There's a point in Worst of Moonriders, a 2-hour-long live album that was intended to be Moonriders' farewell gesture to their fans, where the six-piece rock band kicks into a cover of "In a Persian Market," by the British composer Albert Ketèlbey. Why they've added a 1920 piece of classical music to their repertoire is both somewhat hard to fathom and perfectly in keeping with what makes Moonriders so delightful and enigmatic. A Japanese band covering a British composer's chintzy idea of what Iran must feel and sound like is, in a strange way, perfectly emblematic of Moonriders as a whole.
When members of the band first came together in the early 70s, under the name Honey Pie, they were a lush folk-rock band, and very little more. Three years later, re-emerging as Moonriders for the first time, they immediately started playing with funk, country, tropical exotica, and even Tin Pan Alley-era pop songwriting—and that was just their first album. They released new music at an aggressive clip, and their evolution as a band was equally aggressive, startling, relentless. Every new release introduced a band that was almost unrecognizable as the group from the release before. And for nearly four decades, they kept up that pace, and that relentless transformation, until halfway through their career, they were arriving at places that are hard to fathom—let alone explain—unless you were familiar with the unfathomable place they had just arrived from.
If you've ever had a Beatles phase, you know the heady thrills of listening to them change, album by album, at an almost implausible speed. The shift from Please Please Me to A Hard Day's Night, one year and two records later, is jawdropping enough; the transition from that to Help! is just as shocking, or would be if they hadn't released Rubber Soul the same year and forever changed people's understanding of them. Only five years separates "Love Me Do" from the entirety of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band—a progression so incomprehensibly sudden and vast that it became the story of music in the 60s, and of rock music in general, and of pop music to this day. And what's so thrilling is that you can go back and hear it: it's as startling and delightful to listen to today as it was back then.
Listening through Moonriders' catalogue is a similarly startling thrill: the drastic change from album to album to album is a similar kind of borderline unbelievable. But the Beatles stayed together for a decade, and not even the whole decade at that. Moonriders kept at it for four times longer than that—and against all odds, they found ways to keep startling, to keep changing themselves, to find new ways of doing something that they had never done before. Things that, as far as I know, nobody had done before, and nobody has done since.
To explain all of that, and to explain everything that makes this group so incredible, would take us much too long. But let's try and hit the highlights.
When members of the band first came together in the early 70s, under the name Honey Pie, they were a lush folk-rock band, and very little more. Three years later, re-emerging as Moonriders for the first time, they immediately started playing with funk, country, tropical exotica, and even Tin Pan Alley-era pop songwriting—and that was just their first album. They released new music at an aggressive clip, and their evolution as a band was equally aggressive, startling, relentless. Every new release introduced a band that was almost unrecognizable as the group from the release before. And for nearly four decades, they kept up that pace, and that relentless transformation, until halfway through their career, they were arriving at places that are hard to fathom—let alone explain—unless you were familiar with the unfathomable place they had just arrived from.
If you've ever had a Beatles phase, you know the heady thrills of listening to them change, album by album, at an almost implausible speed. The shift from Please Please Me to A Hard Day's Night, one year and two records later, is jawdropping enough; the transition from that to Help! is just as shocking, or would be if they hadn't released Rubber Soul the same year and forever changed people's understanding of them. Only five years separates "Love Me Do" from the entirety of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band—a progression so incomprehensibly sudden and vast that it became the story of music in the 60s, and of rock music in general, and of pop music to this day. And what's so thrilling is that you can go back and hear it: it's as startling and delightful to listen to today as it was back then.
Listening through Moonriders' catalogue is a similarly startling thrill: the drastic change from album to album to album is a similar kind of borderline unbelievable. But the Beatles stayed together for a decade, and not even the whole decade at that. Moonriders kept at it for four times longer than that—and against all odds, they found ways to keep startling, to keep changing themselves, to find new ways of doing something that they had never done before. Things that, as far as I know, nobody had done before, and nobody has done since.
To explain all of that, and to explain everything that makes this group so incredible, would take us much too long. But let's try and hit the highlights.
What, exactly, made Moonriders so extraordinary?
The Beatles aren't famous because they wrote good songs, although they did. They're famous because they changed people's understanding of what a band was: they turned the studio into their primary instrument, shifted their focus to arrangement and production, and played with just how many influences a single group of musicians could draw from. After that, the story goes, the floodgates were open: rock music, and then pop music, could be anything its musicians dreamt of. And while new technologies emerged, new genres sprang into existence, and visionaries like Aphex Twin and Radiohead (to pick two arbitrary biggies) explored just how far new approaches to musicianship could be taken, in a sense they were still following the Beatles' footsteps. There's a before and an after, and the Beatles symbolically serve as the gateway between.
(Is this a reductive summary? Of course. But it's also, broadly speaking, accurate.)
Moonriders have a similar, singular defining trait: their radical commitment to collaboration.
Each of its six members is a multi-instrumentalist. Each of its six members wrote songs and lyrics. Each of its six members arranged music. And each of its six members produced music, too. Look at any album's songwriting credits, and you see different members credited for each song's lyrics, melody, and arrangements—it's not unusual to see four or five members given credit for a single song, with each one's specific contribution named explicitly.
This was a bigger deal than it might sound, because each of the six Moonriders had an accomplished and diverse solo career, in addition to their working with the main band. Five of its six members have, or had, their own record labels. Every last one of them wrote music for other bands; every last one of them produced albums by other bands. Almost all of them are credited, individually, with soundtracks for movies, TV shows, games, and anime. Hell, the majority of its members each organized and produced their own boy bands and girl bands, writing and producing music for them in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. They formed jazz sextets, ukulele quartets, punk trios, folk duos. They wrote club music and they composed for orchestras and they wrote ad jingles and they inspired some of the most beloved Japanese groups of all time.
So it's not just that each of the Moonriders had a voice in the band proper. What makes this a big deal is that each Moonrider has a strong voice, a unique and highly opinionated voice, and ties to musical cultures that none of the band's other members do. Then, for forty years, they came together and wrote songs as collaborations, with each member working on the others' music at every level of production. And the composition of the band—and the fact that each of its members could take up half a dozen different roles when actually playing a given song—meant that their versatility, their potential to become a new kind of band, was more-or-less unlimited. And they had six songwriters, six composers, and six producers all eager to take advantage of these possibilities.
It sounds a little silly to say that you can actually hear the collaboration when you listen to this band. But you can, if you know just what to listen for. Each of the band's four major eras is defined by a drastic shift in their understanding of how, exactly, the group should function as a unit—how to write and arrange and perform music in a way that knits all of its participants together in as deep and interwoven a manner as possible. Each era dramatically transforms the group's sound, even taking into account the way that the group's sound always changes and never repeats itself. The shifts between eras run deeper than just their sound. They're breakthroughs in a band's neverending quest to figure out how music can bring people together—and I mean that very, very literally.
(Is this a reductive summary? Of course. But it's also, broadly speaking, accurate.)
Moonriders have a similar, singular defining trait: their radical commitment to collaboration.
Each of its six members is a multi-instrumentalist. Each of its six members wrote songs and lyrics. Each of its six members arranged music. And each of its six members produced music, too. Look at any album's songwriting credits, and you see different members credited for each song's lyrics, melody, and arrangements—it's not unusual to see four or five members given credit for a single song, with each one's specific contribution named explicitly.
