Release Date: Sep 16, 2014
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock
Record label: Other Music Recording Company
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As Shintaro Sakamoto drifts further away from the work of his former band Yura Yura Teikoku -- and much 21st century music, for that matter -- it becomes clearer that his solo career is united more by an aesthetic than any particular style. On How to Live with a Phantom and Let's Dance Raw, he combines a crate-digging reverence for vintage sounds and a carefree approach to mixing them until they blur into something delightfully and distinctively his. His second album is a self-described journey into "post-apocalyptic exotica" that offers unexpected layers.
There’s a particular kind of freedom many Japanese rock musicians enjoy, a weird side-benefit of inheriting Elvis from post-WWII American GI radio and never much worrying about fealty to blues or folk traditions. It’s a freedom from the burdens of authenticity, in other words, that makes an artist like Shintaro Sakamoto possible. The raunchy psych-rock Sakamoto played with his band Yura Yura Teikoku was, through its origins in San Francisco and London and Detroit, a authentic product of psychedelic and narcotic influence.
Head here to submit your own review of this album. Imagine a post-apocalyptic universe where space age sounds, '70s grooves and Hawaiian guitars all nestle together in harmony within a world that doesn't always quite make sense and where things could explode into chaos at any moment. Where every moment is the calm before the storm arrives, again. This is really what creates the basis of Shintaro Sakamoto's latest solo effort Let's Dance Raw.
I once thought nihilism was the most rigorous of all philosophies. Not in the sense that it was strictly codified but because nothing seemed so demanding or strenuous as living in a world where everything was permitted and none of the old certainties maintained. The kind of iron-cast spine it would take to walk through a world where even the existence of the ground beneath you was in question… that was something only a super-human or an insane person was capable of, I assumed.
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