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January 29, 2006
nhhmbase
I am snobby, jaded, cynical, and bored with guitar bands, and due to these character flaws, I have been unenthusiastic in recent days about the state of Japanese non-experimental indie music. But I like this band nhhmbase ("ne-han base"), and they're now officially on my shortlist.
Trevor from Music Related sent me their old demo last year, and despite the fact that the drums were recorded to sound like they're Casio keyboard samples, the three mp3s suddenly and inexplicably became my favorite thing outside of The Beagles. I naturally tend to like off-kilter time sequences: they sound fresh. But so many of these semi-Math Rock bands either spiderweb their guitar lines into boring drones, go jazzy, or start believing that their little science experiment in 11/8 is the hook. nhhmbase's instrumental technique makes 9/8 sound easy, and they remember to write actual songs with melodies and structures. They also show great mastery over dynamics - that kind of Jane's Addiction break-neck movement between pastoral scenes and heavy noise. The singer's voice lifts miraclously into the upper register in short spurts with no warning.
They also avoid the normal rock clutter problem. The drummer nonchalantly plays his "zero tom" kit in simple patterns a la Klaus Dinger. The bass is heavy and provides the underlying riffs. The "lead guitarist" punches individual notes and lets them ring out in feedback (guitar strap: extremely loose and long), while the singer only plays sparse and sparkly jazz chords (guitar strap: extremely tight and high).
Now this would be terribly boring if they weren't drunken and brash and young: stereotypically trashing their instruments at the end, dropping lyrics, breaking multiple strings in the course of the first song. (For those wondering how amateur bands can afford to treat their instruments poorly, lead singer Mamoru was rocking a $200 Fender Squier last night for a few songs - the favorite guitar of fourteen year-olds everywhere.)
Nhhmbase will have a proper release later this year, but until then, enjoy this mp3 from their early demo. Also, a clip of their live performance can be found at the Space Shower TV webpage.
Posted by marxy at January 29, 2006 11:36 PM
Comments
You should seriously consider setting target="_top" in your off-site links ...
Posted by: ls at January 30, 2006 7:12 AM
How do I do that?
Posted by: marxy at January 30, 2006 11:59 AM
If your blogging software lets you edit the raw HTML, just insert target="_top" into the a tag:
<a target="_top" href="...">Link</a>
Posted by: ls at January 30, 2006 1:52 PM
Don't do that! I hate that! Let the user decide. If you want a new window, just hold shift or command or whatever and do it yourself. It's the user's job to figure out the optimium times and places to open new windows. Having it forced on you is just a pain.
What does make sense is to put a little arrow-esque graphic to indicate off-site links to people, but that's a different thing all together. The idea is the same though, in that it let's the user decide if it matters or not.
Posted by: Carl at January 30, 2006 10:54 PM
target="top" does not open a new window, it just breaks out of the frameset so you don't go to the new site inside the neomarxisme frame. Getting stuck in a frame is annoying no matter how you slice it ... never mind that the whole frame design paradigm is out of favor these days.
Posted by: ls at January 31, 2006 10:36 AM
I'm sure Nhhmbase is happy to read these comments.
Also for those who are frame haters, you can always access my blog at http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy
Posted by: marxy at January 31, 2006 12:05 PM
like them or not.. they have that "thing". i find the vocalist completely engaging.. even on those horrible recordings.
and do you have a problem with the fender squier?
does anyone on this blog actually care about music? do music and japanese social economics really mix?
Posted by: trevor at January 31, 2006 3:27 PM
What's with this "guitar has been done to death" mentality so prevalent among electronic music enthusiasts? I mean, I used to play keyboards in a band with an analog-modeling synthesizer, and then I picked up guitar and found it just as inspiring.
BTW, I finally found some mp3s of Metalchicks and the riffs sound very cliched to me. Apparently their idea of metal is still in the 80s. You compared them to Slayer? Hell, at least Slayer doesn't sound dated even nowadays.
Posted by: Grishnackh at February 1, 2006 1:53 AM
I'm not against guitars, but I'm against "guitar bands" where you have to guitarists play power chords and a bassist play the root notes over drums.
Metalchicks are not a metal band. You should think of the album as Buffalo Daughter with all the instruments replaced by real drums and guitar. Same mentality.
Posted by: marxy at February 1, 2006 11:27 AM
I came for the music, stayed for the social commentary.
I suppose I made a mistake about the link thing. There's nothing wrong with target="_top" just target="_new", which I was thinking of. I just wasn't really aware that people read this blog inside a frame. I originally found it through a google link to an entry on metalchicks, so no frame then. Now, I wait for the RSS to ping, then I check the comments, again with no frame.
Oh, speaking of RSS, could you add a thing so that it comes out in unicode instead of with the Japanese all garbled?
Posted by: Carl at February 1, 2006 5:47 PM
Hmm, I'm looking at the code for the RSS feed, and actually it looks like it's set up right. There must be a problem on my end. Odd.
Posted by: Carl at February 1, 2006 5:49 PM
Ah ha! On further, further investigation http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy/index.rdf is set up right (but does only partial feeds) and http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy/index.xml is set up wrong (but does full feeds). Changing the first line of the second feed to oughta fix it.
Posted by: Carl at February 1, 2006 5:52 PM
Correction: changing it to <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
Posted by: Carl at February 1, 2006 5:54 PM
I hope my web maintenance person is reading this. I'm just the writer, here.
Posted by: marxy at February 1, 2006 6:31 PM
wha? huh?
you want google ads? i'm right on it.
私は私が何かについて考えたが、一方では私が但し例外としては私が考えることを忘れていた事全然何でもについて実際に考えなかったことを決定したと考える。
Posted by: trevor at pliink at February 2, 2006 2:25 PM
Thanks for fixin' it. Much obliged.
Posted by: Carl at February 3, 2006 12:14 AM