Juliet's J-Rock Report #2 - May 2025
In this issue: Lilbesh Ramko, Osoroshia Kakumei, and songs that sound like cicadas, seasonal allergies and humidity
The changing of the seasons - and the emotions and associations tied to it - is a fundamental human experience. Even for those who live in climates not neatly divided into Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, there are always patterns and cycles – windy season; monsoon season; dry season; allergy season. The days get shorter and longer; the moon waxes and wanes; the tides rise and fall. As I write this introduction, eyes itchy and nose runny despite a Allegra-Benadryl-Flonase cocktail during a historically brutal allergy season in the Northeast, I am physically forced to confront the ongoing change. Perhaps the universal human experience is less so the weather than it is the cyclical patterns that underlie it.
Given the material impacts and emotional associations of these changes and cycles, they’ve of course inspired centuries, if not millennia, of artistic output across pretty much every culture. As Sakura season is brought to a close by samidare1 and the humid spectre of yet another cruel DC summer looms on the horizon, this month’s musical selections are loosely grouped around the sensations of Spring as it moves into Summer. From the hazy synth-soaked nostalgia of Wednesday Campanella’s “Summer Time Ghost” to the cicada-esque feedback squalls of Osoroshia Kakumei and the plodding riffs and chants of Roujin No Shigoto, this time of the year is ripe with both nostalgia for summers past and potent anticipation for what awaits this year. My partner Jeremy, author of “The Deenz List” has also written a special feature about Lilbesh Ramko, a meditation on the song “The World Ends (With) You” which explores similar themes. I hope at least some of these songs resonate with you in this fleeting moment.
Wednesday Campanella - “Summer Time Ghost”
“Summer Time Ghost,” the opening theme by Japanese pop group Wednesday Campanella for the anime adaptation of Jun Mayuzuki’s excellent manga series Kowloon Generic Romance comes swinging right out of the gate. Nostalgia is a core theme of Kowloon Generic Romance, a sci-fi romance story set in a mysterious version of the Kowloon Walled City in which ~not all is as it seems~, and this notion of nostalgia is beautifully present in both the music and lyrics of its opening theme. Sounding like bass-boosted city pop on amphetamines, “Summer Time Ghost” trades in the sonic palette of summer jams past and present, while its verses wax poetic about summer fixtures like iced coffee, sticky sleepless nights, and the constant hum of an electric fan.2
But where the song really takes it up to 11 is in the chorus, where singer Utaha’s impressive vocal range truly shines as she sings kurikaeshi kurikaesu… (“again and again…”) while bouncing up and down octaves over a shimmering symphony of summery synths. As someone who spent a formative period of time in Hong Kong myself, this song hits for me on multiple levels – of the nostalgic fantasies of summer, of the nigh-magical possibilities that can wash away the material discomforts and inconveniences. When I texted Jeremy about this song last week, he replied, “I want to own a car to drive along a coastal highway just for this.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
osoroshia kakumei - Don't play here (album)
In the summer of 2021, Brood X – the infamous cohort of cicadas resurfaced for the first time in 17 years to make tremendous amounts of noise, reproduce, and die. They were inescapable in the northeastern United States, and any time spent remotely close to wooded area was soundtracked by their constant droning hum. One balmy Saturday that summer, I went on a bike ride along the Anacostia River Trail, and in a particularly densely tree-lined glade, I felt their full force – for a moment, I was completely enveloped by their endless droning scream, and time and space nearly ceased to exist.
Japanese art-school garage-punk trio osoroshia kakumei’s debut album Don’t Play Here occupies a similar sonic brainspace for me. This group, who hail from Hiroshima and whose name means something to the effect of “The Scary Russian Revolution”3, share a lot both sonically and aesthetically with last month’s featured artist, Top Secret Man (it should be no surprise they’ve toured together). Fully self-recorded and self-produced, at times the 11 songs that comprise this 32-minute album feel like they were recorded on a 90’s boombox that had been left out in the rain. While the in-your-face lo-fi-ness can be alienating at first, Don’t Play Here will reward you for sticking with it. Despite the cascading layers of fuzz that permeate every track, the band has a clear ear for melody and harmony. The riffs are catchy, and the vocals, while deliberately mumble-y and monotone, are nonetheless accessible and catchy.
But back to the cicadas for a moment – what really sticks with me about this album is the extent to which the low fidelity and layers of feedback become an instrument of their own – a low drone that becomes increasingly meditative and all-consuming with time. A perfect tone setter for the summer sights and sounds to come.
