I really hope this is a big turn for the pillows and we get at least 2 more albums plus some FLCL before the 30th!

[quote="thomasjameskalogianis"]I really hope this is a big turn for the pillows and we get at least 2 more albums plus some FLCL before the 30th! [/quote]
I certainly hope Sawao stays as inspired as he was on the [i]Stroll and Roll[/i] tour. Also another couple of theme songs on par with "Ride on shooting star" and "I think I can" would be incredible.

Anyway, I officially love [i]Nook[/i]. The big pointer for me is its consistency. It's a short album but every track holds its own really well. What had me second-guessing the quality of the album at first was the relative lack of bold songs (like "Konoyo no Hate Made", "Moondust", "Beyond the moon", or "Hybrid Rainbow", for example; big, climatic Pillows songs are my favourite), but modest dynamics aren't a bad thing at all, and once I let the idea of a generally lighter Pillows album sink in, I also noticed how well put together these songs are.

All that said, [i]Nook[/i] may have benefited from a different approach to production/mastering. The end product sounds a bit softer, timbrally, than [i]Stroll[/i] and [i]Moondust[/i]. The instruments also sound a bit more blended together. I would have preferred some sharper tones and more separation between the instruments. Just a minor complaint, though; the songwriting is top notch, regardless.

Alright I love this album. I just realized that when listening to this just now, like a few times before, I just sat there and jammed out the whole time. Thoughts after 8+ listens:

-

[b]Envy[/b] grew, still not a slam dunk but it's alright. It sets up the scene for the rest of the album fairly well despite not being my favorite track. There have been many better openers, though.

[b]Be Your King[/b], from the start I really dug the drums on the track, the kind of optimistic stride is quite fitting. The solo on it really grew on me, at first I thought it was kinda hard to get excited about but now that I've heard it so much I could totally imitate it vocally and remember it in my head, it's quite slick and compact, yet expressive.

[b]Hang a Vulture![/b] I didn't mention earlier, it has a great vocal melody in the hook. It's a solid song, maybe a little simple in comparison to other tracks on here but it works.

[b]Perfect Idea[/b], [i]holy shit[/i], I fucking love the manic vibrating effect they make and all the sparkly guitar noise and when the chords come slamming in, and then the chorus is a great anchor to reign in the frantic energy and put that sweetness into it.
[b]
Coooming Sooon[/b], I can't sing enough praise about this. It's just [i]the most fun shit[/i] and I can't wait to see it live. The vocals and guitar are just soaked with some kind of soul lifting compound that just makes you happy. Awesome solo with an assist attack by the drums just assaults you with joy. If you don't personally like the song that's cool, but it's my jam-a-lam from the first play.

[b]She looks like new-born baby[/b] definitely grew on me, I feel like I understand it better now and realized it has that "two guitars doing two different things" style going on, one sharper and one more dreamy, and wound up digging the verses a lot more. If I'm singing it at work, it's in there, right? It's quite adventurous for it's duration, especially with that bodacious solo where even the drums change up the hits at places.

I wish I could enjoy [b]pulse[/b] more, but unfortunately it's the one song I'm still cold on, and I don't think it will change. I feel it could have done without the "ahh haa" vocalizations before every line in the hook. It just doesn't work for me and takes something out of it; it's somewhat distracting. And I wish the solo came up front and just [i]belted[/i] instead of hanging out in left field, and there was room for the drums to get some synergy with the solo there that would have made them both more interesting, but instead they just keep to themselves and it just feels like a drag, a big fat nothing. It's unfortunate because I love every other guitar solo on the album. But hey, if you liek the song then I'm glad because it has nice qualities to it and has a pretty atmosphere.

[b]Zhelanie[/b] has a nice grooving bass underneath it and is a nice solid Midnight Down-ish straight forward groove, Energia-like reminding hook. It's a nice soft spot on the record that also has good momentum and zippiness to jam out to, and a beautiful solo that starts straight away with really attention grabbing notes and really shimmers.

[b]Be Wild[/b], I love this song! The lunging effect is so "set guitars to stun" and rad. All four elements (the places between the verses, the verses, the hook and the buildup to solo and solo) seem so different and yet have great, tight synergy that really propel the song with an infectious energy.

And finally the closing song [b]Where Do I Go?[/b], it's in the same neighborhood as Come Down and Winning Come Back! when it comes to the punchy, full-tilt blasters. I think it's great that they went with what that type of song used to sound like as opposed to what it evolved into (Ready Steady Go, Locomotion, Ideal Affection, and going back further Poison Rock' n' Roll, Doggie Howl.) Primer Beat remains the odd exception of the newer closers that is pretty much universally appreciated. Where Do I Go? snuggles into a good spot with it's kin and that's great. I dig the lyrics, they're just the right blend of silly and coherent to the point that you can understand the person that Sawao is describing, and can root for them. So the English works well on this one.

