YMCK - Family Music

Even if you’ve been up for three days straight snorting lines of Pixie Stix, you’re still not prepared for the sugar overload of YMCK. This Japanese trio makes pop that’s entirely composed of mid-‘80’s, 8-bit arcade noises: Pac Man, Defender, Galaga, etc. with soft, breathy, unaffected Japanese school-girl vocals and lyrics which are as sweet and childlike as the music is: “Say goodbye to Peter Pan/Say goodbye to Neverland/Say hello to your new adventure” is the English translation of the closing wish of the album’s opening tune, “Magical 8bit Tour”. Although arcade sounds are what comprise YMCK’s musical palette, this is not a techno-kinda record. It’s more like swinging lounge jazz. Seriously. If you transcribed these arcade sound-songs into piano, it would often be straight-out lounge-jazz, complete with faux-scat lines like, “Sha-ba-da-shoobi-doo-ba”, strewn about. Now, turning anything into lounge music would normally be a terrible thing, but YMCK’s musical vision is just so pure and well-executed, I gotta give them a pass. This isn’t that far from what the Swingle Singers, (a ‘60’s French vocal group who made Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, and other classical music swing, which was wholly comprised of “Sha-ba-da-shoobi-doo-ba’s”) were doing, except YMCK uses cutie-pie video game sounds. YMCK’s Family Music will be horribly annoying to most. But if you’re the type of person who enjoys annoying your friends that only listen to stuff that Rawks, it’d be well worth your while, just for that sadistic pleasure. But besides that, Family Music is challenging listening. [www.ymck.net]