Review: Half Japanese

Half Japanese
““Hello””
(Alternative Tentacles)

It’’s odd to get an album, throw it in for the listen (that’s right, I actually listen to the albums I review) and enjoy it immediately.  You listen and you know you must now write about it because that’s the whole point: to convey meaning and a sense of the music through printed words.  The songs play, weird kazoo noises, fuzz box vocals, catchy but odd riffs burble out of the speakers and you search for words to describe it all, for metaphors and you ask yourself, “If I said the songs sound like Guinea Pigs thrown at a high voltage electric fence would anyone understand what I mean?”  And you answer yourself, “No, certainly not.”  Half Japanese, I see from their discography, has been putting out records since 1977.  The only comparison I can make to other bands is, maybe they at times sound a bit like Bongwater as filtered through the Dr. Demento Show and Frank Zappa.  In fact, I’m surprised by their discography that they’’ve never had a release on Shimmy Disc.  It seems they would’’ve fit in quite nicely, what with their day dreamy musical negotiations through child like quandaries into the nature of reality that lead up to big noisy musical fits that soon recede like the tide, leaving pretty shells behind and crabs to crawl around on your mind after the album has reached its end.