This was a bigger deal than it might sound, because each of the six Moonriders had an accomplished and diverse solo career, in addition to their working with the main band. Five of its six members have, or had, their own record labels. Every last one of them wrote music for other bands; every last one of them produced albums by other bands. Almost all of them are credited, individually, with soundtracks for movies, TV shows, games, and anime. Hell, the majority of its members each organized and produced their own boy bands and girl bands, writing and producing music for them in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. They formed jazz sextets, ukulele quartets, punk trios, folk duos. They wrote club music and they composed for orchestras and they wrote ad jingles and they inspired some of the most beloved Japanese groups of all time.
So it's not just that each of the Moonriders had a voice in the band proper. What makes this a big deal is that each Moonrider has a strong voice, a unique and highly opinionated voice, and ties to musical cultures that none of the band's other members do. Then, for forty years, they came together and wrote songs as collaborations, with each member working on the others' music at every level of production. And the composition of the band—and the fact that each of its members could take up half a dozen different roles when actually playing a given song—meant that their versatility, their potential to become a new kind of band, was more-or-less unlimited. And they had six songwriters, six composers, and six producers all eager to take advantage of these possibilities.
It sounds a little silly to say that you can actually hear the collaboration when you listen to this band. But you can, if you know just what to listen for. Each of the band's four major eras is defined by a drastic shift in their understanding of how, exactly, the group should function as a unit—how to write and arrange and perform music in a way that knits all of its participants together in as deep and interwoven a manner as possible. Each era dramatically transforms the group's sound, even taking into account the way that the group's sound always changes and never repeats itself. The shifts between eras run deeper than just their sound. They're breakthroughs in a band's neverending quest to figure out how music can bring people together—and I mean that very, very literally.
Meet the Moonriders
Let's not dwell on this for too long. It would be unreasonable to expect you to care all that much about six musicians you know absolutely nothing about. Still: a little background knowledge on the group—who did what, and why it matters—can go a long way.
Keiichi Suzuki (jack of all trades): If there is a singular classic "genius"-type musician behind Moonriders, it's indisputably Keiichi—though his genius is specifically his omnivorous interest in both collaborative music and in discovering new ways to make it. Best known for his soundtracks to the SNES game Earthbound and Satoshi Kon's film Tokyo Godfathers, Keiichi also collaborated with electronic music pioneers The Orb and with members of Yellow Magic Orchestra, which might be the most successful and groundbreaking Japanese group of all time. (Post-Moonriders, Suzuki brought his ideas about radical collaboration to a new group, Controversial Spark, where he took things a step further: every member of the group is about a decade older and younger than their next-closest member, and the twentysomething's contributions are just as significant as the sixtysomething's.)
Ryomei Shirai (primarily guitar): Known more than anything for his killer pop hooks and infectious enthusiasm, Ryomei's versatility as a guitar player—along with his willingness to embrace almost any approach to playing his instrument of choice—is one of the absolutely essential keys to why Moonriders gets away with just as much as they do. He's been the most successful pop producer of the group, but might be best known for being the principal inspiration of the Pillows, the legendary rock band that scored the classic anime series FLCL.
Tohru Okada (piano/keyboard/synthesizer/accordion): Forever immortalized as the guy who wrote the stings that opened and closed every commercial for every PlayStation, as well as the composer of Crash Bandicoot, Okada's songwriting is whimsical and sweet, emotional in a deceptively simple and open way. He's playful, curious, but always earnest: among his side projects were the aforementioned ukulele quartet, an accordion ensemble, and a Hatsune Miko vocaloid album of Moonriders covers. His spirit suffuses Moonriders as a whole: it's hard to imagine the band without Okada's voice behind it.
Tetsuro Kashibuchi (percussion/piano/guitar): The most remarkable thing about Tetsuro as a drummer is how effortlessly and quietly he shapes every Moonriders song, no matter how outlandish or bizarre. If you're not explicitly listening to him, you'll miss just how much he's doing at any given moment; once you pay him any attention, it becomes impossible not to notice how intricate and inconspicuous every last one of his contributions is. Tetsuro's songs tend to be deeply sensuous and yearning; his solo releases are largely full-orchestra pop compositions, and are achingly lush, romantic, and (frequently) erotic.
Hirobumi Suzuki (bass): Keiichi's younger brother, Hirobumi is a poet on top of his lyricism; his songwriting is conspicuously soulful, in a way that feels more explicitly singer/songwriter than the rest of the band's music. He's released more solo albums than any other Moonrider, and it's not even close; his voice is also one of the easiest to distinguish of the members, thanks to his strong vibrato.
Masahiro Takekawa (primarily trumpet/violin): Masahiro's ability to shift between brass and string is perhaps Moonriders' most significant instrumental trick—it lets the group drastically shift its core sound at a moment's notice. Masahiro also plays a number of other brass instruments, and a wide variety of string instruments as well. He's also the member with the most explicit ties to traditional folk music, bringing in sounds from a wide variety of cultures and traditions.
Why get into all this? What's the takeaway? Mainly that Moonriders is, above everything, a heterogeneous band: each of its members adds something radically different to its mixture, sounds different when he takes lead vocals, and throws a different approach to making music into the group's increasingly-radical explorations of what an album, and what a band, can be. I didn't set out to learn any of this about its members: I discovered this because it's hard not to notice individual contributions to the mix. It's hard not to notice that the people writing this music are, well, different people. And they celebrated and embraced those differences: as time went on, and especially as Moonriders hit their third and fourth decades as a band, their music became notable, more than anything, for how proudly they show off just how different each of their members could be.
But enough of this silly seat-finding preamble. Let's get on with the show.
Keiichi Suzuki (jack of all trades): If there is a singular classic "genius"-type musician behind Moonriders, it's indisputably Keiichi—though his genius is specifically his omnivorous interest in both collaborative music and in discovering new ways to make it. Best known for his soundtracks to the SNES game Earthbound and Satoshi Kon's film Tokyo Godfathers, Keiichi also collaborated with electronic music pioneers The Orb and with members of Yellow Magic Orchestra, which might be the most successful and groundbreaking Japanese group of all time. (Post-Moonriders, Suzuki brought his ideas about radical collaboration to a new group, Controversial Spark, where he took things a step further: every member of the group is about a decade older and younger than their next-closest member, and the twentysomething's contributions are just as significant as the sixtysomething's.)
Ryomei Shirai (primarily guitar): Known more than anything for his killer pop hooks and infectious enthusiasm, Ryomei's versatility as a guitar player—along with his willingness to embrace almost any approach to playing his instrument of choice—is one of the absolutely essential keys to why Moonriders gets away with just as much as they do. He's been the most successful pop producer of the group, but might be best known for being the principal inspiration of the Pillows, the legendary rock band that scored the classic anime series FLCL.
Tohru Okada (piano/keyboard/synthesizer/accordion): Forever immortalized as the guy who wrote the stings that opened and closed every commercial for every PlayStation, as well as the composer of Crash Bandicoot, Okada's songwriting is whimsical and sweet, emotional in a deceptively simple and open way. He's playful, curious, but always earnest: among his side projects were the aforementioned ukulele quartet, an accordion ensemble, and a Hatsune Miko vocaloid album of Moonriders covers. His spirit suffuses Moonriders as a whole: it's hard to imagine the band without Okada's voice behind it.
Tetsuro Kashibuchi (percussion/piano/guitar): The most remarkable thing about Tetsuro as a drummer is how effortlessly and quietly he shapes every Moonriders song, no matter how outlandish or bizarre. If you're not explicitly listening to him, you'll miss just how much he's doing at any given moment; once you pay him any attention, it becomes impossible not to notice how intricate and inconspicuous every last one of his contributions is. Tetsuro's songs tend to be deeply sensuous and yearning; his solo releases are largely full-orchestra pop compositions, and are achingly lush, romantic, and (frequently) erotic.