I would be surprised about people not digging pulse as much, except that I can absolutely see the points you're describing as potentially taking away from the rest of the song for some listeners. :O And dude, didn't realize it, but you're right about Zhelanie and Midnight Down sharing some overlap, the way those chorus vocals just pour out definitely feels familiar.

Edit: Perfect Idea is now translated, btw.

Mare, thank you so much for all the translations and lyrics, as well as the interview translation! It's made the album much more enjoyable, especially knowing what's going on in Sawao's head.

Anyways, I'm still spinning this album regularly. It's such a quick listen, it's hard not to listen to most of the album when you're in the car. Only track I'll really skip often times is Perfect Idea. It's not bad, but it just doesn't do it for me. But Pulse is still awesome, that's one of the better songs on the album, and I really didn't have a problem with the solo as other people here have had.

Zhelanie has far and away become my favorite on the album. That melody is just so, so sweet. It's definitely in the top 10 songs by the pillows this decade. Also, I still can't say this album is overall that great. The interview seems to have confirmed my suspicions that there wasn't a super big amount of thought going into these songs, and that they were never meant to be collected into an album at first. there are some themes throughout a few songs like Sawao said, but I think the album overall feels disjointed, and I personally got more of a "pillows-y" feel from Stroll and Roll, especially that classic "pillows-y" sound on Tragedy of Elliot.

But I do like the "innovation" on Envy, Hang a Vulture, and Where Do I Go?. I'm hoping for more songs in that style, but fleshed out a little bit more and hopefully not in Engrish, and it retains all that fuzz on the bass that reminds me of Sleepy Head. This album will probably stay in my CD player at least another month; it's still enjoyable.

[quote="Son Goshin"]The interview seems to have confirmed my suspicions that there wasn't a super big amount of thought going into these songs, and that they were never meant to be collected into an album at first.[/quote]

So this actually confuses me, because I got the impression he puts quite a bit of thought into the songs. Obviously it's an indisputible fact that the songs weren't written for the intent of crafting an album, but rather for the sake of writing songs themselves - that doesn't indicate a lack of time spent, though. If anything, he directly stated that he's always thinking about the songs he's currently working on while doing other things, which suggests he often takes multiple days to finish up a particular song and he's not just throwing these out like items on a checklist.

Anyway, glad the translations are appreciated! I'm trying to get back on my game a bit more, so expect more of both lyrics and interviews down the road.

[quote="Marekenshin"][quote="Son Goshin"]The interview seems to have confirmed my suspicions that there wasn't a super big amount of thought going into these songs, and that they were never meant to be collected into an album at first.[/quote]

So this actually confuses me, because I got the impression he puts quite a bit of thought into the songs. Obviously it's an indisputible fact that the songs weren't written for the intent of crafting an album, but rather for the sake of writing songs themselves - that doesn't indicate a lack of time spent, though. If anything, he directly stated that he's always thinking about the songs he's currently working on while doing other things, which suggests he often takes multiple days to finish up a particular song and he's not just throwing these out like items on a checklist.

Anyway, glad the translations are appreciated! I'm trying to get back on my game a bit more, so expect more of both lyrics and interviews down the road.[/quote]

That would be badass Mare, about the lyrics and interviews, and I think that would help in me appreciating what Sawao is trying to do.


Maybe I could've chosen my words different. There wasn't a lot of thought going into a cohesive, underlying theme between all the songs, but the album was simply more of a conglomeration of songs written over the course of a tour. I, personally, would like to see a theme throughout the whole album, something I don't think we've seen since TYMT; maybe one could say Good Dreams and My Foot as well. Anyways, Sawao does say in the interview, after all:

[quote]"During that period I was writing without any aim, no plans for making a collection of songs, without even thinking about making a pillows album really. No deadlines or hurrying for a particular time, just writing a lot of songs while we were touring. I wasn't worrying about analyzing any trends in myself, just writing as I pleased."[/quote]


Now he did mention that Be Your King, Perfect Idea, and Zhelanie had a small theme, but that theme was lyrical. I only took one semester of Japanese, and it was so long ago, I can barely read hirigana, let alone translate it. This is the most difficult part for me in being a fan of the pillows: I miss out on these themes until I can get a translation, and even then, it's extra work because I can't simply listen to the song while driving and simultaneously open up the translation on my iPhone. I'd have to be home, and me listening to music at home is rarer and rarer with a wife and a couple kids running around there. So maybe Sawao has been focusing more on lyrical themes in the past 10 years, where I tend to focus on the music and raw emotion in his vocals.

