Five albums and two record companies into a career which has only previously achieved success in their namesake country, Japan have come up with an album which at last frees them from unflattering comparisons with Roxy Music (although David Sylvian's voice still sounds disturbingly similar to Bryan Ferry's strained - and mannered emissions) and places them squarely in the camp currently inhabited by the likes of Ultravox, Orchestra Manoeuvres In The Dark and Gary Numan.
Utilizing tile quite extraordinary rhythmic talents of Mick Karn, whose fretless bass-playing is reminiscent of Weather Report's Jaco Pastorius, and the staccato drum playing of Steve Jansen. Japan have neatly moved from Roxy Music's florid romanticism to a David Byrne-like industrial and electronic starkness. Where this process becomes fascinatingly innovative is in the band's decision to meld their western electronics to oriental rhythms thus, in one stroke, achieving a blend of occidental and oriental, romantic and industrial.
Tracks like "Still Life in Mobile Homes" with Yuka Fujii wailing in the background as synthesisers float and bass and drums punctuate the spaces, or "Canton" and "Cantonese Boy" with their miraculously uncorny Chinese moods, bear witness to this strange amalgum. The wonderfully minimalist "Sons of Pioneers" is equal to, yet quite different from, Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. "Visions of China" has a bizarre counterpointing of almost military drum patterns with wailing, oriental synths. Without exception each track on this album is the work of a very great band at the height of its powers. No one, not even the Yellow Magic Orchestra, has attempted such a unique synthesis. That it works so well should make Tin Drum one of the definitive electronic albums of the 1980's.
Created: 20/7/96
Modified: 6/1/97
Maintained by: Ashley Fletcher
nwc@nerosoft.com