Sometimes circumstances conspire to create the perfect show. Though we’ve always been less than enthusiastic about the art of James Blake, the British singer who configures conventional R&B tropes into electronica expressions, we admire him for his earnestness and his ability to convey that earnestness into heartfelt emotion.
Circumstances did conspire on Friday night. The weather was partly overcast, but the setting sun made itself known. Moreover, Blake made it clear that regardless of the specific situations of which he sang, he was talking about things everyone could relate to. He thanked the audience in Japanese for showing up and said what an honor it was to play in Japan, as if he’s been asked to perform by the Emperor. But he was sincere, and that sincerity came through in interesting ways. On record you tend to notice the electronic processing, but live everything felt immediate and unfiltered. The lighting was clear and unfussy, and the sentiments were just as comprehensible. We stood on the top of the hill to the left of the stage, listening to those pure feelings for more than an hour and didn’t really want to leave. (text: Philip Brasor; photos: Mark Thompson)
One thing we noticed about this year’s schedule is that more time seems to have been set aside between acts. We’re not sure as to the reason, since there’s very rarely a problem with someone going on late due to lengthy equipment changes. But one issue that has arisen is that instead of staggering acts on competing stages, often the acts will overlap. That’s only a problem when there are two acts you really want to see playing at the same time. Theoretically, the fans of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett are probably not the exact same ones for the L.A. neo-soul Odd Future outfit The Internet, but we happen to love both, so there was a quandary.
Courtney played first at the Red Marquee at 3:50. Dressed all in black, with a T-shirt inscribed with the words “BAD SEED” on it, she was even looser and more confident than when we saw her last October at a club in Tokyo. The shed was totally packed, despite the fine weather outside, and the response was warm and enthusiastic. Unfortunately, Courtney’s presentation, which is sort of sloppy and earnest, sounded like crap in the Red Marquee, which is not kind to loud, sloppy rock due to the acoustics. Since we know most of the songs, we could enjoy it, but you could tell some in the audience who weren’t familiar with her music couldn’t quite get a purchase on the melodies and the guitar work. We left during “Depreston,” one of her mellower tracks, and it actually sounded perfect for that reason.
We booked over to the White Stage to catch the Internet, which took a little longer owing to the crowd that was leaving the Field of Heaven, so we missed the first song. Syd the Kid, resplendent in a dark grey hoodie, was relaxed and affable, joking with the audience and marvelling at how many people had actually shown up to see them. “This is a big-assed crowd,” keyboardist Matt Martians said, and got everybody to scream at the top of their lungs just because he wanted to see what a big-assed audience sounded like. We suppose that means The Internet doesn’t normally play to big-assed audiences.
Syd, for her part, got the crowd to deliver the chorus — “you fucked up” — to the song “Just Say,” and we acquitted ourselves admirably, but the whole set was even looser than Courtney’s and sounded ten times better. Despite the big-assed audience, the group played as if they were in someone’s living room, and Syd’s cool, sexy voice delivered her stories of heartbreak and jealousy with all the anger and passion of Nina Simone. It was a great show by a singer and a band who know how to please because they are obviously difficult to please themselves. (text: Philip Brasor; photos: Mark Thompson)
Continuing with the “urban” theme that would prevail at the White Stage during the afternoon, Kanagawa Prefecture’s Suchmos played a well-received set of quiet storm, funky pop, and jazzy R&B. Lead singer Yonce strutted like Teddy, and though his relatively thin voice didn’t convey the kind of sex-you-up vibe his body was trying to sell, the band was up to the challenge and a fairly good crowd accumulated as the set progressed. (text: Philip Brasor; photo: Mark Thompson)
Takuji Aoyagi is a misleadingly simple guitarist. He purposely writes melodies with lots of repetitive noes and phrases, and while he sings in a pleasant tenor and knows how to rock out and even get funky, his trio, Little Creatures, do very little of what you would call sololing, though, in principle, they’re an instrumental band. Deceptively skilled musicians, they build on these repetitive patterns to create moods that they then manipulate at will.
Under an occasionally blazing sun, they cut a striking figure on the Field of Heaven stage, and while no one really danced, the solid rhythms of bassist Masato Suzuki and drummer Tsutomu Kurihara worked their magic on Aoyagi’s patterns. Sometimes, when they hit a climax the crowd would gasp. Not exactly jamming, Little Creatures nevertheless kept us guessing, and always seemed to have the right answer in the end. (text: Philip Brasor; photos: Mark Thompson)
Japanese rap can be political, it can be personal and honest, and it can even be funny. What it often isn’t is caustic. The young rapper named Kohh, who seems to pattern his stylings after dark American acts like the Onyx, pretty much shot his wad as soon as he took the White Stage shortly after lunch.
