Pizzicato Five throw all taste and class out the window and just go “Kimono” and “Sukiyaki Song” until you want to burn every album in their entire catalog. By taking Japan as a theme, Konishi produces a recursive error, like the scene where John Malkovich goes into his own head. I could maybe extract some good quotes from the lyrics of “Fashion People” (Nigo!) for a nonfiction book, and I am partial to the mambo-beats of 1960s cover “In America” but the rest is beyond cheesy - like a “JAPAN COOL” poster hanging in a provincial gift shop selling salty green tea. This record is really, really, really, really terrible. (A) - The groovy, moogy Pizzicato Five we should all remember Other interesting sound experiments include the mega-blown out mixes of “Weekend” and “The Great Invitations,” the Austin Powers trend convergence of “Playboy Playgirl,” and minimal stutter snare of “Such a Beautiful Girl Like You.” If you remove the skits, this is one of the more consistently good efforts and a sound for the ages. The band recovers with “A New Song,” P5’s best use of the moog synthesizer in a bright and shiny Hugo Montenegro pastiche. And then we get to Konishi’s great weakness in sequencing his own albums, forcing the least exciting song into the prime #2 spot in this case, the boring “Rolls Royce” goes on for eight full minutes. The album starts with the excellent “La Dépression” - a cheery joke about Japan’s own economic despair. Here we begin the final, mature years of Pizzicato Five, a period in which the band finds a unique, yet timeless sound rooted in 1960s analog with the speed of late 1990s electronic music.
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