Event Asobi Seksu • Bell and Resplendor
City San Diego
State California
Venue The Casbah
Thank you for contacting Asobi Seksu Customer Service. Please listen carefully as our options have changed. Press one for information about version 3.0 of our software, Hush. Press two for skeevy journalistic slobbering over Yuki Chikudate. Press three for hackneyed “but she sings in English and Japanese!” cultural analysis. If you were attempting to reach the My Bloody Valentine Coachella Reunion Complaint Hotline, please hang up and dial 1-800-HOWSMYSHOEGAZE.
Siren. Either the enchanting song of a nymph that lures sailors to dash themselves on the rocks below or a harsh warning to get the fuck out of the way of the oncoming ambulance. Pint-sized Ms. Chikudate’s voice manages to be both at once. There’s a temptation to be closer in to the woozy, keening gauze castle of her vocal performance, but lean in too much to the speaker to catch every breathy curlicue and you’re liable to get your eardrum burst by a blast of James Hanna’s guitar radiation.
There’s a lot of music-crit red herring fodder to Asobi Seksu’s schtick—the “fun sex” name, the j-pop culture jamming, the Cocteau references—all obscuring the purity of their (live) formula: apocalypse-loud dronegaze + pretty girl vox. It’s not really that heady, it just seems that way.
The best way to get to know Asobi Seksu for noobs might be their two excellent performance discs, “Live at the Echo” and “Live from Soho,” a pair of recordings of shows in LA and NYC from 2006 and 2007 that correctly document the band’s bipolar swings from tenderness to explosiveness. Their new LP, Hush (aptly named), is just a little too precious and micromanaged to be compelling.
Even with the bombast injection that comes from shitty concert PAs and crowd enthusiasm, limp album material like “In the Sky” off Hush doesn’t hold a candle to vibrant tracks (Cure-esque “Goodbye,” slowburner “Thursday,” et. al.) from predecessor Citrus. The 45-second interstitial sixth track “Risky and Pretty” (which showed up live) only gets it half right. There’s lots to admire, but not very much on the line. Not much is gained by sanding the glass edges of Asobi’s sound.
The records grow quieter and less adventuresome with every iteration, but luckily their live performances grow more raucous and punk every year. At this level in their live performance, A.S. have less in common with the Elizabeth Fraser-4AD sound than they have with the Kim Gordon’s wail + modem-squelch snowcrash of Daydream Nation.
Part of this is context: compared to other noise+girl bands, Asobi Seksu remain remarkably devoid of bullshit and the band neither relies on Chikadate to carry the show nor actively upstages her with antics or sonics. At the Casbah, it seemed to be a theme night of bands composed of femme-fatale ingénues and their three-piece nerd entourages on bass, guitar, drums and synthwhatever. The two acts that preceded Yuki & Co. were Bell and Resplendor, both in full gazegeeks+arty songstress configuration, both god awful, without chops or charisma. In this light, A.S. truly shine, simply because their ostensible genre-mates who shared the Casbah’s tiny stage nook sucked so hard. [Note: for clarity's sake, we should refer to this category of music as "björks 'n' dorks" going forward.]
By keeping their record output and live evolution largely separate but interestingly equal, they’ve managed to turn an art-house hypothetical (what does MBV sound like with Yoko Ono in front?) into an open-ended question (Sonic Youth? M83? The Field?) and thus jump the shark of shoegaze revivalism that would kill a less relevant band.
It’s like how Watchmen is a clever and subtle (but failed) experiment and X-Men Last Stand is a moldering dollop of moose dung, but to my mom, they’re both just comic book movies.
Noisy j-pop inflected shoegaze isn’t a genre that gains fans by abandoning the difficult bits. If anything, keeping the chaos and danger coursing below the surface of Asobi Seksu’s gossamer Gotham is going to keep them afloat for a fourth record. Or at least they’ll melt down loudly rather than dithering out quaintly. Like the dude in the mask says, never compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. – By NOAH BARRON
Tags: asobi seksu, bell and resplendor
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