Single review: Japanese Voyeurs – That Love Sound / Blush

The arrival of another single from Japanese Voyeurs made me wonder whether I’d been a little harsh on the last one. Perhaps the angry fan who emailed me in response to my review was right: maybe I have a rose-tinted take on the glories of nineties grunge, due to that being the period of my own musical awakening. Maybe Japanese Voyeurs are in fact doing something new and vital with that bygone style, updating it for a networked age, making it relevant to a new wave of kids with a new outlook on the world?

Well, I’m going to stick with my original assessment – I like the tone and texture of their music, but the tunes themselves feel lifeless, derivative, done to death decades ago, the audio equivalent of finding a faded fax from 1991 falling out of the back of your old college ringbinder. “That Love Sound” comprises breathy/shrieky I’m-so-kooky-krazy vocals delivering I’m-so-screwed-up lyrics, quiet-loud-quiet dynamics as patented by The Pixies, three fuzzed-up chords and a simple backbeat from the drums… and after three minutes of waiting for something interesting to happen, it’s all over.

The main riff of “Blush” has a moody Melvins-like simplicity to it, but that’s about all we’ve got. Japanese Voyeurs are redefining unremarkable: their performance is all workaday competence without any flair, flash or fire, all fronted by a bargain-bin Katie-Jane Garside impersonator. Again, I love the tone of the band, but I’m just not convinced by them – much like their name, their music seems to be grasping for a shlocky pop-culture nihilism that was already looking tired when Natural Born Killers was showing at the cinemas. Maybe I’m just old and jaded, but Japanese Voyeurs need to do more than a few loops around the picked-clean mulberry bush before I can see them as anything more than second-rate revivalists.