Love is Groovy
By MIKEY HIRANO CULROSS
Rafu Shimpo
Friday, Aug. 29, 2008

Naoki, left, and Kumi of Love Psychedelico hang on at the Venice headquarters of HackTone Records, which has released their first U.S. album.

MIKEY HIRANO CULROSS/Rafu Shimpo
Naoki, left, and Kumi of Love Psychedelico hang out at the Venice headquarters of HackTone Records, which has released their first U.S. album.

“This Is Love Psychedelico”

VENICE.–Naoki, half of the duo Love Psychedelico, plopped onto the plushy sofa at the HackTone Records of­fice and took in a deep breath of Venice Beach oxygen.

“The atmosphere here lets me release, frees me in a way,” he said in Japanese. “The California air is different, so I hope it helps me think differently.”

Naoki, 35, and band mate Kumi, 32–both apparently on a first-name ba­sis with the world–are spending a few months in L.A. to soak up the environ­ment and gather inspiration for some new songs. The visit comes on the heels of their first release in North America, after eight years of stardom in Japan.

“This Is Love Psychedelico,” on the HackTone label, is more or less an introductory collection tailored for the American market. Not simply a “great­est hits” mix, it’s a potent representa­tion of the scope of the duo’s music and–perhaps more strikingly–their rock and roll acumen.

Bred on American and British rock of the 1960s and 70s, Naoki first met Kumi while enrolled at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo in the late 1990s. Naoki had spent time in cover bands dur­ing high school, imitating mostly hard rock hits by the likes of Van Halen. A chance meeting with Kumi altered his musical focus.

“When I met Kumi and realized how much I like her sense of music, my style changed right away,” he said.

Kumi said while she had fleeting dreams of singing, she didn’t really lis­ten to much music during high school.

“It wasn’t until I met Naoki that I began to think about it. I discovered that I really like 60s and 70s music, American and British rock and roll,” she explained.

The two immediately formed a part­nership, originally called Love Psyche­delic Orchestra, a moniker shortened by the time their third album was released in Japan. Their first CD, ambitiously titled “The Greatest Hits,” sold more than two million copies.

In a sequence that is certainly the envy of would-be rockers everywhere, the pair’s big break came via the most frequently attempted–and perhaps least effective–mode of introduction.

“We were at a party and handed a cassette tape to a record company guy and he liked the song,” Naoki recalled. “It was cool.”

Cool, indeed.

With their foot in the door, Love Psychedelico (ironically initialed like the long-defunct long-playing record) showed they were full of good ideas, which come across immediately on their U.S. release. Naoki is first and foremost a guitar player, with an ear for hooks and graceful skill in constructing chord pro­gressions. The first track on “This Is...” opens with gritty notes being punched on a Rhodes organ, a sound instantly recognizable to ears told not to trust anyone over 30.

The verses are inventive rather than predictable, with choruses that open with confidence and swagger. It’s an entertaining collection on the merits of the music alone, but the lyrics are the most notable point of craftiness.

A decade or so ago, there was a radio station in Fukuoka that referred to its content as “Janglish Love,” with disc jockeys peppering their Japanese with English words or phrases. For those with a good degree of fluency in both, it all made perfect sense; for the rest, much may have been lost in translation. In a lot of Japanese pop, it has long been trendy to toss in a few English terms to “Americanize” songs, but usually only to enhance the artist’s coolness factor.

Kumi speaks English with as a re­sult of attending elementary school in San Mateo. That ability lends itself to her writing, which flows unbounded between languages in her tempered style that speaks more to the 1990s than the 60s. So freely does she combine Japanese and English–not only mid-sentence, sometimes mid-word–that she’s almost creating a new category of Janglish. The result is an effortless, if not always understandable, flow unlike any in popular music since Eartha Kitt melted listeners with “C’est si bon” in the 1950s.

Whether one understands every word is secondary to the satisfaction of the recordings by a group who are so obvi­ously in tune with rock’s essence.

“Usually, when I hear a song, I tend to pay attention to the music,” Naoki said. “If I like the melody or the hooks, then I’ll try to understand the lyrics, but it’s the music that catches me first.”

Love Psychedelico are that rare act in Japan that succeeds on a large scale outside of the current pop music norms. Pre-fab teen groups continue to reign the airwaves there, with seemingly little room for any throwback to the era of your parents’ favorite tunes.

“When we started, we didn’t re­ally have a ‘mission,’ but we knew we wanted our album to be the one rock CD owned by teenage girls who are growing up with modern pop, who have never been exposed to rock and roll in the traditional sense,” Naoki explained. “Maybe they’ve grown up with hip-hop and poppy stuff; when they think about rock music, they might have images of long hair, tattoos and a more dangerous image. That’s not what rock and roll is all about.”

Naoki cited the fact that while John Lennon and Sex Pistols both fall under the heading of rock and roll, the mes­sages they send can be quite contrary.

“The Sex Pistols’ message was to say ‘no’ to society, while Lennon’s was to say ‘yes.’ We wanted teenagers in Japan to understand how rock music can con­vey a range of messages, how it can be used to say important things.”

On their stateside CD, in a mishmash of languages, Love Psychedelico’s mes­sage is well-received.