Love Psychedelico, What's Your Excuse?
I have never liked Japanese pop or rock music...ever. Both musically
and stylistically, it reflects everything wrong with the kinds of songs
that appear in U.S. and U.K. pop charts. Nevertheless, it attracts a
great many listeners and fans (hence the name of the genre).
Back around 2000, however, I was hearing bits and pieces of something...different in CD rental stores, cafés, clubs, etc. I immediately began to research what the source of this new sound was (since, at the time, Shazam was still in its early stages of conception). After months and months of blaring J-pop boom boxes and shitty band recommendations from friends, I finally found a band I could possibly stomach, and I obsessed over it Like a diver, submerged deep in the ocean on an empty tank, struggling to reach air, I frantically rushed around to find out who they were and what they were about.
And when I did, the first listen to their then-newly released album made it all worthwhile. I mean, it does not get any better than a debut album entitled "Greatest Hits". The style of the album, from beginning to end, was something I had not heard from any other Japanese band, and the impression it gave me had little or nothing to do with the fact that almost half of its lyrics were in English. Musically, I could hear ideas within the composition of each song that sounded wholly unique, and for the first time, I was taken aback by a Japanese band, and I had no clue as to how or why...
...until recently.
Last year's release of Sheryl Crow's Detours inspired me to go back and listen to all of the albums I had missed between Sheryl Crow
and C'mon C'mon (1996-2002). I had, of course, heard all of the songs that got radio airplay, but I learned from Wildflower and Detours that it wasn't always the songs that were on the air that I enjoyed the most. (In fact, there are SOME songs that will remain nameless that reached wild popularity as singles that I literally cannot stand to listen to.)
You can imagine my dismay when discovering, while listening to this six years' worth of work, that I had actually been listening to those albums all along, but the music had simply been credited to another band. In other words, there's a thin line between "influence" and "musical plagiarism", and Love Psychedelico crossed it.
Some specific examples of where Love Psychedelico went from "flattering imitators" to "cover band" are in the styles, voicings, and studio engineering of tunes like These Days (see Strong Enough) and Everybody Needs Somebody (see There Goes the Neighborhood). It's in the guitar in I Saw You in the Rainbow (see Every Day Is a Winding Road), the vocals of LOW (see The Na-Na Song), and even compositional elements in Lady Madonna 憂鬱なるスパイダー (see Superstar).
I don't believe, however, that Love Psychedelico, are the only ones to blame for plagiarizing Crow, since, no matter how much they were influenced by Crow's work, they were facilitated by a studio that clearly made the necessary adjustments for matching their sound with hers.
To Love Psychedelico's credit though, the song that first grabbed my attention and sent me on the quest to identify them sounds nothing like anything that has come from Crow.
Back around 2000, however, I was hearing bits and pieces of something...different in CD rental stores, cafés, clubs, etc. I immediately began to research what the source of this new sound was (since, at the time, Shazam was still in its early stages of conception). After months and months of blaring J-pop boom boxes and shitty band recommendations from friends, I finally found a band I could possibly stomach, and I obsessed over it Like a diver, submerged deep in the ocean on an empty tank, struggling to reach air, I frantically rushed around to find out who they were and what they were about.
And when I did, the first listen to their then-newly released album made it all worthwhile. I mean, it does not get any better than a debut album entitled "Greatest Hits". The style of the album, from beginning to end, was something I had not heard from any other Japanese band, and the impression it gave me had little or nothing to do with the fact that almost half of its lyrics were in English. Musically, I could hear ideas within the composition of each song that sounded wholly unique, and for the first time, I was taken aback by a Japanese band, and I had no clue as to how or why...
...until recently.
Last year's release of Sheryl Crow's Detours inspired me to go back and listen to all of the albums I had missed between Sheryl Crow
and C'mon C'mon (1996-2002). I had, of course, heard all of the songs that got radio airplay, but I learned from Wildflower and Detours that it wasn't always the songs that were on the air that I enjoyed the most. (In fact, there are SOME songs that will remain nameless that reached wild popularity as singles that I literally cannot stand to listen to.)
You can imagine my dismay when discovering, while listening to this six years' worth of work, that I had actually been listening to those albums all along, but the music had simply been credited to another band. In other words, there's a thin line between "influence" and "musical plagiarism", and Love Psychedelico crossed it.
Some specific examples of where Love Psychedelico went from "flattering imitators" to "cover band" are in the styles, voicings, and studio engineering of tunes like These Days (see Strong Enough) and Everybody Needs Somebody (see There Goes the Neighborhood). It's in the guitar in I Saw You in the Rainbow (see Every Day Is a Winding Road), the vocals of LOW (see The Na-Na Song), and even compositional elements in Lady Madonna 憂鬱なるスパイダー (see Superstar).
I don't believe, however, that Love Psychedelico, are the only ones to blame for plagiarizing Crow, since, no matter how much they were influenced by Crow's work, they were facilitated by a studio that clearly made the necessary adjustments for matching their sound with hers.
To Love Psychedelico's credit though, the song that first grabbed my attention and sent me on the quest to identify them sounds nothing like anything that has come from Crow.