Favorite Songs: Loudness Normalization, The World is Downer Summer, May All The People I Hate Die, ASD
roujin no shigoto - 一 (“ichi”, album)
I have a vivid memory of walking along the towpath of the Chesapeake & Ohio canal in Georgetown with my father at night in the summer of 2012. Just after crawling over the finish line of my junior year of high school and just before my 18th birthday, my family had the bright idea of taking us on a family trip to the District of Columbia in late June, right as DC’s legendarily muggy summer got into full swing. It was around 10 o’clock PM, at least 85 degrees Fahrenheit, a similar percent humidity, and we were simultaneously realizing that it was never going to get any cooler.
If “Summer Time Ghost” is nostalgia for a confabulation of an idealized summer, then the music of Roujin no Shigoto (老人の仕事, lit. “old people’s work) embodies how this type of brutal summer actually feels. The self-described Tokyo “four-piece tribal doom rock band” has very little information – or recorded music – online besides their 2017 album ichi (lit. “one”). Like all good stoner metal albums, this album has three songs clocking in at a combined 32 minutes, but none of them overstay their welcome – to quote one of the reviews on Bandcamp, “I wish every song was one hour longer.”
The album’s first track, 霊峰を望む (reihou wo nozomu, roughly “longing for the sacred mountain”4) is the longest and (in my opinion) strongest track. Starting off in a haze of reverberating moans and chants punctuated by feedback swells, the distorted riffs flow like molasses, creeping along slowly while enveloping everything in their wake. The drums only kick in just shy of the five-minute mark, adding more shape and structure to the previously established groove. As the song plods along, the band masterfully slows down further and further, the riffs becoming more and more punishing and suffocating as the tempo drops further and further.
The second track, 庵にて嗅ぐ (iori nite kagu, roughly “sniffing in the hermitage”), is a little more typical stoner metal – still distorted of course, but much more melodic, legible and uptempo than the prior song. It’s fully instrumental, rollicking up and down the scales like a ship on the high seas, until around two-thirds of the way through the song where a flute-like instrument of some sort kicks in, adding a ray of lightness to counterbalance the Doom.
The album closes out with its shortest song (8 minutes and 52 seconds!), titled 翔んでみせろ (tonde misero, literally “fly!”5 ), the most 60s-feeling of the three. Beginning with a folksy acoustic guitar lick and the return of the flute-like instrument, it feels a bit twee yet simultaneously Sabbath-esque. Crescendo-ing into a brutal finale featuring throbbing drums beneath wordless chants, the song slowly but surely tapers off where it began with the acoustic guitar and flute.
While this album is of course not explicitly a seasonal album, doom metal is a perfect accompaniment to the portent of an oppressively sticky summer; when it’s so disgustingly hot and humid outside that you can barely muster the will to peel yourself off the couch and venture outdoors to be immediately blanketed in a layer of sweat.
LILBESH RAMKO. THE WORLD ENDS (WITH) YOU.
Guest essay by Jeremy Munro of The Deenz List
“AFTER LIFE -- DEATH; AFTER DEATH -- LIFE AGAIN. AFTER THE WORLD -- THE PALE; AFTER THE PALE -- THE WORLD AGAIN.” - Disco Elysium
I’ve always dreamed of being at the End of All Things on a cliff over at the Western Ocean.6 On a cliff where the sun sets and it takes up all of my vision, dredging up the emotions you struggle to verbalize or even visualize. I call this dream, being yeeted into the sun.
Almost every video game platformer (Mario) either has an autumnal / end of day level and those visuals have branded into my brain, never to be forgotten. I’m obsessed with bittersweetness of the End of the Summer, the Longest Day of the Year as its true, depressive ending, and the Shortest Day of the Year as its start. In all of this is contained one of the Great Three Possibilities:
We are at the ending of all things (simple, poetic, sounds great)
We are at the ending of this one thing (a year, childhood, relationships, fuckin’ life dude)
We are the start of some other thing (matter is not created or destroyed, cc: the top quote right above ya)
The Japanese video game Boku No Natsuyasumi is about a young boy on summer vacation in rural Japan and the vibes contained within could be right within a Pop Punk/Midwest Emo song just as soon as it could be about the magic of childhood. Loss is loss and maybe there isn’t as much distinction between the loss of a relationship with a person and the loss of relationship with a concept/time/era as we think.
I know basically no Japanese, but I can pick out a couple of pronouns and such. I have zero idea what is being said in almost any of the great J-Rock / Punk / City Pop I’ve been dialed into for the last year plus.
It doesn’t take a music or linguistics scholar to understand the subject matter of anyone who is recording music under the age of 30 or over the age of 60 (its that middle ground where things get muddled).7 However, not understanding / mishearing lyrics is part and parcel of listening to music in your own language and takes on strange dimensions with a language you don’t speak.
