![]() A page of solid Japanese language reviewsĪnd thank you to Jean Snow who delivered some hard-to-find EPs and provided spiritual guidance through the long process.Mark Wasiel’s defunct Pizzicato Five discography.Ted Mills song-by-song Pizzicato Five discography.I skipped “promo releases.” If there is something major I overlooked, feel free to pester me until I add it. I listened to every album that was not a greatest hits album rehashing old music, and I listened to every EP that was not just a single with a nearly identical remix. Fortunately I have been in a mood for what I call “systematic listening” (close listening to music catalogs of certain artists or genres in chronological order), and so I decided to listen to (basically) the entire Pizzicato Five discography and report back on my findings. Pizzicato Five invented a new methodology that yielded incredible results: laying bright new melodies on top of devalued and forgotten 1960s junk - Bacharach, film soundtracks, French Yé-Yé, Donovan - with drum samples and dance floor beats.Īnd this brings us back to the main barrier for Pizzicato Five fandom, whether new or old: the band’s prolificacy. On the other hand, they were the most consistent and driving force of the Shibuya-kei movement and pioneered a sound that no one outside of Japan ever replicated with the same skill. They were not a “serious” group in terms of content or timbre, they released too much material, and the quality went off a cliff at the very end. We can argue on quality, but P5 wins quantity hands down: There are more great P5 songs than there are Happy End or Flipper’s Guitar songs total.Īnd yet the band’s legacy is not a settled issue. One of the last P5 things I ever bought was called “In the Bag,” and it was literally a bag of Pizzicato Five records.īut now with some distance, I cannot think of a Japanese band who achieved more memorable and innovative songs than Pizzicato Five. Whether it was their long tenure, ubiquity, or the comically long discography, Pizzicato Five records felt like a commodity. When I started hunting for rare Shibuya-kei vinyl in 2000 across Japanese RECOfans and disk unions, there was rarely what I was looking for but there was always a giant stash of Pizzicato Five. ![]() When I started listening to Japanese music in the late 1990s, there was almost nothing available in the U.S. I always took Pizzicato Five for granted. Here are his thoughts over a five-part series. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. While P5 may be in with the lounge crowd, they never feel superior to their cheesy predecessors avoiding the sometimes smug, reactionary irony of the new exotica, Yasuharu Konishi's diverse influences are held together by his all-embracing love of the pop spectrum. Pepper's pomp to '60s R&B horns to symphonic dancefloor beats to introspective pastorals. Singer Nomiya Maki puts her unpretentious stamp over everything from Sgt. Keyboard timbres run the gamut of the Pizzicato imagination from faux-harpsichord to spacy funk. Think Burt Bacharach without the self-pity, with a smidgen of Motown and Stax. Hookier and more danceable than their previous album, this is a welcome return to songwriting for the dynamic duo. Playboy & Playgirl begins with the kind of collage-heavy imagined soundtrack that marked Happy End of the World with that out of the way, they get back to the inspired, eclectic popcraft that is their strength.
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