Conventional Wisdom: My First Japanese CDs - "Penalty Life" - the pillows (Patreon)

On several occasions so far, I’ve alluded to a certain milestone I was waiting to reach: the first Japanese CD I bought without any connection to an anime. I’ve disqualified several albums that really SHOULD have earned that title on the grounds of some loose anime connection, at least with my intentions. I bought that L’Arc-en-Ciel compilation because I thought it would have the Fullmetal Alchemist theme on it. I bought Yuki Kajiura’s Fiction because I thought it’d have the Noir theme on it. I bought that Puffy AmiYumi compilation because I wanted their Cartoon Network show themes. Even if I wound up listening to them in terms entirely unconnected to any pre-existing anime, I still found myself waiting for that one first album that I bought SOLELY because I was a fan of the music itself. It’s hard to explain why this felt like such a milestone. Maybe it’s the lingering effects of that whole “prove you’re a REAL fan” mentality. Maybe I still bear the scars of seeing too many try-hard 14 year olds trying to act like they know everything despite demonstrably not knowing anything. For whatever reason, I always felt like a little bit of a poser only owning albums as an extension of the anime I was watching, and felt like I’d advanced to a new level when I finally owned one just for its own sake. Now I was a REAL fan of Japanese music, dang it!

The irony, aside from the obvious silliness of feeling like I had anything to prove to anyone, is that the album I always look to as my first non-anime-related purchase is still fairly anime related: Penalty Life by the pillows. Sure, none of the songs on the album were used in an anime soundtrack (well, not at the time, anyway) but the pillows were still very much “The FLCL Band” in the minds of pretty much everyone in 2005. Under other circumstances, I could easily write off as an extended case of me buying a CD because of an anime… but just in case the pages and pages of text in the FLCL Soundtrack blog didn’t tip you off, I REALLY got into the pillows. When copies of Penalty Life started turning up in that one little CD rack in the back of Suncoast, you’d better believe I gobbled that thing up straight away (…at least, I THINK that’s where I got my copy. Lord knows I saw it for sale there amongst the other Geneon CDs often enough). Even now, Penalty Life is the first thing that springs to mind when I ask myself where I started really following Japanese music for its own sake rather than as a side-show to some other fandom.

The second thing I think of when I think of Penalty Life is usually “Wow, this album is a lot more mellow than the FLCL soundtracks.” That’s not really an accurate assessment of the album as a whole, but it’s still what hits me right off the bat. Compared to the likes of “Last Dinosaur” or “Blues Drive Monster” or, of course, “Ride On Shooting Star,” the likes of “The Sun That Will Not Rise” or “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is In Paradise” are waaay more relaxed and low-key. But the thing is, those two songs are far and away the gentlest songs on all of Penalty Life. Really, there’s only one more “slow” song on the whole album: “Lonesome Diamond.”  Other than those three tracks, Penalty Life is every bit as high octane as anything on the FLCL soundtracks. That’s eight fast tracks against three slow ones. Actually, no, that’s NINE fast tracks because there’s a bonus song (“I’m Broken Piece”) tacked on after “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is In Paradise” that’s just as high energy as the others. So why does my brain insist of cataloguing the entire album based on just these three tracks?

Well, the easy answer is that I just like “The Sun That Will Not Rise,” “Lonesome Diamond,” and “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is in Paradise” better than any of the fast songs. To compound matters, the FLCL soundtracks have one fairly obvious advantage over any of the whole original albums: they get to cherry pick the very best songs and skip over the less memorable ones. Obviously, the first pillows album that I heard in its entirety rather than in digest form was going to have more average songs in the mix, and my young spoiled brain probably had trouble grappling with the reality of average pillows songs. So I guess Past Me just imprinted so hard on my favorite songs that the majority of the album just sort of didn’t count.

