother, but this is House of the J-Pop flavour.
That flavour is sugar.
Lots of it.
One of my descriptions of Perfume to Chibi-R was that they’re like a small child sitting on my shoulders and bashing me repeatedly in the head with a squeaky hammer.
In a good way.
Their music is just so vibrant and lively that if you get into the sound, which I do, it actually has the ability to make you happy all of its own accord, and even make you smile, possibly against your will.
I can’t listen to Perfume all day and all night, but there are plenty of situations where the music suits, like driving, surfing the internet, or jumping around the house like a child with ADHD.

I can understand if young citizens of Japan despise their own pop just as much as we hate western pop, but just like them, we get into sounds that we don’t hear a lot of. I imagine the pop-music scene in Japan is absolutely saturated with this stuff, but we only get the one or two artists that get through the filters. Just as we love the absolutely mental happy sounds of J-pop, they probably find it as inane and insipid as we do our western pop music.

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Other music that I’ve been really into recently are U2, with a classic revisitation of the 1991 album Achtung Baby, still the best album ever created (along with BT’s This Binary Universe of-course), Crazy Penis, or Crazy P as they’re now known, for superb disco grooves, and two tracks by The Seatbelts/Yoko Kanno, Call me call me and No reply, both from the Cowboy Bebop selection of music.