Hirobumi Suzuki (bass): Keiichi's younger brother, Hirobumi is a poet on top of his lyricism; his songwriting is conspicuously soulful, in a way that feels more explicitly singer/songwriter than the rest of the band's music. He's released more solo albums than any other Moonrider, and it's not even close; his voice is also one of the easiest to distinguish of the members, thanks to his strong vibrato.
Masahiro Takekawa (primarily trumpet/violin): Masahiro's ability to shift between brass and string is perhaps Moonriders' most significant instrumental trick—it lets the group drastically shift its core sound at a moment's notice. Masahiro also plays a number of other brass instruments, and a wide variety of string instruments as well. He's also the member with the most explicit ties to traditional folk music, bringing in sounds from a wide variety of cultures and traditions.
Why get into all this? What's the takeaway? Mainly that Moonriders is, above everything, a heterogeneous band: each of its members adds something radically different to its mixture, sounds different when he takes lead vocals, and throws a different approach to making music into the group's increasingly-radical explorations of what an album, and what a band, can be. I didn't set out to learn any of this about its members: I discovered this because it's hard not to notice individual contributions to the mix. It's hard not to notice that the people writing this music are, well, different people. And they celebrated and embraced those differences: as time went on, and especially as Moonriders hit their third and fourth decades as a band, their music became notable, more than anything, for how proudly they show off just how different each of their members could be.
But enough of this silly seat-finding preamble. Let's get on with the show.
The Early Years (1973-1978)
Moonriders' earliest forays together as a group are marked by a restless pursuit of new sounds. To say that they incorporate "world music"—a nonsense label to begin with—belies how varied their explorations of other cultures really was, how quickly they shed their original sound, and how rapidly they reached the outer limits of what mere mimicry and pastiche would let them do. It's obvious why they had to find a new approach to writing music, and how relentlessly they're trying to find it. But they're heartfelt from their very first moments together: they writing aching, tender music, and no amount of impish whimsy ever distracts from that.
SENTIMENTAL STREET (1973): The first song the band that became Moonriders ever released, "On the Fence," is about as lush and beautiful and stirring as music ever gets. The whole album is this lush and this poignant, and stylistically fairly consistent—which is how you know this is the band Honey Pie and not Moonriders proper. While only half of Moonriders' members were involved in making this album, it nonetheless makes sense that the group's origins are rooted in folk music: there's a simple emotionality to all their music, an awareness that music is first and foremost about creating a feeling, that only deepened over the many years. Everything else about them changed, but they never lost sight that this is where everything begins.
HINOTAMA BOY (1976): Billed as "Keiichi Suzuki and the Moonriders"—shortened to Moonriders one album later—this debut album quickly establishes that this is a group that has no patience for sitting still, and no interest in staying straightforward. It leaps rapidly from lightly funky pop to piano ballads to country music with a bit of soulful organ thrown in for good measure. Perhaps the real indicator of the band to come, however, is a seven-and-a-half-minute suite whose name translates to Mediterranean Weather Forecast, and which shifts rapidly between a series of musical genres borrowed from altogether different cultures.
MOONRIDERS (1977): By their second self-titled album, the band's folk origins are all but done away with: their influences are farther-reaching than ever, and while there's a lot of playfulness to the way they dabble, Ketèlby-style, in different sounds—like with the devastatingly catchy earworm Muscat Coconut Banana Melon—the emotion behind their music is very real and sincere. Album closer Dunes incorporates a handful of sounds the group's never played with before, from the children's choir at the beginning to the violin-and-piano instrumental passages, but the heartache shines through clearer than ever.
ISTANBUL MAMBO (1977): There's something very funny to how Moonriders jump from an arrangement of a traditional folk song to a mambo arrangement of Nat Simon's classic "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" to "Visiting Khabarovsk," an original composition that you could easily confuse for a cover. At the same time, they start playing, not only with early synthesizers, but with obvious disco influences, even if they're dancing (heh) away from approaching any one kind of music too straightforwardly. Keep in mind that, at this point, Moonriders has been a band for all of one year. This is as close to ordinary as they will ever be again.
NOUVELLES VAGUES (1978): While a band on the cusp of the 80s calling an album "New Wave" might immediately make you think of the musical genre that's just getting started—especially with how Devo-esque the band looked in their music video for Jub Up Family—the French titling of their album points more towards the French New Wave era of cinema, particularly the stylistic and formal breakthroughs of Jean-Luc Godard. Which is fitting for how many startling choices this album makes: "Jub Up Family" is batshit in a way Devo never was, and the dramatic album opener, Swimmer, has an urgency to it that Moonriders never bothered with before. (Its phenomenal guitar solo, meanwhile, serves as a terrific introduction of Ryomei Shirai to the band—the final piece of the Moonriders composition snapping into place. Two tracks later, Animation Hero demonstrates just how quickly Shirai can completely transform a song, when it's what that song needs.) The album closer Travessia—a cover of a song by Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento—is like a last nod to this era of drawing from music around the world; Moonriders never got less omnivorous in their inspirations, but Nouvelles Vagues feels like a band looking to find a distinct style of their own.
And within a year, they began to find it.
HINOTAMA BOY (1976): Billed as "Keiichi Suzuki and the Moonriders"—shortened to Moonriders one album later—this debut album quickly establishes that this is a group that has no patience for sitting still, and no interest in staying straightforward. It leaps rapidly from lightly funky pop to piano ballads to country music with a bit of soulful organ thrown in for good measure. Perhaps the real indicator of the band to come, however, is a seven-and-a-half-minute suite whose name translates to Mediterranean Weather Forecast, and which shifts rapidly between a series of musical genres borrowed from altogether different cultures.
MOONRIDERS (1977): By their second self-titled album, the band's folk origins are all but done away with: their influences are farther-reaching than ever, and while there's a lot of playfulness to the way they dabble, Ketèlby-style, in different sounds—like with the devastatingly catchy earworm Muscat Coconut Banana Melon—the emotion behind their music is very real and sincere. Album closer Dunes incorporates a handful of sounds the group's never played with before, from the children's choir at the beginning to the violin-and-piano instrumental passages, but the heartache shines through clearer than ever.
ISTANBUL MAMBO (1977): There's something very funny to how Moonriders jump from an arrangement of a traditional folk song to a mambo arrangement of Nat Simon's classic "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" to "Visiting Khabarovsk," an original composition that you could easily confuse for a cover. At the same time, they start playing, not only with early synthesizers, but with obvious disco influences, even if they're dancing (heh) away from approaching any one kind of music too straightforwardly. Keep in mind that, at this point, Moonriders has been a band for all of one year. This is as close to ordinary as they will ever be again.
NOUVELLES VAGUES (1978): While a band on the cusp of the 80s calling an album "New Wave" might immediately make you think of the musical genre that's just getting started—especially with how Devo-esque the band looked in their music video for Jub Up Family—the French titling of their album points more towards the French New Wave era of cinema, particularly the stylistic and formal breakthroughs of Jean-Luc Godard. Which is fitting for how many startling choices this album makes: "Jub Up Family" is batshit in a way Devo never was, and the dramatic album opener, Swimmer, has an urgency to it that Moonriders never bothered with before. (Its phenomenal guitar solo, meanwhile, serves as a terrific introduction of Ryomei Shirai to the band—the final piece of the Moonriders composition snapping into place. Two tracks later, Animation Hero demonstrates just how quickly Shirai can completely transform a song, when it's what that song needs.) The album closer Travessia—a cover of a song by Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento—is like a last nod to this era of drawing from music around the world; Moonriders never got less omnivorous in their inspirations, but Nouvelles Vagues feels like a band looking to find a distinct style of their own.
