We will end this week of Japanese punk with a very early band, The Stalin. They formed in 1979, and put out their first EP in 1981, Stalinism. It was the brainchild of Michiro Endo — who was already in his thirties by the time the band was recording. He reminds me of Lee Ving of Fear when he was at his most unhinged. But I don’t think he ever was as unhinged as Endo.

Here is a song off their first LP, Trash. The song is called “Kaibōshitsu,” which apparently means, “Autopsy Room.” And that’s, well, very hardcore punk.

After discovering Hi-Standard, I became interested in finding more of their music. It turns out that one of the founders of the band, Ken Yokoyama, started another band when Hi-Standard stopped working in 2000. The band’s name is BBQ Chickens. And they are great too. At the same time, Yokoyama created Pizza of Death Records, which seems to be doing very well, and currently includes Garlic Boys.

In 2002, they released a video of two of their songs, “Sick Guy/Stupid Magazines” off the album, Indie Rock Strikes Back.

Today, we listen to Hi-Standard — a Japanese band formed in 1991, whose members clearly listened to a lot of American punk rock from the 1980s. They mostly sing in English, which doubtless makes them sound more American. But they just have the sound down. And they are great players. And they have a sense of humor with covers of Saturday Night and The Kids Are Alright and a great version of California Dreamin’. (Really. Listen to it. Click it. I’ll wait… Great, right?)

We are going to listen to “Maximum Overdrive” off their first album, Growing Up. Special attention should be paid to Akira Tsuneoka on the drums. He’s just amazing. I mean, they all are, but especially him. I love this band. They are the find of the week.

54 Nude Honeys was a very successful punk band out of Tokyo — formed in 1992. They are silly and generally over the top. As you will see in the video below and on the cover at the left, they dress is skimpy leather and generally try to seem like bad girls. It’s all got the same campy feel as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Despite their success, the only album of theirs that is widely available is the 2006 compilation, 54 Nude Honeys (Greatest Hits). The song we are going to listen to is the title track off their second album, “Drop the Gun.” It is also on the the greatest hits album. The video features Yuri pointing a gun at things. If an action hero were doing it, people would think it was cool. But Yuri makes it look as silly as it actually is.

Today we have a real treat: Teengenerate. They were a short-lived band out of Tokyo know for having a sense of humor. Of course, I think that’s one of the things that distinguishes punk from heavy metal. As a genre, heavy metal takes itself very seriously. Or maybe what I’m really talking about are the fans. Certainly Blue Öyster Cult always knew they were hilarious and that’s one of the main reasons I like them.

Anyway, on this video we get two songs that one commenter was nice enough to list: “Sex Cow” and “Gonna Feel Alright.” (I checked, and he was right.) They are off the album, Live At Shelter. What I especially like is the song that the guitarist is playing while he’s waiting for the rest of the band. Yes, this was a fun group.

Today we have something very interesting, Red Bacteria Vacuum. It is an all woman band that formed in 1998. What I like about them is that their music hearkens back to a lot of earlier music. For example, “Gimme Culture” sounds very much like Richard Hell & The Voidoids. The song I’d really like to share with you is listed as “恋愛ミュージック,” which means “love song” and is almost certainly not the name of the song. It is very much like Ramones. And a more recent song, “San Francisco,” while good reminds me rather too much of early Nirvana.

In early 2006, Red Bacteria Vacuum released what appears to be their most successful effort in the west, Roller Coaster. In fact, “Gimme Culture” is from that album. But let’s just listen to the title track because it is much more in the hardcore tradition. But it has some interesting elements that make it greater than that — like its use of syncopation and some standard pop elements:

This week, we are in Japan. Since I first discovered The Blue Hearts a few years back, I’ve been vaguely aware that Japan had a strong punk scene. But I’m just going to warn you right now: I’m not going to have that much to say about these bands. I often (as is the case today) won’t even be sure what the names of the songs are. And in general (as is also the case today), I won’t have much of an idea what the songs are about. But the songs are all great.