This is the first time I've ever heard Sawao say this: "The lyrics are the biggest thing to me". It's the opposite for me, whether the music is in English or not. It's still an important attribute, I admit, just not a priority for me. If this is the biggest priority for Sawao, then maybe this is why several people think the pillows' last few albums have been somewhat "same-y". But maybe the lyrics are the saving grace. For you and others that know Japanese more, is this the case? Have the lyrics been phenomenal over the past several albums? Is Sawao's poetry more "mature" or "enlightened" as opposed to the classic era?

What I'm hoping or in the next year or so, is a further development of what we heard on songs like Cuckoo's Nest, Tragedy, Envy, and Vulture. Energiia too, for that matter. Explore that more, and maybe mix in some of that quiet-loud-quiet style that Sawao said he was really into when FLCL was coming out. Not for nostalgia's sake necessarily, but because he crafted a lot of interesting music in that mindset.

Updated that line in the translation to make it more clear, but he's talking about the lyrics being the biggest thing he spends time on regarding stuff he finds and wants to incorporate, rather than necessarily stating anything about a balance of focus on writing music vs writing lyrics.

I frickin love when the guitar slams in on PERFECT IDEA. Even in ENVY.

After a couple weeks of slowly building up an appreciation of [i]Nook[/i], my love for the album has suddenly skyrocketed. This is right up there with The Pillows' best in the post-'90s era, for sure. And what Mare was saying about [i]Nook[/i] having some real flow to it is especially true of the back half: the album is structured brilliantly from the halfway mark so that the overall energy escalates through the subdued groove of "She looks like new-born baby"; "pulse", the emotional climax of the album; the perfect balance of liveliness, emotion and lightness that is "Zhelanie"; "BE WILD", the best and perhaps most exciting song on the album (and hence a perfect penultimate track); and finally, "Where do I go?", the ultimate release of all the momentum that's built up throughout the duration of the album in one concise ass-kicking that--despite being less than two minutes in length--feels like it's exactly as long as it should be. imo even the best Pillows albums don't have structure as compelling as that; most of them just feel like collections of songs (albeit GOAT songs), but the back half of [i]Nook[/i] feels like a real journey. The first half doesn't feel disjointed, exactly, but it certainly doesn't have the same degree of flow (side note: the first three tracks on [i]Stroll and Roll[/i] flow really well into each other; it's sorta incredible since they're all so different).

Yeah man. Every time new born baby comes on I lose it.
When Sawao says 'bang bang bang!' and I'm in the car i point 'finger guns' ar random people. Probably not the best idea upon reflection but it's fun!

[quote="thomasjameskalogianis"]When Sawao says 'bang bang bang!' and I'm in the car i point 'finger guns' ar random people. Probably not the best idea upon reflection but it's fun! [/quote]

Hahahahaha dude, I know what you mean. I live in LA right now, though, so I just finger gun shoot the air right-left-right up at an angle, Yosemite Sam style. Pretty sure someone might shoot a real gun at me eventually if I were to do it at cars/people lol.

I used to hold my fingers up against the glass riding the bus and pretend they were a video game character, and I made the character "jump" across gaps like street intersections and over objects and such. The morning bus ride was "Intro to Parabolas" and I didn't know it!

It's interesting how many posts I see that have lukewarm feelings on Pulse. That's the song that first stuck out to me as my most enjoyable on first listen. I've given this album about 2 weeks or so now I think, I come back to it and listen through every so often with fresh ears, so I've kind of finalized my opinion on it...it's short and sweet, which I can appreciate. It's easy to listen from start to finish. That said, the start isn't that great in my opinion (haven't liked Envy since I first saw the PV before release), and the finish is sort of...lackluster? I don't know, it doesn't have a big closer to me.

What I'm getting at is I think this album really hits it's stride around Perfect Idea, and then I kind of feign interest after Zhelanie. Overall, I'd give it a 6/10, only really a fan of half the album, but it gets an extra point because the other songs aren't really [i]unlistenable[/i].

A 6/10 is a 12/10 when you apply MAREKENSHIN MATHEMATICS to your rating scale.

Nice score.

Edit: Real talk, though, one of the things that I think makes a good album to me is when people often disagree over what the best tracks are - small group here but it seems like the parts people like the most/dislike the most vary nicely.

Double edit (realer talk): Sonic the highway hedgehog/highway mario platforming through the window is best imagination game, forever.