And within a year, they began to find it.
The Breakthrough and the Breakup (1979-1986)
While the 1970s were marked by Moonriders' rapid forays into a world's worth of musical tradition, the 1980s are defined by a just-as-rapid evolution of a new songwriting method: one defined by interplay between musicians, and by the ways in which their individual contributions come together to form a unified whole.
This is the one era of the band's existence in which, by and large, each album consists of a somewhat cohesive sound: it's the era where the band sounds deceptively like a band, rather than a laboratory. But that belies how drastically the group's sound changes album-by-album, year-by-year. One year's smooth disco is the next year's frenzied punk; warm, clean, acoustic sound is replaced by cold, echoing synthesizer the next. Each release is a step forward, an evolution in a singular experiment—if you don't understand the logic between each initially-bewildering leap, it's because you're focusing too much on the individual sound, and too little on the band that's producing it.
This is the one era of the band's existence in which, by and large, each album consists of a somewhat cohesive sound: it's the era where the band sounds deceptively like a band, rather than a laboratory. But that belies how drastically the group's sound changes album-by-album, year-by-year. One year's smooth disco is the next year's frenzied punk; warm, clean, acoustic sound is replaced by cold, echoing synthesizer the next. Each release is a step forward, an evolution in a singular experiment—if you don't understand the logic between each initially-bewildering leap, it's because you're focusing too much on the individual sound, and too little on the band that's producing it.
MODERN MUSIC (1979): Coming from the chaos Nouvelles Vagues, it's a little surprising how sparse and restrained this follow-up is. But the album's title doesn't refer to the sudden emphasis on disco beats—Modern Music is a little too skeletal to be properly disco, anyway—so much as to how the band operates within its compositions. Take the way that Modern Lovers is almost perfectly staccato at first: there's near-total silence between beats, up until, all at once, everyone explodes into an extraordinary lushness. Or listen to how the band's members shift around each other in Disco Boy, each phrase of the song completely changing what every musician is up to all at once. In Burlesque, the subtlest changes in dynamics—little nudges here and there—bring everything to a whispered hush one second, and a loud exultation the next; each musician changes what they're doing very little, but the sum result is drastic. Listen closely, and you'll notice that every song is a different kind of game between its performers: they're inventing new ways to play games with one another, and disguising it as pop music. But they won't be sticking to their disguises for long.
CAMERA EGAL STYLO (1980): If Modern Music was a little too controlled, Camera Egal Stylo makes up for that by being aggressive, fast-paced, harsh, and fun as hell. The album name, "Camera as Pen," comes from film director Alexandre Astruc's theory that directors should wield their camera the way writers wield their pens; putting aside how many covers of classic movie themes are on this album, the implication seems to be that Moonriders are trying to wield themselves with just as fine a point. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her—which takes its name from a Godard film—certainly feels like a band coming together pointedly and sharply. Elsewhere, in 18 Years Old Under the Sun—an Ennio Morricone cover—they use frenetic brass and woodwinds to hit the same level of intensity; it works because their arrangement has the cleanliness and precision that they discovered with Modern Music. The Adult Does Not Understand is a more multilayered version of the Modern Music sound that occasionally erupts into something more driving; meanwhile, a song like Desire makes it clear that Moonriders has made as clear a break from their sound of just two years ago as their second album was a break from the folk origins of their first. (It's also probably the catchiest chorus to ever feature necrophilia or zoophilia, let alone both at once.)
AOZORA HYAKKEI (1982): The first of two albums to come out of the same songwriting session, Aozora Hyakkei and its immediate follow-up Mania Maniera establish what is probably Moonrider's most famous sound as a band: an escalation of their Modern Music style that incorporated loop machines and sampling to create a truly pulsating, intricate, almost clockwork sound. Of the two albums, Aozora Hyakkei is the slightly gentler and poppier of the two: Aozora no Marie ("Marie of the Blue Sky") is a gentle, sweetly melancholy pop song, while Kurenai Futou ("Kurenai Pier") became one of the band's all-time standards with its soulfulness and warmth. The arrangement is no less intricate, but its layers soften the overall sound, rather than make it overwhelming. Meanwhile, songs like Boku Wa Superfly ("I Am Superfly") both find ways to draw from the band's funk origins and to hint that Moonriders' sense of impishness is going nowhere any time soon.
MANIA MANIÈRA (1982): This is often considered the breakthrough moment for Moonriders, and it's not hard to see why. From K No Trunk (K's Trunk) onward, the band's new approach to developing its songs takes front-and-center: you can reductively call it new wave, but that doesn't do justice to how strange and how novel this sound is, marrying the aggression of punk instrumentation with the layered repetition of early electronica. There are no traces of where Moonriders originally came from, or direct references to the many regions of the world they drew their inspiration from; at the same time, their focus on simple, straightforwardly emotional melodies—which are comfortable, patient, and slow even as the music beneath them erupts into fire—is a direct throughline to their folk-rock origins, and runs somewhat counter to the rest of new wave at the time. Listen to Gentle Workers and Convenient Power Plants, which takes the same approach and produces something quieter, calmer, but no less busy for it; when it erupts from its quirky jitters and twitches into its lusty, bellowing chorus, it suddenly sounds far more organic and warm, but its method remains the same. And the tense anxiety of K's Trunk is counterpointed by the album's closing song, Scarlet Oath, in which those same intricate, looping, pulsing arrangements suddenly feel exhilarating, liberating, hopeful: an anthem for a changing world that offers hope for what's to come.
CAMERA EGAL STYLO (1980): If Modern Music was a little too controlled, Camera Egal Stylo makes up for that by being aggressive, fast-paced, harsh, and fun as hell. The album name, "Camera as Pen," comes from film director Alexandre Astruc's theory that directors should wield their camera the way writers wield their pens; putting aside how many covers of classic movie themes are on this album, the implication seems to be that Moonriders are trying to wield themselves with just as fine a point. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her—which takes its name from a Godard film—certainly feels like a band coming together pointedly and sharply. Elsewhere, in 18 Years Old Under the Sun—an Ennio Morricone cover—they use frenetic brass and woodwinds to hit the same level of intensity; it works because their arrangement has the cleanliness and precision that they discovered with Modern Music. The Adult Does Not Understand is a more multilayered version of the Modern Music sound that occasionally erupts into something more driving; meanwhile, a song like Desire makes it clear that Moonriders has made as clear a break from their sound of just two years ago as their second album was a break from the folk origins of their first. (It's also probably the catchiest chorus to ever feature necrophilia or zoophilia, let alone both at once.)
AOZORA HYAKKEI (1982): The first of two albums to come out of the same songwriting session, Aozora Hyakkei and its immediate follow-up Mania Maniera establish what is probably Moonrider's most famous sound as a band: an escalation of their Modern Music style that incorporated loop machines and sampling to create a truly pulsating, intricate, almost clockwork sound. Of the two albums, Aozora Hyakkei is the slightly gentler and poppier of the two: Aozora no Marie ("Marie of the Blue Sky") is a gentle, sweetly melancholy pop song, while Kurenai Futou ("Kurenai Pier") became one of the band's all-time standards with its soulfulness and warmth. The arrangement is no less intricate, but its layers soften the overall sound, rather than make it overwhelming. Meanwhile, songs like Boku Wa Superfly ("I Am Superfly") both find ways to draw from the band's funk origins and to hint that Moonriders' sense of impishness is going nowhere any time soon.