We start the week with Garlic Boys — a band that started in 1985 and are still performing today. According to Wikipedia, they are considered by some the “godfathers of [the] new school Japanese hardcore.” In this country, hardcore has become something of a farce. The bands have little character. I doubt that either Black Flag or Dead Kennedys — Much less Minutemen! — would be accepted in the movement. I don’t know if that’s true there as well. But it certainly isn’t true of today’s song. We are going to listen to the very chant-y song that is named, “あんた飛ばしすぎ” — which Google translates as, “You’re Skipping Too.” It is off their 1996 EP ビンビンジロ, which means (if that is the right word) Bin Bin Jiro.

This song seems to be about a guy drinking to forget a woman who left him. But it’s really hard to say. There is definitely a lot of drinking in the song. And I get the impression that the singer looks down on people who drink to excess — thus the powerful denouement when he admits to doing it himself. But reading Japanese translations are very much like the stereotype, “Drink resounds in left to good though it is usually timid person a rant in it off that involved drunk people of guy rules useless change drunk too skip.” The fact that English speakers learn Japanese, and Japanese speakers learn English is very impressive.

I hope you appreciate all that information, because even finding out that much was a lot of work!

My normal routine would be to take this last day of the week to present a whole set of the featured artist. But with Nick Drake there is no such thing. In fact, there is apparently no video of Nick Drake ever — even of him not performing. So I figured that we would instead watch a 45-minute long documentary from 2000, A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake. It is mostly interviews with people who knew him and worked with him. It sounds like a bit of a snore, but it’s riveting.

The film is helped along by Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister. She is also quite a successful actor and is no doubt partly responsible for his music’s increasing audience over the years. Both of the Drake parents wrote and performed music. And there is a moment quite early on, when Gabrielle plays a cassette tape of her mother performing one of her songs. And as Gabrielle mentions, the style is quite similar to Nick’s.

So give it a watch. It’s quite interesting and provides some context for the music:

I just read about some of the initial reviews of Nick Drake’s final album, Pink Moon. They weren’t all that eager. And it is interesting to see how later it has come to be seen as a work of genius. It reminds me of studies that have been done with teachers. When told that a paper was written by another teacher, they give it a pass; when told it was by a student, they savage it. This is an idea that guides so much of my life — it is the one thing that film critics and atheists are rarely willing to engage with: we are not very rational.

But where does that put me with my love of Nick Drake? The truth is that I associate him strongly with a very good period of time in my life. Is that all it is? I like Nick Drake because I like Nick Drake? Certainly that’s a large part of it. I can’t say that his voice and style of singing is objectively good. I just like it. I can, however, say that he was an awesome and creative guitar player. And I can say this in an absolute sense: Nick Drake’s music works on its own terms — and that is the highest complement that I’m capable of giving.

Today, we listen to “Parasite.” If you don’t consider the refrain, the song tells the story of a man observing others around him from afar — disconnected. But the refrain is mysterious: “For I am the parasite of this town.” Does that mean that the singer feeds off the life around him? That he is, in a sense, dead without their nourishment? I really don’t know. I don’t think it matters. It’s a beautiful song.

Now we come to Nick Drake’s last, shortest, and (if you ask me) best album, Pink Moon. Okay, it is kind of bleak if you pay attention. But it is so beautiful. On this album it is hard not to hear an unnerving personalizing of the material. Supposedly, he was not depressed when he wrote and recorded this album. But I know from my own depression that it informs the way that I see the world when I am not suffering from it.

Consider today’s selection, “Road.” It has an incredibly great guitar part and not many lyrics. But the lyrics that are there seem telling, “You can take a road that takes you to the stars now; I can take a road that’ll see me through.” No one can say what it means, but it is the case that not long after finishing the album, he found he couldn’t deal with the world and returned to live with his parents for what turned out to be the rest of his life.

Nick Drake was only 26 when he died. It’s remarkable when you consider how much regret permeates so much of his work. It seems to me that as one gets old, regret becomes a bigger and bigger issue. I just don’t remember regretting that much when I was 26. I wasn’t aware enough — of the outside world or myself. But then, I wasn’t an artist like Drake.

Today, we are sticking with his second album, Bryter Layter. The song is “Fly,” which is probably one of my favorites. But I don’t much know what it is about. But that can largely be said of all his work. It communicates a feeling of regret and the details are beautiful, but vague. I love the line: “I’ve fallen so far; for the people you are.” Yes, the people each of us are.