Belle and Sebastian lean toward politics and away from twee on newest album
Belle and Sebastian are headed back to Japan, but are not quite as you remember them. For nearly 20 years the Glasgow indie darlings have been pigeonholed as producers of twee, lovelorn songs for corduroy-clad outcasts, but with their newly released ninth album, that ...
Glasgow's Chvrches score a hit with debvt albvm
Scratch beneath the surface just a little and Chvrches' electro-pop becomes something of real substance. The Glasgow trio's songs, which recall that genre's golden era in the 1980s reimagined through meticulously modern production, initially appear throwaway in the truest sense but later reveal themselves ...
Hostess exists rather happily on the edge
With international repertoire's share of the music market down to about 15 percent, it has never been harder to break foreign acts in Japan. And given the shrinking market for non-Japanese music, it seems quixotic to set up a company specializing in bringing foreign ...
McCartney, One Direction and Atoms for Peace head to Japan in November
He's been knighted, named the richest rock star in the world, has an Oscar, has done a guest spot on "The Simpsons," has played to the largest stadium audience in history and has been imprisoned right here in Japan. That's right, rock god Sir ...
Japan's festival industry is stuck in a fine kettle of fish
Are summer festivals killing Japan's live-music market? Weird question, right? Hundreds of thousands of people shell out gobs of yen every summer to see an amazing array of domestic and international acts rock out at festivals up and down the Japanese archipelago. (Organizers say last ...
Travis returns with 'Where You Stand' after five-year break
You can't sell as many records as Travis have without dividing opinion. Like most bands that smash through the commercial ceiling — 1999's breakthrough second album "The Man Who" sold 2.7 million copies in the U.K. alone — the Scottish four-piece count as many scorn ...
June: Taicoclub, Tokyo Camp kick off festival season
Students are counting down the days till school lets out, while urban commuters are starting to sweat the impending heat. Summer is coming, and a sure sign of that is that music festivals are starting to kick up around the country. The month starts off ...