That’s a shame, of course, because Penalty Life is still a perfectly solid album on it’s own merits, even if it doesn’t it as many home runs as a compilation curated from several separate albums. The lead-off track, “Dead Stock Paradise,” is a good case study for my impressions of the album as whole. It’s a short, concise, riff-heavy rock tune with pretentious-sounding gratuitous English that generally struck me as this album’s attempt at a new “Ride On Shooting Star.” That’s an unfair comparison, even BEFORE you remember that “Ride On Shooting Star” is an absolute, all-time classic. While “Shooting Star” might also be compact and riff-driven, it’s also extremely punchy and frantic, with its start/stop arrangement and Shinichiro Sato’s pounding drums. “Dead Stock Paradise,” immediately locks into a more steady, constant groove that make the song feel more cool and laid-back than wild and energetic. The heavy use of echo that occasionally makes the lead guitar sound like its underwater only further adds to the mellow ambiance. And then the album immediately slips into the even more laid-back “Lonesome Diamond” … which is admittedly only “laid-back” in the sense that it’s the album’s requisite lumbering Oasis-styled ballad. Still, compared to the THIRD track, the significantly faster “Freebee Honey,” it’s downright sedate, and I think that one/two punch of “Dead Stick Paradise” and “Lonely Diamond” did a lot to screw with my initial impressions of Penalty Life. And again, they’re also two of the most memorable tracks, where “Freebee Honey” just sounds like a forgettable rearrangement of “Last Dinosaur.” Not BAD, mind you, just not very memorable, and definitely not up to balancing out the impression made by the first two tracks.

That’s especially unfortunate since the NEXT track is “Terminal Heaven’s Rock,” which absolutely DOES make a lasting impression. A clear attempt to evoke a sort of Swinging 60s swagger without actually going full retro, “Terminal Heaven’s Rock” has another solid foundation of tasty riffs, but dresses it up with some high-pitched “woo hoo hooo” backing vocals and even a surprise horn section! The whole package sounds like a more radio-friendly version of Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, a good encapsulation sound that was so big in the Early Aughts. It really surprises me that THIS track didn’t immediately follow “Dead Stock Paradise,” as while the later definitely works best as the opener, “Terminal Heaven’s Rock” has a lot more substance to it. A one/two punch of THOSE tracks absolutely would have balanced out the mellowing effects of “Lonesome Diamond,” especially without “Freebee Honey” to lessen the effect. And it’s not like the pillows didn’t have faith in “Terminal Heaven’s Rock,” the song was the albums one single. Why deaden a good song’s potential impact with such questionable sequencing?

And speaking of good songs but questionable sequencing, the NEXT track is “The Sun That Will Not Rise,” one of Penalty Life’s two unquestionable “slow songs.” This is the kind of song you normally place at the END of an album, not a few tracks in… and I know the pillows agree, because that’s exactly what they did with “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is In Paradise.” This is the cool-off song after a string of scorching rave ups, not the song that leads INTO a stretch of faster songs, and being in such close proximity to “Lonesome Diamond” only adds to the muted atmosphere I remember Penalty Life having. But again, I could just be harping about this because “The Sun That Will Not Rise” is STAGGERINGLY better than most of the songs on this album. It’s possibly one of my favorite pillows songs ever, a haunting, droning Indie song that sounds a bit like what would have happened if Lou Reed had based “The Ocean” on a Japanese folk melody. This was apparently one of two songs off of Penalty Life to get used in the new FLCL seasons, and I can totally see why. This is mood music perfection (Then again, the other song was apparently “Freebee Honey” so maybe getting on that soundtrack isn’t THAT big of a deal). It’s definitely the one Penalty Life song I remember best, and involuntarily comes to mind when I try to think of a lot of OTHER songs, so it’s no surprise that my impression of the whole album would be skewed in its favor.

It also helps that the following several songs are pretty forgettable. Again, not BAD, but fairly average. “I Know You” is the probably the fastest song on Penalty Life, a punky little thrasher of a song with a slightly Country-ish melody. “Phantom Pain” has a very herky-jerky arrangement that really ought to make it sound more nervy and energetic than it is, but something about it just feels… muted. “Moon Margaret” is a bit livelier, and is probably the most “typical” pillows song on all of Penalty Life. If you programmed some deep learning AI to digest all the tropes and trademarks of Sawao Yamanaka’s songwriting and compose something in that style, “Moon Margaret” is the song it would generate. It’s fine, but it doesn’t do anything that a dozen other pillows songs don’t do better. The chorus, with it’s two note nursery rhyme refrain, in particular sounds like filler waiting to be replaced but the REAL chorus. Again, I have to stress that an average pillows song is still a better song than anything YOU and YOUR band will ever write, but it’s still not very memorable.

