YMCK
Family Racing (2005)
**** out of *****

On a recent trip to Tokyo, Jiggy and I stopped in the Shinjuku HMV store. I’m always on the lookout for interesting music, and in Japan I expected to find plenty. But Japan is like any other country, there’s interesting stuff being made, but most it's generic garbage. Over in the West the music we get from Japan is the interesting stuff; we have our own generic pop acts so why bother importing them from countries who don’t sing their cliches in a language we understand?

After forty minutes of sampling generic J-Pop, metal, and rap I realised that maybe HMV was the wrong place to look. But they have lots of listening posts and I don’t know how to say “Got any music that isn’t tedious shit?” in Japanese, so it was my only option. Then I spotted the bright NES primary-coloured cover of YMCK’s Family Racing. “8-Bit Jazz” it proclaimed on the funny cardboard insert thing you get in Japanese CDs. I started it up. The first track was a catchy video game jingle, like something you get when the racers are lining up in Mario Kart. “This is going to rule” I thought, then an engine noise started, then a countdown, 8-bit engines roared, and what I feared was a drum and bass beat kicked in. “No, this is just a techno album” I screamed in rage (Japanese are really polite, so you can scream all you want in stores without being told off).

But my fears were unfounded. A song started. Singing, solos, craftsmanship. A really good, catchy song. And all the music was 8-bit. The bass, the drums, even the instruments that you could never quite tell what they were supposed to be. Maybe an attempted piano, a saxophone? It doesn’t have to be a saxophone! Like Superman’s imperfect clone Bizarro, the act of imitation created something great in its own right.

Despite the old computer game sounds the resulting tracks don’t sound tinny. YMCK overlap more instruments than most old sound systems could probably have handled. And the soft female Japanese singing voice, something that’s usually so treacly it hurts my teeth, is perfect for the soft backing instruments. There aren’t any over-the-top R&B embellishments to the singing, allowing video games sound effects (tire screeches, little explosions) to fill in.

YMCK haven’t just got themselves a gimmick and let it do all the work. The song are filled with bass solos, piano solos, and even choral-style arrangements that break out into jazz solos. The result is an album full of genuine songs, not just a blippy joke CD. There’s the occasional English lyric like “Roller skate”, “Come on”, and “Power up” as well.

I imagine that there’s only one demographic group the CD will appeal to (or, who will actually give it a try), people aged around 25-35 who grew up playing games with music from old soundboards. People who played games before they got so realistic that you didn’t need your imagination any more. People whose childhoods were spent in dark rooms travelling to primary coloured lands full of rainbows and monsters and power ups shaped like cakes. The soundtrack to their dreams was this music, this blippy, happy, otherworldly music.

I’m not guaranteeing you’ll like it, but I am saying that it’s worth looking into. The only down side is that the whole album is only 28 minutes long. Are we still in the age of vinyl?

If you still find yourself humming the theme music from Rally X and you’re not thinking “My God, this album sounds like tripe” you can download some samples at their records label’s website here. The band have their own website as well, which has an English language side here.

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)