MANIA MANIÈRA (1982): This is often considered the breakthrough moment for Moonriders, and it's not hard to see why. From K No Trunk (K's Trunk) onward, the band's new approach to developing its songs takes front-and-center: you can reductively call it new wave, but that doesn't do justice to how strange and how novel this sound is, marrying the aggression of punk instrumentation with the layered repetition of early electronica. There are no traces of where Moonriders originally came from, or direct references to the many regions of the world they drew their inspiration from; at the same time, their focus on simple, straightforwardly emotional melodies—which are comfortable, patient, and slow even as the music beneath them erupts into fire—is a direct throughline to their folk-rock origins, and runs somewhat counter to the rest of new wave at the time. Listen to Gentle Workers and Convenient Power Plants, which takes the same approach and produces something quieter, calmer, but no less busy for it; when it erupts from its quirky jitters and twitches into its lusty, bellowing chorus, it suddenly sounds far more organic and warm, but its method remains the same. And the tense anxiety of K's Trunk is counterpointed by the album's closing song, Scarlet Oath, in which those same intricate, looping, pulsing arrangements suddenly feel exhilarating, liberating, hopeful: an anthem for a changing world that offers hope for what's to come.
AMATEUR ACADEMY (1984): As songs like 30 immediately show, this album is almost an unexpected return, of sorts, to the warm, Tin Pan Alley-meets-funk sound of their debut, Hinotama Boy. It's almost an inversion of the sound they've been developing up to this point: Moonriders taking the songwriting method they've been developing and using it to deconstruct, and reconstruct, the sound of another era. The result is an absolute pleasure: some of the most nakedly heartfelt music the band ever wrote. From the quiet sorrows and hopeful exuberance of BTDF to the exquisitely chill funk of MIJ, the utter giddiness of NO OH! to the tender eroticism of SEX, this is pure mood music; pay attention and you'll notice the intricate structures are still there, with a whiff of clockwork gears turning, but the goal here is to test how those techniques can be used to do what music does best, and holy shit did they succeed. (The transition from BBLB's first phase to its second is one of the most purely joyful moments music has to offer, in my humble and correct opinion.)
ANIMAL INDEX (1985): Structurally, one of the band's most formally strict offerings: each of its first six songs is written by a different Moonrider, as is each of each of its last six. Sonically, one of the strangest and hardest-to-pin-down albums the band ever made: it's the group's most synth-heavy album to date, but the synth tones it works with are unusual, as are the instrumentations that each song works around them. But it's incredibly accessible and gorgeous, and a phenomenal demonstration of what each band member is capable of. Tetsuro Kashibuchi turns in songs that are sensuous and full of heartache, but absolute bops just the same. Masahiro Takekawa turns in a simple piano-and-violin waltz one moment, and a wall of brass the next. Hirobumi Suzuki delivers straight-up soul food while his brother Keiichi offers a sound that's somehow icy, melancholy, and funky all at once. Each song was allegedly inspired by a different animal—hence the album name—and it's never clearer than when Ryomei Shirai writes a song that sounds like the inside of every dog's head. And Tohru Okada delivers the album's chillest moment in one place and its most whimsical moment in another.
DON'T TRUST OVER 30 (1986): And here was what the band, at the time, thought would be its grand farewell: an album demonstrating that they'd taken their approach to music as far as it could go, perfected their craft, and were ready to end on a high note. It was released alongside a non-album single that sounds like the band's attempt to cram everything they were into a single song, and Worst of Moonriders, the two-hour live recording that, among other things, turns that single into a 17-minute-long medley of Moonriders' catchiest riffs and hooks. The band was determined to go out on a high note—and they couldn't have gone out on a higher note than this album. Every song feels like an amalgam of everything Moonriders had to do in order to get to this point: 9gatsu no umi wa kurage no umi ("The sea in September is a sea of jellyfish") and Bokuhanaku ("I Cry") are devastatingly moving pop songs, Darui Hito ("Stupid People") is as driving of a bop as A Frozen Girl, A Boy in Love is a driving and ardent declaration of love, and Don't Trust Anyone Over 30, the titular track, is a seven-minute funk jam that takes Modern Music's approach to musical interplay to its logical conclusion. There's a methodical, almost mathematical logic to how its arrangement's elements shift about, building and releasing, but it's a song to move to, not a song to think about. And if the band's journey started with the nostalgic, bittersweet yearning of "On the Fence" thirteen years earlier, it's fitting that they intended to go out with a song just as unabashedly emotional, but with the feeling changed to celebration and glee.
And that could have been it! Almost was it. End of the road. Nowhere else to go from there: Moonriders had devised an altogether new way to write music as an ensemble; they had worked out how to incorporate the things they cared about from folk music and dance music, rock and punk and disco and electronica and funk, to create a single cohesive whole; they had written music that somehow reflected all of them at once, music that was almost unassailably good no matter how you looked at it. They started as friends and left as friends, and congratulated one another, and went their separate ways. And they didn't know it, but they still had 25 years to go.
ANIMAL INDEX (1985): Structurally, one of the band's most formally strict offerings: each of its first six songs is written by a different Moonrider, as is each of each of its last six. Sonically, one of the strangest and hardest-to-pin-down albums the band ever made: it's the group's most synth-heavy album to date, but the synth tones it works with are unusual, as are the instrumentations that each song works around them. But it's incredibly accessible and gorgeous, and a phenomenal demonstration of what each band member is capable of. Tetsuro Kashibuchi turns in songs that are sensuous and full of heartache, but absolute bops just the same. Masahiro Takekawa turns in a simple piano-and-violin waltz one moment, and a wall of brass the next. Hirobumi Suzuki delivers straight-up soul food while his brother Keiichi offers a sound that's somehow icy, melancholy, and funky all at once. Each song was allegedly inspired by a different animal—hence the album name—and it's never clearer than when Ryomei Shirai writes a song that sounds like the inside of every dog's head. And Tohru Okada delivers the album's chillest moment in one place and its most whimsical moment in another.
DON'T TRUST OVER 30 (1986): And here was what the band, at the time, thought would be its grand farewell: an album demonstrating that they'd taken their approach to music as far as it could go, perfected their craft, and were ready to end on a high note. It was released alongside a non-album single that sounds like the band's attempt to cram everything they were into a single song, and Worst of Moonriders, the two-hour live recording that, among other things, turns that single into a 17-minute-long medley of Moonriders' catchiest riffs and hooks. The band was determined to go out on a high note—and they couldn't have gone out on a higher note than this album. Every song feels like an amalgam of everything Moonriders had to do in order to get to this point: 9gatsu no umi wa kurage no umi ("The sea in September is a sea of jellyfish") and Bokuhanaku ("I Cry") are devastatingly moving pop songs, Darui Hito ("Stupid People") is as driving of a bop as A Frozen Girl, A Boy in Love is a driving and ardent declaration of love, and Don't Trust Anyone Over 30, the titular track, is a seven-minute funk jam that takes Modern Music's approach to musical interplay to its logical conclusion. There's a methodical, almost mathematical logic to how its arrangement's elements shift about, building and releasing, but it's a song to move to, not a song to think about. And if the band's journey started with the nostalgic, bittersweet yearning of "On the Fence" thirteen years earlier, it's fitting that they intended to go out with a song just as unabashedly emotional, but with the feeling changed to celebration and glee.
And that could have been it! Almost was it. End of the road. Nowhere else to go from there: Moonriders had devised an altogether new way to write music as an ensemble; they had worked out how to incorporate the things they cared about from folk music and dance music, rock and punk and disco and electronica and funk, to create a single cohesive whole; they had written music that somehow reflected all of them at once, music that was almost unassailably good no matter how you looked at it. They started as friends and left as friends, and congratulated one another, and went their separate ways. And they didn't know it, but they still had 25 years to go.