Lilbesh ramko is part of what I mentally refer to as “The Top Secret Man” extended universe that Juliet has written well about already. Their song “the world ends (with) you” has done something to me that songs like Deafheaven’s “The Pecan Tree” or Titus Andronicus’ “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future” has. What its done is send me spiraling viscerally to the world of emotion and dreams where time is suspended and yet you are in a waking state - the definition of being Overwhelmed or Awed.
This song just does not stop. I love a good repetitive song and I think about repeating lyrics as a kind of magical spell. We all have too many lyrics stuck in our heads - a kind of spellbook. You can pull these lyrics out in times of need or your brain can use their repetition as a signal or siren of something weighing on you or you or even will yourself to believe something that you might struggle to internalize.
All of punk music itself is this act of wizardly desperation, especially considering the magic tends to fade itself with repetition as the emotional experience of the song becomes more and more performative, attempting to bring back the ‘wild’ spell that was present originally.
When I hear this song and my brain tries to put some part of it into English, what I hear in the hook is “Can’t die young.”
When I was younger I talked a big game about not dying, one of my favorite ska songs was called “Refuse to Die” (by the Flaming Tsunamis). Right now, I fear dying young as there are things I would like to do. I would like to see this end of the world sunset or get over my immense fear of the West and the larger West’s ocean and go to The Other World (Asia).
I am not doing an exoticization here, what I mean is that the core assumptions of philosophy in Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, etc are radically different than my experience / society I view them as parallel connected worlds (similar to the great JRPG Tales of Symphonia). There are stunning similarities too of course, that’s why this entire essay exists, I hate being too obvious but I’m talking about connecting to a song I don’t even know the words to here.
I also don’t want to die young in the future, which is a feeling not about youth at all, but more about I don’t want to die a million deaths before my time because I ceased to attempt to be curious about the world and discard simple rigid answers and systems.
The irony of this misheard lyric is the actual song is essentially the exact opposite sentiment.
The hook is “I want to disappear” progressively said louder, harsher, and with more noise for three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.
There was a time in my life I did want to disappear like most teenagers and again at times in public, especially when I moved to the city and felt the Eye of the Other on me constantly.
The thing is, I think there’s a way, through the actual music of this song to square these two lyrics. This song is one slow build pushing further into Desperation and Catharsis. Desperation and Catharsis are interlinked as Desperation is a progenitor of Catharsis and Catharsis is a Reckoning with Desperation.
Both lyrics contain desperation and catharsis. “Can’t Die Young” is a cathartic sentiment, it is desperate just like “I Want To Disappear” is horribly, tragically desperate and yet, is its own form of Catharsis.
The big lie at the heart of art to me is that an artist can attempt to tell you what something is about, but they also can’t stop people from interpreting it. They can say someone is wrong or that they don’t care, to which, sure, who knows / it doesn’t matter. No one makes a piece of art unless they have something they want to communicate to the world, even a desire to not communicate. This song has moved me, in either interpretation of the lyric because it isn’t the lyric itself, its some kind of sentiment behind it that is universal and transcends the parallel tracks of human existence that we all walk or at least try to. The associations between a Japanese summer vacation or a Japanese young person who makes weird glitchy loud music and me, a doofus are real, regardless of how I hear them.
And what a gift! That we can hold multiple interpretations at once! It truly feels like Gospel, good news that I want to shout from the rooftops!
Closing Notes
If you made it this far, thanks again for reading! If you like these songs, you can find more on this playlist I’ve been updating since January 2024.
I’m not sure what the theme of the June issue will be yet, but I’m sure it’ll be good, so stay tuned, and stay cool out there!
Footnotes
五月雨, “early summer rain”
This video has lyrics translated into English for your reference
I haven’t seen anything online of them confirming whether their band name is actually a portmanteau, but I’m pretty sure it is. The word “osoroshii” means “scary”, “roshia” means “Russia”, and “kakumei” means “revolution”, so if you put that all together, it would mean “the scary russian revolution”.
also almost certainly a reference to Sleep’s Holy Mountain
The word 翔んでる（tonderu, literally “to soar” or “to fly”) also has a meaning of “far out” or “groovy”, so given the stoner rock context I’m assuming there’s a hippie double meaning here.
a place I do not want to travel aside from this concept, the West of America is the seat of one half of its id, the South is another, though the Southern id is actually superego in disguise maybe.
is The Hold Steady a parody of your 30s and 40s? Or is it what your teenage and 20 year old self thought adulthood would be like, so you ex post facto fill in the memory gaps?