The PC’s on the blink again. It’ll be over a week before I can put right whatever’s wrong so in the meantime I’m working on the backup machine, my trusty four-year-old low-spec laptop. So here I am, running in the Aniblog Tourney with little to write about because I can’t watch much; I feel like I have an important call to make when my mobile phone’s in the pocket of My Other Jacket.
So I thought I might as well write about Perfume. Music dominates a lot of my spare time: I immerse myself in as much as possible, ignoring the usual boundaries of time, trends and genre in favour of my own so sometimes my tastes are a bit unpredictable. My fascination with Perfume is a guilty-pleasure kind of thing, but not completely so.
As in, I’m again asking myself “why am I enjoying this when it’s such a departure from everything else in my collection?” They are after all commercialised and have this aura of image, of marketing, of popular shallowness, for want of a better phrase. And no, I’m not going into that K-on business again after what happened last time. I’m merely saying it’s a departure from most music I listen to.
Bands that sound like this don’t usually appeal to me but I really enjoy Perfume…and not just because it consists of three attractive ladies in cool outfits (although I’m not denying that helps). I have a feeling that they aren’t a typical manufactured electro-pop girl-group (I’m using the distinction between ‘group’ and ‘band’ very deliberately here), and my acceptance of them can largely be attributed to that.
I’ll admit that on the surface they sound and look manufactured. I’d even go as far as to say they represent everything about commercialised pop: they’re marketed as a sound and image rather than self-made songwriters, they sell zillions of records and the lyrics are generic to the point of being nonsensical at times. I even find the voices peculiar.
The vocals are put through so much digital studio trickery that their own mothers wouldn’t recognise them; I’d put money on them being indistinguishable from a skillfully-used piece of Vocaloid software in the next five years (and I don’t think that has to be a bad thing). Hell, the visuals at their gigs look like something from Sharon Apple in Macross Plus (again, not a bad thing?).
Perfume are therefore a textbook example of a commercially successful, chart-friendly electropop group that projects a futuristic, popular image. I also admit that my own personal methods of appreciating and classifying music are weird enough anyway…
Let’s start on ‘genre’: the concept that music fans hate because it unfairly pigeonholes things, but we grudgingly accept because it’s useful on occasion. I like alt-rock, post-rock, classic rock, shoegaze, nu-gaze, blues, classical, electronica…but where does Perfume fit into this nebulous world of mine? It’s too poppy to be alternative, to electronic to be rock…and clumsy self-conscious people like me are generally averse to dance music (I’m working on it. Not the dancing…just the appreciation of dance music).
I found this pic at The Bonkurasu Brigade ages ago and found the manga-style artwork cool…I finally have an excuse to post it
How would I classify Perfume? Here’s where it starts to get interesting. A while ago I jokingly referred to My Bloody Valentine as ‘post-pop’ in the sense that, despite it being a form of sonic experimentation that sounds like nothing before it, chief songwriter/guitarist Kevin Shields insists that he sets out to write straightforward guitar songs. Nobody who listens to Isn’t Anything or Loveless can call it *just* guitar pop – nevertheless it is, beneath the pitch bends and liquid reverb atmospherics, five-or-less minute songs made up of ordinary guitar chords. Perfume are *just* electro-pop…only not.
Before going any further I have to link to the official promo video for the Triangle version of Edge, which is possibly my favourite tune of theirs so far (the album overall isn’t their best though). The video itself is really fun – it has images from End of Evangelion mixed up with concert footage, wild computer text strings blinking across projector screens, and is a neat test for whether you have photo-sensitive epilepsy or not if you hit fullscreen in a darkened room.
It shows Perfume as an energetic live experience, which makes them more than some sterile studio-only act. Making records is one thing, but putting on a live show that draws people in is a different matter; some artists are more comfortable in the studio while some attain fame/notoriety through live gigs. Jumping around like mad AND singing is damned hard (are their vocals dubbed for gigs? Feel free to clarify this for me)!
The title track to the GAME album is another example of the quirky Perfume sound: there’s this tooth-rattling fuzzy bassline that cuts through the pretty-shiny girly shimmer and feels so unexpected and incongruous…to the point where I felt the need to invent a new genre definition for it and the caffeine rush of Edge: ‘bubblegum industrial’.
Listening carefully to the arrangements, this robotic and meticulously-produced electro isn’t quite in the same league as the usual chart music to me. I don’t follow the UK or Japanese charts but what I’m used to hearing is more formulaic than this – it has to be in order to be ‘safe’ from putting mainstream fans off and losing sales (not that it stops Lady Gaga…). As significant as they are in terms of financial revenue, Perfume’s cybernetic heart may well be an indie one.
Towards the end of the Edge promo the screens display the line “what is DISCO?”, along with some eccentric stage work that’s different from ordinary choreography. What I’ve heard of Yasutaka Nakata’s work on Capsule covers similar ground to Perfume’s current sound but he strikes me as being more eclectic and experimental; my assumption is that Perfume’s songwriting duties can largely be attributed to him, and as such they’re an experiment on his part to dabble in the mainstream and challenge its conventions.
Does Nakata dislike formulaic, commercialised chart music and wants to subvert from within? Or are Perfume a demonstration of his closet love for it? Or, more interestingly still, are they an attempt to marry popular marketability with indie cred and imagination to push the electro-pop envelope? I haven’t had chance to listen to their early Shibuya-kei-inspired material for comparison but I view Perfume in their current incarnation partly as a vehicle for Nakata’s songwriting.
The end result shouldn’t matter when the songs are as fun as they are, but part of the appeal that Perfume holds for me is that they come across as band who have gained the acclaim of a headlining pop act – even playing the Budoukan – but underneath they’re an experimental outfit that innovates as well as entertains. Because they placate the Industry – playing the GAME[sic] – with the choreographed dance moves and catchy hooks, they can get away with the commercially riskier innovative moments.