Kaleidoscope (1991-1998)
Past this point—with exactly two notable exceptions—it gets very hard to describe Moonriders in terms of their sound. While they were never exactly a band that was known for repeating themselves, their reunion as a group saw them taking the sheer breadth of their style to new extremes. You can't anticipate the sound of any one song on their album from the sound of any other song: they will swerve from chamber sextet to power metal to Celtic folk group to proto-vaporwave to surf rock, and if those examples are oddly specific, that's because I'm describing a single actual album (and leaving out the weirdest moments, too).
If their 80s era is the story of Moonriders learning how to develop a single, singular, all-inclusive sound as a band, their 90s era is the story of Moonriders exploring how to function as a cohesive band once they abandon any notion of a "singular" sound at all. Between the six of them, they had an extraordinary depth of knowledge about a dizzying variety of musical styles; they also had such a versatile ensemble—with every member of the band, including the drummer, able and willing to switch to a handful of different instruments apiece—that the configuration of the group could shift drastically between each and every song.
What's more, when it came to sheer songwriting fundamentals, Moonriders could call themselves genuine pros at this point. Their melodies were heartfelt and stirring. Their choruses were catchy as hell. They could turn any kind of beat into a bop; they could turn any kind of arrangement unusual and compelling. They didn't just know how to write a song: they knew how to arrange and produce it too. So why not take that as far as it could possibly go? And what on earth would they find on the other side, if they tried again to push themselves to their limit—a limit that few, if any, other groups could even begin to conceive of?
LAST SUPPER (1991): It would be harder for Moonriders to declare their change of style more clearly than the one-two punch of Who's Gonna Cry? and Who's Gonna Die First? Jumping straight from over-the-top, syrupy strings into crunchy guitar feedback—the most guitar-driven music the band had ever written—certainly sets an impression. But even that can't possibly prepare you to hear something like the Beatles-meets-Sousa march of Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!—it's hard to imagine what would prepare you for that—or the bizarre arrangement of Shiawase Na Yajuu ("Happy Beast," fittingly). Inu No Kitaku ("Dog's Home") sees the band shift into a more dramatic, almost cinematic mode: not only is this not rock, it feels like the group transforming, without warning, into something more akin to an instrumental ensemble. And when they want to completely elide genre definition altogether, it's easy for them: 10Jikan ("10 Hours") throws so many unusual elements and transitions into its blend that it feels like it should be a shock just how catchy and accessible it is. Only it's not a shock, because Moonriders have proven a dozen times over that they can make the strangest choices palatable, if it happens to suit their whims.
AOR (1992): Perhaps the strangest outlier in Moonriders' discography, AOR feels like a single album-long attempt to write music of a very specific variety. AOR ("album-oriented rock," though Moonriders cheekily suggests it stands for "adults only rock") is a much-maligned genre of "soft" rock; this album seems like the band's attempt to play by AOR's rules while still imbuing it with their own voice. Sometimes, they succeed too well: Shiawase no Kouzui no Mae de (roughly, "In front of the flood of happiness") is so smooth that it almost disappears. Others, like Dynamite to Cool Guy, find more personality without breaking the feel of the genre. Woo Baby might be my favorite of the "playing it straight" songs; it's over-the-top and more than a little schmaltzy, but hey, who doesn't like a bit of schmaltz? Which may be the point Moonriders makes with this album: that nothing, not even the corny cheeseball uncool "cringe" stuff is off-limits, and that if they want to cover this ground, nothing's going to stop them. But then again, if they want to deviate from their own plan, they can do that too: Renga no Otoko ("Brick Man") doesn't fit any definition of AOR I've ever heard, but why on earth would that stop them either?
LE CAFÉ DE LA PLAGE (1995): One of three(!) albums Moonriders released this year, this one feels enough of a piece with AOR that it's worth including directly after. Café, like AOR, is an exercise in a specific style—this one a reggae-adjacent "beach vibe" sound—but unlike AOR, it consists solely of Moonriders covers, which simultaneously underemphasizes it as A Major Moonriders Release and gives Moonriders more room to explicitly play with their own songwriting techniques, revising and reevaluating their own work to meet a specific new goal. What's amazing is how well it all works: Bokuhanaku, from Don't Trust Over 30, makes just as good a sunny bop as it made for a passionate expression of heartache. Ditto 9gatsu off the same album, which was already an expression of joy and now gets even joy-ier. But maybe the best thing here is the incredible album cover, which looks exactly like the kind of junky throwaway CD you'd find lying around in someone's garage sale. Just exquisite.
MOONRIDERS NO YORU (1995): With the curious excursions of AOR behind them, Moonriders returned to the kaleidoscopic style they'd begun with Last Supper, intensifying the extent to which they were willing to drastically shift up their own sound on a song-by-song basis. The album opens with a chamber-music instrumental that transitions into a chamber-music ballad; immediately after that, it transitions into sunny power pop, and from there it leaps to increasingly unexpected places. It's hard to describe exactly what Phantom Street Corner sounds like, though it's incredibly groovy; it's hard to explain how it transitions from that to something this gentle and watery, or how exactly it leaps from there to something this... un-gentle and un-watery. Even for a band known for its extraordinary range of sound, Moonriders no Yoru's leaps start to feel genuinely impossible: it's hard to grasp a group jumping straight from the folk sound of The Last Fruit to the surf rock of There's No Cold Beer. And it's not just about the genre leaps: it's about the band shifting so much about its approach between songs, down to the nuances of each individual performer, that the leaps start to feel flat-out unreal.
BIZARRE MUSIC FOR YOU (1996): The crystallization of everything Moonriders worked on through the 90s, down to the title itself, Bizarre Music opens with the Celtic-flavored Beatitude, then transitions immediately into the synth pop of Ai Ha Tada Rancyou Ni Aru. Knitcapman's jangly banjo and overprocessed vocal harmonies feels like what you'd get if Katamari Damacy had written songs about cowboys, while Girl Hunt is a return to the tropical exotica that early Moonriders loved to play with, but with a much richer sound and more sophisticated arrangement. On and on it goes, for just over an hour. And as if to prove that they really can do anything, Moonriders cheekily ends their album with a country song, a Christmas song, and a march with Beach Boys harmonies, in precisely that order.
And now comes a strange and tricky moment.
If their 80s era is the story of Moonriders learning how to develop a single, singular, all-inclusive sound as a band, their 90s era is the story of Moonriders exploring how to function as a cohesive band once they abandon any notion of a "singular" sound at all. Between the six of them, they had an extraordinary depth of knowledge about a dizzying variety of musical styles; they also had such a versatile ensemble—with every member of the band, including the drummer, able and willing to switch to a handful of different instruments apiece—that the configuration of the group could shift drastically between each and every song.
What's more, when it came to sheer songwriting fundamentals, Moonriders could call themselves genuine pros at this point. Their melodies were heartfelt and stirring. Their choruses were catchy as hell. They could turn any kind of beat into a bop; they could turn any kind of arrangement unusual and compelling. They didn't just know how to write a song: they knew how to arrange and produce it too. So why not take that as far as it could possibly go? And what on earth would they find on the other side, if they tried again to push themselves to their limit—a limit that few, if any, other groups could even begin to conceive of?