Sporting a ragged shriek-sing that would not have been out of place in a Norwegian death metal band, he writhed, skipped, and threw himself around the stage while his DJ cranked out industrial strength noise. The audience, much of which seemed to know his material, found the rhythm way before we did and dipped and waved accordingly.
Though the air of menace was mostly an act, it was an act that couldn’t quite survive Kohh’s between song patter, during which he chatted amiably with the audience and commented about the weather, which was cool, breezy, cloudy, and very dry.
Proving that he understands what constitutes hip-hop in the post-millennium, he used some Auto-Tune, brought out a two-man crew to chant the phrase, “dirt boys,” and spell him for a bit with different types of flow, and did a song about drugs, which, in Japan, is bolder than doing a song that includes copious references to “bitches.” The guy has a future, even if he doesn’t have any more real estate available for tattoos. (text: Philip Brasor; photos: Mark Thompson)
The 20th Fuji Rock Festival started the same way the last 19 did, with announcements from NGOs about recycling and donating to disaster relief funds. etc. The two grizzled emcees joked a little less this year, but managed to mention the fact that Pokemon Go finally launched in Japan this morning.
Given Boredoms’ sense of mischief you might have expected them to somehow incorporate Pikachu into their act. For sure, they seemed an odd choice to kick off the festival on the Green Stage. Boredoms’ monumental drum circle thing seems better suited for the night, and while the air was cool, the sun was intense. In such a bucolic setting chanting and howling had an even more shamanistic cast to it, and what was so interesting about the visual aspect was the mundane nature of the instruments, many of which were just metal hardware. You could do this at home, but don’t. The neighbors will be pissed.
Maybe Eye Yamataka is making his bid to be the successor to the late Kiyoshiro Imawano, the mayor of Fuji Rock. Of course, Boredoms’ style has nothing to do with Kiyoshiro’s rock’n soul hybrid, but if you wanted a clean break to welcome in the next 20 years, you couldn’t ask for anything starker. (text: Philip Brasor; photos: Mark Thompson)
We were pleasantly surprised to see that Keen shoes had a booth this year at the festival, just east of the Green Stage area. We always wear Keen hiking boots at the festival and they’ve never let us down, despite all the walking we do over the course of the festival. Even more interesting is that the booth offers shoes for rent…or maybe we should say they lend shoes, since they don’t charge you for their use. Sandals, too, though we tend to shy away from sandals because pebbles always find their way in. Of course, the purpose is to get you to like the shoes so that you’ll eventually buy a pair. We’re already sold.
For once, the rain in Tokyo didn’t intrude on Naeba. When we left the capital in the early afternoon it was pouring and rained most of the way up to Niigata Prefecture. As we climbed the winding roads up to the festival grounds, the rain became more intense, but as soon as we surmounted the hump it was dry–overcast, but dry.
The pre-festival party is free to everyone. It’s sort of a thank you gift to the locals, but a long time ago it just became an integral part of the festival. For some reason they cut the bon odori dance this year, opting instead for a raffle (tickets were given out at the entrance to anyone who passed through). It was sort of cheesy. It was also packed, as if the party had already started and everyone who was going to be here was already here.
MARK THOMPSON PHOTO
The fireworks didn’t have to compete with the rain or mist this year. Though it was overcast, the hanabi came through clear, even if the emcees on the stage at the center of the Oasis seemed hard put to get the crowd excited. After all this time you could call them jaded. They were already settled into their festival faces, happy, slightly drunk, itching to be impressed.
MARK THOMPSON PHOTO
Con Brio, the San Francisco soul-funk outfit was maybe the best Prefest opener I’ve seen here since Danko Jones more than 10 years ago, and for the same reason. The audience didn’t know them and that itch to be impressed was thoroughly scratched. Lead singer Ziek McCarter shimmied and slid across the stage as the six-piece backup churned a greasy soul stew that ust became more intense during the half hour they commanded the stage. Festival regular Koichi Hanafusa introduced them by trying to find out how many in the packed Red Marquee had been there for the first Fuji Rock 20 years ago. Not many, you can imagine, and hardly anyone cared. The great thing about Con Brio was that they made you appreciate the moment all the more. Screw those memories. Live for today and raise your hand.
Given how short a time she’s been in the public consciousness, FKA Twigs headlining appearance at the White Stage Sunday night was quite a phenomenon. And judging from the thin turnout, obviously the decision to headline her was premature.
It’s understandable. Despite her cutting-edge reputation among critics, Twigs has yet to appeal to a wider fan base.