If you want memorable, you want track eight: “Super Trampoline School Kid.” Honestly, this is the one song that sounds like it was specifically written to be used on FLCL, or some other equally wacky anime. Heck, it literally opens with a sound-alike for the Powerpuff Girls fanfare! It could absolutely see this song’s Rockabilly guitar refrains being used as background music for one of manga page sequences the same way the instrumental version of “Come Down” was. Heck, “Super Trampoline School Kid” is mostly instrumental! It's the song for everyone who though edited songs on the first two FLCL soundtracks were what the pillows normally sound like.

Next up is “Mall Town Prisoner,” another song that sounds like a scientific attempt to pinpoint the absolute exact mathematical average of the pillows sound. It’s fine, a bit more memorable than “Moon Margret” thanks to possessing more of an earworm chorus, but still fairly interchangeable with a dozen other high speed pillows songs. It’s got the break-neck pace of “Last Dinosaur,” the power chords of “Runners High,” the singalong chorus of “I Think I Can,” the fist-pumping energy of “Blues Drive Monster,” the squeaky synth flourishes of “Ride On Shooting Star,” it’s a one-song sampler of everything everybody likes about the pillows. In fact, if you slipped “Mall Town Prisoner” into a playlist of FLCL songs and told somebody it actually was in the show, they’d probably believe you. You could probably engineer your own little Mandela Effect moment as their brain manufactures memories of what scene they heard the song in. so yeah, not a bad song at all. Yet, again, I question the sequencing of the album here, as “Mall Town Prisoner” feels more like the kind of song Penalty Life should have kicked off with, not one to hold back as the penultimate track. Well, sort of.

Yeah, Penalty Life pulls the rather obnoxious trick of lumping its OFFICIAL last song “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is In Paradise” onto the same track as bonus track “I’m Broken Piece,” with a long stretch of silence in between. Oh, the things we used to think were clever back in the days of CDs. That may have been fine back in the days when we all just listened to one disk at a time, but here in the age of streaming and playlists and you kids with your hula hoops, it’s really inconvenient. I really like “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is In Paradise,” its another laid-back Indie tune that serves as a nice companion piece to “The Sun That Will Not Rise.” It’s not quite as good as the previous song, but the less ethereal mood gives it a bit more of a sense of finality, making it a very good choice to wrap up the album. Except that it doesn’t. “I’m Broken Piece” kicks in after a minute or so of silence, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s doing there. Again, it’s not a bad song, it’s a totally competent little rocker with a nice 50s Phil Spector beat underneath everything. Honestly, I like “I’m Broken Piece” better than most of the official songs in the middle of the album, it’s a fair sight more memorable than “I Know You.” But what’s it doing as the final track? And what’s more, why is it strapped into the end of “The Scar Whispers, Nobody Is In Paradise?” The first song is much better, but I don’t remember it anywhere near as well because of what a mood whiplash it is when the later song fires up. These days, I almost never listen to whole albums in sequence, I just pick the songs I like and drop them in themed playlists. There’s no listening mood that both “The Scar Whispers” and “I’m Broken Piece” equally fit in, so I hear neither song as much as they deserve. And yes, I know I could just chop up the MP3 in Audacity and get two separate songs… but that’d be, like, WORK.

Gosh, this sure isn’t the blog I thought I was gonna end up writing. I mean, it’s not as if I don't like Penalty Life, I think it’s just fine. What’s more, I really do have a lot of really fun memories of listening to it right at the peak of my weebness. I’ve got this one particularly vivid memory of driving home from some Animazement with my little brother with “Lonesome Diamond” cranked up and just being so pleased with myself. I was livin’ the life, man. Maybe it was that “I’ve got more Otaku cred than you” power trip of owning some pillows music that people who’d only seen FLCL had never even HEARD of. Maybe it was the feeling that, yes, there really WAY more cool stuff in Japan than just what anime was showing me, I just needed to go digging for it. Maybe I just felt a little cooler every time I actually BOUGHT something at Suncoast instead of just hanging around in the back for an hour. The point is, Penalty Life is another one of those “good memory” albums, and I didn’t expect to go nitpicking the song placement as much as I did. Then again, those good memories are inexorably wrapped up in my diving head first into the convention community, so maybe Present Me becoming cynical and grumpy about it was only to be expected.