5 out of 5

Label: Ki/oon

Produced by: ?

A lovely, precise slab of 90s-esque noise guitar pop, sharpened from  リーガルリリー’s now years of experience to shift their ramshackle stylings into something equally catchy, abrasive, and loud.

The easy read on  リーガルリリー is that they’re everything that was good about the kind of early 00s indie pop of Polyvinyl and Matador that was inheriting the marketable aspects of late 90s indie / grunge; good is obviously subjective, but I suppose I’m using it to represent a kind of middle-of-the-road slice of the sum total of that stuff. Which, ultimately, became a kind of hybrid of edgy and accessible music that made for some of the last “stars” of the post-physical music era – groups / artists who lasted at least beyond a single season of Spin covers and etc., and probably had a song show up on a popular TV show.

…Which makes  リーガルリリー sound awful milquetoast, but the group’s special sauce has always been a willingness to add plenty of extra distortion to the mix, and, y’know, to not be all that tuneful. Singer Honoka Takahashi has a sing-songy “essence,” but her voice is also delightfully flat. Both of these elements make for a joyous dichotomy of a pop band that the back of your mind is like – but this also sounds kinda rough.

And while subsequent albums have improved Takahashi’s delivery, and erred guitar freakouts towards more palatable solos, that essence still remains, and where? is a perfectly concise delivery of that.

In a longer format, it’d be easier to criticize these songs as not taking more risks, but boiled down to 5 tracks, it’s all we need: opener 若者たち and closer キラーチューン add some denser counter melodies atop main themes; ハイキ and 管制塔の退屈 deliver on the guitar overload with bombastic conclusions (a trait essentially shared by all songs), and only the midpoint’ ライナー is really kind of a truly straight-forward pop jam, but that’s exactly why / how it works: as a midpoint.

More critically-minded me is digging up lyrics translations (years of duolingo still do not make me near capable of speaking / translating Japanese), or taking the group to task for kinda playing it safe, but then I realize I’ve had the EP on loop for literally an entire day, and truly love each song. So here we are.