FKA Twigs | Mark Thompson photo
Even in concert, it’s difficult to gauge the sort of emotional impact she’s supposed to make. Much of her act is dancing, in a fluid, abstract sort of way. Her singing is uniformly falsetto, copying an R&B model that’s mainly male. Still, the vibe is overtly sexual, but the live act was predicated on art performance.
FKA Twigs | Mark Thompson photo
There was almost no interaction with the band. It was just Twigs and the audience, who were polite but reserved. At the end of the set, she made a point of thanking the crowd for “supporting” her, though we’re not sure what that means. Is she actually making money in Japan? That would be quite surprising.
We were sitting near the Gypsy Avalon stage early in the evening when we heard a curious sound coming from the stage itself. It was the sound check for the next band, which we weren’t familiar with. But the sound was so intriguing we felt obligated to check it out.
It was a band called the Shoka Okuba Blues Project, a Japanese power trio headed by the titular guitar player, a woman who dressed like a typical Japanese ojosan (proper young lady) in high heels and short skirts, However, she plays a mean blues guitar and can sing with equal proficiency.
Intrigued, we returned to the stage at the time the band were scheduled to appear and were subsequently blown away. It’s not just that Okubo smashes the stereotype of the wilting Japanese woman. In a sense she upholds it; it’s just that she also subverts it with her version of the polite young woman with a real life. It wan’t just blues. It was classic rock and a little reggae and some metal. Okubo slashed and strummed to beat the band, and the audience, perhaps perplexes by this cognitive dissonance, didn’t know what to make of it. We did, however, and grooved accordingly.
We didn’t see the last time Ryan Adams played Fuji, but we heard he was slightly pissed. Not sure why, but in any case his situation wasn’t helped by the fact that press photographers were limited in what they could shoot and there was an announcement before the set at the Red Marquee saying that flash photos from the audience would be a serious problem.
None of these rock star prerogatives made much of an impact on the show. Adams, who is prolific and somewhat contrarian, delivered a classic rock concert, one where guitar histrionics and heartfelt conviction went hand in hand. At first he seems strangely oblivious to the circumstances, wearing a leather jacket in a tent that was smoldering due to the sun. No one held it against him, and his blend of alt-country and classic rock eventually sucked in people who might not have know who he was in the first place but nevertheless knew what they liked.
So even the slower, more sentimental songs made an impact, thanks to Adams’ realization that he was making a difference, at least for the moment. Every subsequent song drew a more emotional response, and by the time he ended on a purely rock number, the audience was in his hands. He didn’t even seem to fathom it. He stood on a monitor and did the rock star thing in a darkened shed. What could be more cliche? But the audience wouldn’t leave. They wanted more as the crew came out to remove the equipment. They were still clapping when I walked away.
During her late afternoon show at the Red Marquee, Jenny Lewis, late of power pop behemoth Rilo Kiley, related about her first trip to Fuji some years ago, a show we saw and loved, though it was a strange one. Lewis, a solid rock act, played as the first act of one of the late night shows, which is usually reserved for techno/dance artists or out-of-there indie acts. What happened is that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was supposed to play but cancelled and Lewis was hire to fill in. As we remember only a handful of people showed up, but she delivered fully.
There was a much larger crowd for this, her first legitimate Fuji show, thought it wasn’t what you would call a sellout. She related the earlier story, misremembering the band’s name as Clap Your Hands Say Hi, but the crowd hardly cared.
Jenny Lewis | Mark Thompson photo
Jenny (“you can call me Lewis”) plays an earthy form of Americana that connects directly on an emotional level, and the audience succumbed to her obvious charms. Whether she was playing country or soul or pure power pop–she did a killer version of Rilo KIley’s “Bad News” — she made good on her reputation as a soulful singer and a forceful personality. Her band was aces, especially in the vocal department.
She finished the show not with a bang but with a whimper and received the kind of ovation usually reserved for guitar freakouts. Playing “Acid Tongue” on acoustic guitar with all her bandmates only adding choir like choral backup, she floored the audience. It take a big person to pull off a ballad as a finale.
We arrived about a minute late for Todd Rundgren’s set on the White Stage and wondered if we were in the wrong place or whether or not Rundgren cancelled. There was a hip-hop DJ on stage playing classic rap and R&B. Then, he suddenly started yelling at the crowd. “Put your hands together for Todd Rundgren!”
And out he came, with two female dancers dressed as anime characters. Potbellied and balding (but what’s left of his hair frosted), he didn’t seem to care about the impression he made, but nevertheless word skin tight pants and a sleeveless T-Shirt. He was a modern star, or at least his sardonic version of one.