LAST SUPPER (1991): It would be harder for Moonriders to declare their change of style more clearly than the one-two punch of Who's Gonna Cry? and Who's Gonna Die First? Jumping straight from over-the-top, syrupy strings into crunchy guitar feedback—the most guitar-driven music the band had ever written—certainly sets an impression. But even that can't possibly prepare you to hear something like the Beatles-meets-Sousa march of Hai! Hai! Hai! Hai!—it's hard to imagine what would prepare you for that—or the bizarre arrangement of Shiawase Na Yajuu ("Happy Beast," fittingly). Inu No Kitaku ("Dog's Home") sees the band shift into a more dramatic, almost cinematic mode: not only is this not rock, it feels like the group transforming, without warning, into something more akin to an instrumental ensemble. And when they want to completely elide genre definition altogether, it's easy for them: 10Jikan ("10 Hours") throws so many unusual elements and transitions into its blend that it feels like it should be a shock just how catchy and accessible it is. Only it's not a shock, because Moonriders have proven a dozen times over that they can make the strangest choices palatable, if it happens to suit their whims.
AOR (1992): Perhaps the strangest outlier in Moonriders' discography, AOR feels like a single album-long attempt to write music of a very specific variety. AOR ("album-oriented rock," though Moonriders cheekily suggests it stands for "adults only rock") is a much-maligned genre of "soft" rock; this album seems like the band's attempt to play by AOR's rules while still imbuing it with their own voice. Sometimes, they succeed too well: Shiawase no Kouzui no Mae de (roughly, "In front of the flood of happiness") is so smooth that it almost disappears. Others, like Dynamite to Cool Guy, find more personality without breaking the feel of the genre. Woo Baby might be my favorite of the "playing it straight" songs; it's over-the-top and more than a little schmaltzy, but hey, who doesn't like a bit of schmaltz? Which may be the point Moonriders makes with this album: that nothing, not even the corny cheeseball uncool "cringe" stuff is off-limits, and that if they want to cover this ground, nothing's going to stop them. But then again, if they want to deviate from their own plan, they can do that too: Renga no Otoko ("Brick Man") doesn't fit any definition of AOR I've ever heard, but why on earth would that stop them either?
LE CAFÉ DE LA PLAGE (1995): One of three(!) albums Moonriders released this year, this one feels enough of a piece with AOR that it's worth including directly after. Café, like AOR, is an exercise in a specific style—this one a reggae-adjacent "beach vibe" sound—but unlike AOR, it consists solely of Moonriders covers, which simultaneously underemphasizes it as A Major Moonriders Release and gives Moonriders more room to explicitly play with their own songwriting techniques, revising and reevaluating their own work to meet a specific new goal. What's amazing is how well it all works: Bokuhanaku, from Don't Trust Over 30, makes just as good a sunny bop as it made for a passionate expression of heartache. Ditto 9gatsu off the same album, which was already an expression of joy and now gets even joy-ier. But maybe the best thing here is the incredible album cover, which looks exactly like the kind of junky throwaway CD you'd find lying around in someone's garage sale. Just exquisite.
MOONRIDERS NO YORU (1995): With the curious excursions of AOR behind them, Moonriders returned to the kaleidoscopic style they'd begun with Last Supper, intensifying the extent to which they were willing to drastically shift up their own sound on a song-by-song basis. The album opens with a chamber-music instrumental that transitions into a chamber-music ballad; immediately after that, it transitions into sunny power pop, and from there it leaps to increasingly unexpected places. It's hard to describe exactly what Phantom Street Corner sounds like, though it's incredibly groovy; it's hard to explain how it transitions from that to something this gentle and watery, or how exactly it leaps from there to something this... un-gentle and un-watery. Even for a band known for its extraordinary range of sound, Moonriders no Yoru's leaps start to feel genuinely impossible: it's hard to grasp a group jumping straight from the folk sound of The Last Fruit to the surf rock of There's No Cold Beer. And it's not just about the genre leaps: it's about the band shifting so much about its approach between songs, down to the nuances of each individual performer, that the leaps start to feel flat-out unreal.
BIZARRE MUSIC FOR YOU (1996): The crystallization of everything Moonriders worked on through the 90s, down to the title itself, Bizarre Music opens with the Celtic-flavored Beatitude, then transitions immediately into the synth pop of Ai Ha Tada Rancyou Ni Aru. Knitcapman's jangly banjo and overprocessed vocal harmonies feels like what you'd get if Katamari Damacy had written songs about cowboys, while Girl Hunt is a return to the tropical exotica that early Moonriders loved to play with, but with a much richer sound and more sophisticated arrangement. On and on it goes, for just over an hour. And as if to prove that they really can do anything, Moonriders cheekily ends their album with a country song, a Christmas song, and a march with Beach Boys harmonies, in precisely that order.
And now comes a strange and tricky moment.
Kaleidoscope II (1998-1999)
Here, to start, is Sweet Bitter Candy, the biggest hit that Moonriders ever wrote. It's off their 1998 album GETSUMEN SANKA ("Moon Hymn"), which in many ways functioned as a continuation of the trend that Moonriders had already been on. Here, they took their attempts at stylistic diversity to new extremes: every song on the album was handed to a different producer, who could make of it whatever they wanted. Did every song off their last few albums sound like it came from a completely different band? Good! Now every song was being handled by a completely different production team. Truly an exercise in just how far a single band could take their sound.
Now here is Sweet Bitter Candy again, this time off Moonriders' 1999 album DIS-COVERED. Suffice it to say, the song is completely different—in some ways aggressively so. (Most dramatically, Ryomei Shirai's guitar solo, which the hit version of the song completely revolves around, is reduced to a thin buzz.) Dis-Covered is a song-for-song recreation of Getsumen Sanka—not a single track was reordered from the original. The melodies and song structures are identical; the albums themselves could not be more different.
Immediately after Dis-Covered, Moonriders' approach to writing songs will undergo one final, drastic transformation—and there's no obvious reason why. The only hints we have, if we're to go by music alone, lies in the deeply unusual nature of Dis-Covered itself—and in the existence of Getsumen Sanka before it.
Because for all that it was an interesting experiment, there's no denying that Getsumen Sanka is just a little less... bizarre. The songs on it aren't bad, but they sound like... well... decent and quirky rock songs written by a quarter-century-old rock band. Rather than diversifying the sound of the band, each producer seems to go for somewhat straightforward choices: they accentuate the melody and the lead instruments, they make sure the rest of the arrangement supports that, and the result is an album of songs that mostly sound like other music. It's good, but it's not exactly surprising. And thanks to Moonriders' choice to completely redo the album a year later, it's possible to point to exactly what I mean by that.
Here's the Getsumen Sanka version of "Happy Place," the albums' second track. It's a laid-back, breezy, beachy song. A lead guitar plays out a calm melody; rhythm guitar strums behind that. The chorus introduces some gentle banjo plucking, counterpointing a new piano melody. The second verse introduces a bit of xylophone. So it goes.
And here's the Dis-Covered version of "Happy Place." The entire song is underscored with a steady rhythmic bongo beat, which, though soft, is still the loudest instrument in the mix—louder, even, than the lead vocals. The guitar line is sparser, focused more on counterpoint than on establishing a melodic line of its own. A recurring birdcall plays on a loop, with clockwork precision. And while the chorus introduces new instrumentation, there's virtually no interruption to the existing arrangement: the new guitar part is considerably more complex, melodically, than the Getsumen Sanka banjo plucking, but it's still subsumed within the central percussive rhythm, and the quiet counterpoint that already existed. Even the song's bridge, which is a drastic change in the original production of the song, stays pinned beneath the bongo rhythm.
