They warned us. They warned us, and yet the world was unprepared not just for the musical stylings of one Watanabe Junnosuke and his long-time partner, Matsukuma Kenta. Even when the track was announced as the kick-off to that WACK shuffle album, we were unprepared. And now, the wages of our inattentiveness are wrought:
It’s actually pretty nice! I’m one of those people who think that BiSH’s first album is, if not their outright best, then definitely their coolest and most ambitious, and the song that started it all (literally) is, of course, “Spark.” This puts a weird kind of bow on the song’s long trajectory, too, as the very first recording of it was Watanabe’s voice, and it even popped back up again prior to the release of FAKE METAL JACKET (link gone!). It was the only BiSH track to ever include the voice of Yukako Love Deluxe, who I believe is still getting royalties for having written the lyrics to the original. Neat.
The video … well, you can’t ever accuse Watanabe of not knowing how to play to his base, you know? My first play of it, I was skipping around a little to see if there was going to be anything notable, and I caught a brief glimpse of Pour Lui looking so disingenuously sad that I laughed. Good to see that the whole family was included.
Now, if they want to release a few MVs from other tracks on the album, that’d be nice.
Yukako didn’t write the lyrics to Spark (you can tell that’s a Watanabe song by the fact the whole thing is a massive, unsubtle YELLOW MONKEY tribute) but she did MONSTERS, Lonely girl and TOUMIN SHOUJO, which she is almost definitely still getting royalties from.
Whaaaaaa … I feel so tremendously misguided.
Let this also be a lesson that I should probably listen to YELLOW MONKEY more.
If they already buried him (in the part where they were all marching on the street), then why did he rise up at the ending? -my mom’s question minutes after watching it XDD
IS it a shame, though? Because this is excellent!