And for the next hour he but on a real show, one with strong songs and singing, and even choreography that he joined in with in his own feeble way. If the crowd had come for the hits they would have been disappointed, but they weren’t. Most of the material was from his new album “State,” which is electro-pop, with lyrics that, per Rundgren’s mission, tend to be zeitgeisty, with mentions of Miley Cyrus’s ass and the Internet age. But it wasn’t gratuitous grandstanding. If anything, the words were secondary to the music, which Rundgren has always been fussy about. The audience fell for it.
Of course, there had to be at least one hit, and after the four left the stage, the DJ came out again and incited the crowd, which was on its way out. They returned for “One Dream,” the only song approaching a hit, and a nice showcase for a guitar solo. Some things just don’t change.
Despite its awkward name, Bloodest Saxophone is very specific about its musical aims. An old-fashioned R&B rhythm and horn section, they play pretty much anything that swings, from blues to cocktail jazz to boogie woogie, and with an emphasis on the woogie, so to speak. They don’t seem to touch anything that can’t be milked for maximum sexual feeling.
The band’s afternoon gig at the Field of Heaven opened with three instrumentals that touched all the bases, from slow, greasy blues to big band Louis Jordan swing to “Tequila.” The capacity crowd was primed for the girl singer.
Jewel Brown is a veteran, one of those old school vocalists whose conversational approach aligns with any R&B style that’s available. On in years, she spent the entire set seated in front of a music stand with the lyrics for reference, but nothing could dampen her ardor, neither old age nor the heat. She was constantly preaching, getting the band–all Japanese players – and the crowd, to “pick it up,” “get it moving,” and “slowing it down a bit,” as the case may be.
It might have been more appropriate to watch such a swinging, rocking (or “rolling,” a word Brown used quite a bit) show in a smokey night club or auditorium, but Heaven was perfect, and the old gal obviously enjoyed every minute of it. We did too.
The current state of the former Orange Court. In the distance is the Cafe de Paris and an amusement area featuring buskers, a drum circle, and bowling alley.
When we first saw Jim O’Rourke’s name on the Fuji roster it was attached to someone named Gaman Gilberto, which we naively assumed was some sort of Brazilian collaborator – O’Rourke doing bossa nova is hardly a novel idea. Actually, it’s the name of his backing band, all Japanese musicians. “Gaman” is Japanese for “patience” or “fortitude.”
O’Rourke has lived in Japan for the past decade-plus and seems appropriately acclimatized. His music hasn’t change drastically, though in a sense it has regressed to a kind of nostalgia for ‘70s singer-songwriters. Still, his noon set at the Field of Heaven was full of quirk, starting with his getup. Gnomish in his favorite soft hat, baggy jeans, carework shirt and full beard liberally streaked with gray, he was the anti-rock star, a sensibility confirmed a little story he told at one point in his shaky but serviceable Japanese about how drummers in the 80s always wore the same thing on stage and he hated it.
Though the songs were conventionally structured, O’Rourke expanded them with long introductions and coda that adhered to the ‘90s indie dynamic template of soft-loud-soft-loud ad infinitum. Some of the grooves were so strong as to threaten the equilibrium of the ensemble, who couldn’t quite keep up with their leaders volume choices. And the quieter passages were so delicate you could hear O’Rourke breathing. As for the singing, he was in key (not a small feat given the thrust of the songs) and could belt like a bluesmaster.
Txarango is a Catalan band that’s proud of their roots. They sing in their native language and made a point of teaching the large Sunday morning crowd at the White Stage a few useful phrases, one of which wasn’t “dance your ass off,” because no one needed to be told that. With a healthy complement of horns and a lead singer whose energy level belied the scorching sun overhead, Txarango dips into rock, ska, gypsy party music, all infused with an Iberian regard for rhythm and melody. We’re not sure if it’s a good idea to get yourself so worked up at the beginning of a day that threatens to be hot and dry, but isn’t that why you come to Fuji in the first place?
The DJ-dance guy known as Deadmau5 went on just after the sun set, when the sky was still a deep blue in the west, behind the Green Stage. Our experience with this sort of big beat electronic dance music has mostly been at the Red Marquee in the middle of the night, so the timing seemed a little strange. And as the guy in the creepy mouse head hit his second or third climax we wondered if any of the thousands of people in the vast field jumping up and down could explain to us what made Deadmau5 better than any of those other beep-boop-beep-beep DJs, because we know he gets paid a truckload of money for one of these gigs. We won’t deny how effective he is at getting people to move, but there isn’t a whole lot of nuance to what he does.
