Yura Yura Teikoku
Hollow Me / Beautiful
In their native Japan, Yura Yura Teikoku are twenty-year psych-rock veterans, beloved above-ground vets with a ten-album discography revered for the sort of obstinate high quality of Sonic Youth more so than the fitful, morphing back catalogs of the Flaming Lips or Butthole Surfers. On Hollow Me / Beautiful, their tenth record, they ditch some of the prog and punk leanings of earlier stuff to pillage instead 1970s AM gold, in the process creating warped, dreamy pop-rock. It is as much fun as it is brazenly insane. The first track alone has like three saxophone solos on it.
Let the record show that these are not subtle saxophone solos either, but rather big, shit-eating saxophone solos: trilling, soaring, un-subtle things that fly out of the speakers like doves from a magician’s palm. And just wait until you hear the organ line at the end of “Still Alive,” which could be described as both “creamy” and “avuncular.” This sound–spacy, riding and ostentatious–never really existed on either continent, but may exist in the halcyon memory of some permanent teenager who got high constantly that entire decade and only listened to Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic and Television’s “Elevation.”
Point being, though, that this sonic daring works, filtered as the chintz is into this amber-colored neverwhere along with such straight-forwardly awesome stuff as the twin versions of “Beautiful” or the analog-driven freakout “In The Forest.” At over 70 minutes, the record is a true long-player, cresting hills and stretching ever onward, a kickass radio station that never was. Their countrymen Boris, the Boredoms and Melt Banana have traversed the Pacific by decimating American rock tropes and building forts with the rubble, but Yura Yura Teikoku keep their melodies tight and their faces straight. But give credit where due: it’s hard to subvert via sax solo.
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