The Band that Would Be King!

With so much great weird new and noisy garage-rock going down lately, I keep waiting for someone to come around and stomp it all up in a big-ass big-band manner a la Baltimore, MD’s brilliant Half Japanese (1976 - present). There are some fun, more-than-four-piece acts out there — Thee Oh Sees, Fresh + Onlys, and I think King Khan is like that (they sound it). But none have the insane, rockin’ oooomph that Half Japanese provided, especially in their high point in the early ’80s, when they might have been the best rock and roll band in the world.

Half Japanese’s music has always been tough to pin down. What’s hard to convey, especially given its roots in the most basic rhythm and blues chord progressions, is how distinctive it is. It never really shared any of the thematic concerns of punk, but was too primitive and self-taught to qualify as postpunk. The music was too in love with good, old-time rock pleasures and structure to please many noise or art freaks, yet it’s way too fucked up to please most fans of good, old-time rock music.

What brings you back to Half Japanese’s music all the time is that even in its most menacing-sounding songs—say, “Walk Through Walls” or “No Direct Line”—it displays the total joy in acting like a kid that is really hard to carry on into adulthood. To make music that always sounds like it’s falling apart yet is fully infectious is a lot harder than it looks. Jeff Fuerzeig’s documentary on them is a readily available, and really fun, way to get hep to ‘em.

—DJ Yeti