So I got in trouble at work. For wearing a hat. Not even a cool look-at-me it’s Halloween hat. A green sort of boring Che-style hat with “CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR” embroidered on it, offensive and trite to game nerds and hipsters alike. Said uglyass hat was a freebie from my roommate who playtested at the game studio.

But secretly, my editor was probably yelling at me because I was wearing black nail polish. I thought I had kept it a secret by keeping my hands in my pants pockets, but probably not. Another reporter was like “Yeah, he can’t yell at you for that because he’d get sued for discrimination.”

The paper’s publisher was milling around the building and my boss was freaked because Daddy Warbucks might see his newspaper dollars at work to employ me, a scruffy, scummustachioed dude in his girlfriend’s scarf, a commie-lookin’ hat and femme gothy nail polish on Halloween. Horror of horrors.

But I digress. It’s Halloween night and we’re all here to hear Asobi Seksu. My black, crappily-applied nail polish is still on. But instead of me being the weirdest freak in the place like I was at my office, I’m the squariest square that ever squared here at the Echo.

Around me is a churning mass of Hunter S. Thompsons and Sarah Palins, sexy pirates, bloody nurses, Clockwork droogies, shirtless Hellraiser fetish dudes, Flava Flavs, steam punks, crowned Where-The-Wild-Things-Are pajama kids and even one girl in that goose costume that Bjork wore to the Oscars that one time.

Who can even tell what’s a costume anymore. It would really have been Halloween if these kids had shown up in casual-fitted Old Navy jeans and Tommy Bahama dad shirts.

For my costume, I kept the crappy nail polish and my girlfriend gave me some spooky eye makeup. Unfortunately, I left the Call of Duty hat at home, but it would have been oddly apropos. In the game, heavily armed, unsubtle American soldiers do battle with the wily, racially caricatured samurai of the Japanese WWII fighting force.

In Asobi Seksu (according to wiki, colloquial Japanese for “playful sex”), bracing droneverb does battle with cutesy-sexy j-girl alien diva vocals from Yuki Chikudate.

First aside: this is one of those problematic bands where despite the musical competence of the band itself, people only write about the frontwoman. So like, Asobi Seksu is three tall nerdy white guys on bass, gee-tar and drums and a tiny nymphet doing keyboard pantomime and vox. So who the fuck do you think people focus on? It’s like some weird post-colonial fetishism where three tall white dudes are musically dating the pocket-monster-sized Ms. Chikudate, an arrangement that is simultaneously titillating and irritating for the audience.

But anyway, Asobi Seksu blew the roof off it. Yuki’s ethereal Cocteau siren song floats like a satellite above the surface of a storming planet of bass drone, guitar fuzz and Joy Division robo beats. It’s a dizzying experience, the sonic equivalent of angels fighting with power tools.

And sure, they wear their influences on their sleeves, but so what? It fuckin’ works.

Reading other reviews on the interwebs, it’s My Bloody Valentine that gets the most lip service in connection with Asobi Seksu. And yeah, that’s there without a doubt. But I thought there was a shitload of Disintegration-era Cure in the mix, if they replaced Robert Smith with Sailor Moon.

Picking out individual stand out tracks is a little hard, and to be honest, I’d had a few drinks. Maybe that’s why my notes are all lecherous. I suspect most of the material was drawn from 2006’s “Citrus” but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. This one tune began with an odd ska beat and a funky bass hook, and that was more than I could identify in any other song. “Springs,” I think. Overall, their schtick is super unified: a pretty, otherworldly voice ensconced in gorgeous, violent noise. What else do you want? I loved it and so did the drunk Halloween crowd.

Second aside: Yuki sings in English and Japanese, an effect that taps into the sonic irrelevance of lyrics in overly beautiful music, re: Sigur Ros or Cocteau Twins. It works perfectly live, and instead of being overly mysterious, results in an exuberant cheerfulness, like what she’s saying doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the wonderful, playful, sexy time she’s having saying it. Every so often, a word or riff will materialize out of the forcefield, but trying to hang on to the solid objects is far less rewarding that allowing one’s ears to get swept downstream, at least as far as I’m concerned.

Occasionally, they clanked. A few moments got awkward or murky or just came off as poorly rehearsed noise. My biggest beef was with guitarist James Hanna, who seems to be doing a whole lot of extra work, banging and scratching and mauling his instrument to get the effect of a wall of open chord echo noise. Most of it seemed non-functionally theatrical, but it sounded good so fine.

Third aside: I’m sure there’s lots of sort of problematic “issues” that could be unpacked through the framework of Asobi Seksu—the American atom bomb of fuzz guitar exploding on the Japanese cityscape of opaque vocal performance, cultivated otherness (though Yuki is from L.A.), the fact that she got behind the drum kit for the last track and beat the shit out of all of us with her drumsticks. It’s an exercise in what my former girlfriend Sarah, a shoegazer and a lit professor to boot, calls “geek Orientalism.” The whole Roland Barthes not-real-Japan-but-our-idea-of-Japan thing. More about the prejudices and aesthetic hungers of the Western observer interpreting the signs than the source material itself. But I haven’t been in a college English class since like 2004. Deconstruction is so undergrad.

Asobi Seksu are polished and taut and build their soundscapes with the staid hand of a Renaissance painter using sunlight behind clouds to build majesty. It’s kind of an empty signifier but who gives a fuck. Just paint your nails black and put on the damn WORLD AT WAR hat and rock out.

Check out our full set of Asobi Seksu concert photos.

Review by NOAH BARRON
Photos © NOAH BARRON + CHRIS GLAZE