AKB48, Teddybears, Tiamat, Pizzicatto Five and Arashi

There are many things I like about Japan, however Japanese pop music is not one of them. My ignorant impression of Japanese pop music is that it comes into one of the following categories:

• Girl groups like Morning Musume and AKB48 catering to the Lolico crowd of single men in their late 30's early '40s with a creepy obsession of the girls. These groups are also pretty good at being horrible singers with voices slightly below "that girl at work that is decent at karaoke"


• Boy Bands straight out of Johnny's like SMAP, Arashi or even worse; Hey Say Jump. I'm not sure who actually likes these bands, but my guess is that the non-threatening appearance makes them particularly appealing to insecure young girls and gay men, I can't imagine who else would listen to it considering that singing usually is not their strong side


• Visual Kei bands like Glay, Gilgamesh and whatever they are called. I find this category in particular quite offensive since they take the attributes of a sub-culture but play really bland stale regular rock music which is alternative only to appearances, to an old EBM Electrohead like me it's only about posing


• Shonan Rappers who seem way too happy with life, rapping about how great it is with beach life, girls and generally partying; pretty far off from N.W.A. and Public Enemy


• The rest, basically normal R&B inspired mainstream music like Ayumi Hamasaki and whatnot, nothing that interests me particularly although it doesn't really offend me

So, I mostly stick with Western music and yesterday I realized that the Swedish band Teddybears had released a new album "Devil's Music" (hey, since they're pretty big now they don't really need much promotion, but check out their song Punkrocker ft. Iggy Pop here) which triggered a frantic search in trying to get hold of the album. After quite some time of searching the options available I could not find any torrent site having the album and iTunes refused to let me buy it since it's not offered on the Japanese site and not officially released in Japan yet either and meeting the similar situation at klicktrack.com teasing me with the text "This release is unfortunately not available from this shop in your country".

After being very close to giving up and ordering a physical copy of the CD from the old country I finally managed to find a Swedish record store having it for download, and since the site only was available in Swedish I guess they figured that they could contain sales to Sweden only without locking it for other countries I finally managed to get hold of a copy.

It's good stuff, the groove that Teddybears can create in their best moments is up there with the best moments of Fatboy Slim and My life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Although it didn't reach the heights of their previous album "Soft Machine" I still highly recommend it! After the recent quite disappointing release by Dark Tranquility and the lack of lifesigns from Tiamat it felt good to not be let down by the teddies.