Otherwise known as the “The White Album”, palpably because the stapled together gatefold record sleeve lacks any real title but the band´s name… and rising high in three point perspective…

A tall, scarred, messianic; defiant, tattoo-scrawled, fist-clenching icon, with giant-hair, the vocalist frontman Ishii Motako. *

Conjuring up a stage presence as mighty as a mezcla of Iggy and Damo Suzuki rolled into one, Motako almost seems like the wild drooling Jesus-Kinski to the mike; untamed, ferocious, ready to eat and drink after a cathartic starvation. 

In live performances, dripping in sweat, he has taken a pint of water, seemingly drank the contents, continued to gargle and asphyxiate through the songs, until the whole contents are puked forth from within — at some lesser expected moment — and in a splurge of chaotic wails and water.

“A moment of a decisive battle came” really introduces Motako´s abrasive ripped up vocal well, shouting his orders to nowhere on the ravaged battlefield.

“Ah-EE Ah-ee AH!”

All backed with an off kilter, clattered jazz drumming from Yusuke Mukae, Ayler-like, demented blues lead guitar from Kirara Nakabayashi. 

I´m told they´re based in the Kansai area of Japan, (the region around Osaka and Kyoto), and may fall under the wing of the manic Scum Rock scene, if they weren´t so damn weird, played by a host of bands like Ultra Fuckers and Afrirampo (an all girl underground band with punk-pop attitude; think Boredoms, Deerhoof, but more fun and colourful on stage). I´ve yet to attend one of Tokyo´s Underground music festivals, which Japanese friends have suggested, but I imagine being enthralled by hundreds of bands unknown in the West, and yet all sounding like Les Rallises Denudes on amphetamines.

I caught the band in Glasgow, highly jet-lagged, polite and sheepish, quietly crashed out on the floor of a flat after playing at the Instal festival in 2006. On the stereo was a Les Rallises Denudes CD, Live ´77, if I´m right, and one guy was sat in the middle of the room, head down, entranced in the music. He turned to me, and when I uttered the name, was pleasantly surprised, did anyone outside of Japan know who they were? I too then mercifully and gleefully accepted, that yes they were the greatest band on earth, and Live ´77 probably captured the spirit of the thee greatest live act in all of eternity… okay, you know that was the mood and everything, fresh after seeing Oshiri Penpenz live. So it must have been something.

The sound of Oshiri Penpenz is something like a bit off the tangent, marching sound found in early Captain Beefheart: “Pachuco Cadaver” or “Neon Meat”, and is further implicit by track three “Oh! Hell”, where the band already seem to be falling apart in their pea soup-diet, love-stricken drunken Woyzeck hell, and yet you feel like a welcome visitor on their Beefheart field recording. The breezy comedy element enters, with song titles “Love victory method of MOTAKO” and “love letter from the plain-looking woman”, with light fanciful fleets of drumming and acrobatic movements of guitar, wherein Motako relentlessly continues in his hoarse, punk way, as if drunk on a circus tightrope taunting them from above at their jazzy performance.

Oshiri Penpenz translates as ‘skelped arse´, and for me the raw, live mixture of demented jazz, which courses together remarkably well with Motako´s barrage of punk jibes and ridiculous shouts like “Beetle!”, they merge together into a highly charged entertaining listen. 

The fact is the album ends with a track called “Buttocks”, and it now sounds as if Motako is waffling on about things, making rabble like Peter Cook would on a Derek and Clive record, with no particular attention from his co-workers. His throat is so dry by now it probably hurts and although he might be sober it sounds like he´s had a skinful at least.

* Co-incidentally another CDR of around about the same time is replete in black, slightly more crazed, perhaps slightly less tuneful too, known as “The Black Album”. I encourage you to listen more than once to the White Album, especially the first couple of tracks on repeat to ascertain their magic, it definitely captures the raw live energy of the band, a Japanese Beefheart Magic Band if you will. 

Tracklisting:

1 A moment of a decisive battle came
2 Thigh communication
3 Oh! Hell
4 Love victory method of MOTAKO
5 love letter from the plain-looking woman
6 I am a dancer (hometown)
7 Crawl (HAW)
8 Beetle!
9 A man to detain and the woman who leave
10 godparent
11 Excessive psychadelic… OK!
12 city
13 Opium
14 Buttocks