Love Psychedelico: Annoying? Awesome? Annoyingly Awesome?

Love Psychedelico is one of the odder bands I've come to enjoy this year. This duo from Japan has apparently been all the rage in their home country and southeast Asia for a few years now. That's right, I said Japan and southeast Asia. It's my understanding that this is pretty uncommon...in general, Japan is the pariah of the Eastern world. Culturally, the country keeps to itself, and the rest of Asia likes it that way. But these rockn'rollers are changing that, and with the recent release of This Is Love Psychedelico in the U.S., they're now moving their way west.

With the exception of the Yoshida Brothers, who use ancient Japanese instruments in a crazy mixture of traditional and contemporary styles (and are pretty awesome), I haven't delved into the Japanese music scene all that much. Unfortunately, when I think Japanese music, I often think of the generic pop that plays in the background of a lot of anime (though perhaps MWC could point me toward some anime with good music?). LP is definitely a bit more western-sounding, and they definitely have a way with the hooks. When it comes to good hooks, I'm a hungry, hungry fish.

The lyrics are really the polarizing factor in these songs. They're basically a lot of Japanese words meshed not-so-seamlessly with Engrish. This basically means you won't understand half the lyrcis--unless, of course, you happen to read Japanese--and the other half are borderline hilarious. For example, listen to the English lyrics in the video below for "Standing Bird," an incredibly catchy song:

Did you listen? One string of relatively meaningless English phrases ends with a prolonged, sincerely sung "Breaking wiiiiind." I'm pretty sure this song isn't about farting, so I can only assume that this is an unfortunate misappropriation of an English phrase. Very few of the English lyrics make sense on this album, though few lyrics are as amusingly awkward as "Standing Bird." This will probably annoy a lot of people, but there's a large chunk of albums in my collection that I listen to for the music, and the lyrics are basically not that important. If these Love Psychedelico songs were exclusively in Japanese, I'd still listen to them.

My only quibble with a lot of these songs is that they're 1-2 minutes longer than they should be. Maybe the stories they tell in the lyrics, if they are stories, require that kind of song length. For western listeners, this is not profound stuff. It's rock candy, and it doesn't need to sit in my mouth quite this long. That said, I still recommend people check out some of their other tunes on their website(link at the top of the post). It might not blow your mind, but it'll get your head bopping. I'll call Love Psychedelico one of my guilty pleasures of the summer, and they're creeping into fall now, too.