These aren't loud or drastic choices—as with "Sweet Bitter Candy," they lead to something quieter than the original did—but they're strange choices, less predictable than the Getsumen Sanka choices were. And, as if in reaction to the way that Getsumen Sanka's picked nothing but obvious structural choices—add an instrumental riff here, add driving percussion there—the choices Moonriders make with Dis-Covered almost all have an element of: de-emphasize the most obvious parts of the song, let the subtler elements of the song take over, and find a way to balance as many different parts of the arrangement as possible. Wherever Getsumen Sanka reduces a single musician's job to reinforcing some existing melodic line, Dis-Covered has them introduce some new unusual complexity—but never so loudly that it drowns any of the other unusualnesses out.
To manage that requires a profound level of interlock. This isn't the overlapping layers of Mania Manièra, with elements rising and receding from one another. This is a manner of arrangement in which each performer is completely distinct from all the others, doing something unique and standalone, yet doing something complex enough that they warrant their listener's full attention. To balance against one another, each one has to perfectly fill the gaps left by all the others, and to offer gaps for the others to fill. Any shift in one necessitates shifts in all the others. And each one has to be playing something compelling in its own right. It's like a four-dimensional puzzle, where each piece has to be pleasingly and intriguingly shaped while coexisting seamlessly with all the others.
This might sound like too much of a leap to make, in the same way that my description of Modern Music might have sounded overblown at first... but I'm writing this with the advantage of hindsight, knowing full well what Moonriders became after this. And what Dis-Covered and Modern Music have in common is that each pointed to an entirely new approach: a new way to conceive of how a band works, and a new way to envision writing music for a band. And with Dis-Covered, more than ever before, Moonriders were setting themselves a challenge that only they, with their unique configuration of songwriters and composers and producers, were equipped to tackle.
Now here is Sweet Bitter Candy again, this time off Moonriders' 1999 album DIS-COVERED. Suffice it to say, the song is completely different—in some ways aggressively so. (Most dramatically, Ryomei Shirai's guitar solo, which the hit version of the song completely revolves around, is reduced to a thin buzz.) Dis-Covered is a song-for-song recreation of Getsumen Sanka—not a single track was reordered from the original. The melodies and song structures are identical; the albums themselves could not be more different.
Immediately after Dis-Covered, Moonriders' approach to writing songs will undergo one final, drastic transformation—and there's no obvious reason why. The only hints we have, if we're to go by music alone, lies in the deeply unusual nature of Dis-Covered itself—and in the existence of Getsumen Sanka before it.
Because for all that it was an interesting experiment, there's no denying that Getsumen Sanka is just a little less... bizarre. The songs on it aren't bad, but they sound like... well... decent and quirky rock songs written by a quarter-century-old rock band. Rather than diversifying the sound of the band, each producer seems to go for somewhat straightforward choices: they accentuate the melody and the lead instruments, they make sure the rest of the arrangement supports that, and the result is an album of songs that mostly sound like other music. It's good, but it's not exactly surprising. And thanks to Moonriders' choice to completely redo the album a year later, it's possible to point to exactly what I mean by that.
Here's the Getsumen Sanka version of "Happy Place," the albums' second track. It's a laid-back, breezy, beachy song. A lead guitar plays out a calm melody; rhythm guitar strums behind that. The chorus introduces some gentle banjo plucking, counterpointing a new piano melody. The second verse introduces a bit of xylophone. So it goes.
And here's the Dis-Covered version of "Happy Place." The entire song is underscored with a steady rhythmic bongo beat, which, though soft, is still the loudest instrument in the mix—louder, even, than the lead vocals. The guitar line is sparser, focused more on counterpoint than on establishing a melodic line of its own. A recurring birdcall plays on a loop, with clockwork precision. And while the chorus introduces new instrumentation, there's virtually no interruption to the existing arrangement: the new guitar part is considerably more complex, melodically, than the Getsumen Sanka banjo plucking, but it's still subsumed within the central percussive rhythm, and the quiet counterpoint that already existed. Even the song's bridge, which is a drastic change in the original production of the song, stays pinned beneath the bongo rhythm.
These aren't loud or drastic choices—as with "Sweet Bitter Candy," they lead to something quieter than the original did—but they're strange choices, less predictable than the Getsumen Sanka choices were. And, as if in reaction to the way that Getsumen Sanka's picked nothing but obvious structural choices—add an instrumental riff here, add driving percussion there—the choices Moonriders make with Dis-Covered almost all have an element of: de-emphasize the most obvious parts of the song, let the subtler elements of the song take over, and find a way to balance as many different parts of the arrangement as possible. Wherever Getsumen Sanka reduces a single musician's job to reinforcing some existing melodic line, Dis-Covered has them introduce some new unusual complexity—but never so loudly that it drowns any of the other unusualnesses out.
To manage that requires a profound level of interlock. This isn't the overlapping layers of Mania Manièra, with elements rising and receding from one another. This is a manner of arrangement in which each performer is completely distinct from all the others, doing something unique and standalone, yet doing something complex enough that they warrant their listener's full attention. To balance against one another, each one has to perfectly fill the gaps left by all the others, and to offer gaps for the others to fill. Any shift in one necessitates shifts in all the others. And each one has to be playing something compelling in its own right. It's like a four-dimensional puzzle, where each piece has to be pleasingly and intriguingly shaped while coexisting seamlessly with all the others.
This might sound like too much of a leap to make, in the same way that my description of Modern Music might have sounded overblown at first... but I'm writing this with the advantage of hindsight, knowing full well what Moonriders became after this. And what Dis-Covered and Modern Music have in common is that each pointed to an entirely new approach: a new way to conceive of how a band works, and a new way to envision writing music for a band. And with Dis-Covered, more than ever before, Moonriders were setting themselves a challenge that only they, with their unique configuration of songwriters and composers and producers, were equipped to tackle.
The Last Fanfare (2003-2011)
It seems strange to suggest that a rock band's real creative renaissance came thirty years after they first came together to make music. (Though not unheard of: see Sparks.) Rock, and more broadly pop, are thought of as a youthful art. Moonriders themselves released an album and a song titled "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" for a reason. (In 2015, guitarist Ryomei Shirai would put out a song charmingly titled "Please Trust Over 60." You've gotta love a good callback.)
But Moonriders were, from the start, an excessively ambitious band that wanted to involve itself with every aspect of music creation and production. They grew, not only as songwriters and performers, but as producers; their vision of what they could create expanded, unchecked, decade after decade. And their vision included that dimension of deep collaboration, too—which, by the 90s, had led to such strange territory that the band itself seemed to transform into something new between every song. Now, with three decades of fruitful partnership behind them, the band found new frontiers that they had yet to explore: frontier that, more than ever, put the focus on the nature of their collaboration rather than on the specific sound and feel of any particular song.
One immediate, obvious result was that it freed them to write looser and more strangely-shaped music than they'd ever written before. Moonriders' music, more than ever, begins to defy genre; their approach to instrumentation gets so idiosyncratic that it's hard to point to obvious reference points. Where they once explicitly wrote music inspired by the styles and approaches of different cultures around the world, here they incorporate and interweave influences so densely that the individual strands become impossible to separate. That doesn't make their music any less accessible, enjoyable, or heartfelt—but it makes their music harder to describe than ever before.
Even when they write more conventional-sounding songs, though, something deeply strange is afoot. In part, this is because they place such emphasis on the fact that there are six of them, and find ways to incorporate all six into their compositions simultaneously. A blues-rock song might be accompanied by a subtle, strangely-effective synthesizer, a muted trumpet, and one more guitar than you'd expect to hear. A straightforward pop song might introduce an unexpected counterpoint, running throughout the piece in a different time signature than everything else that's going on. And if I start referring to "compositions" and "pieces" as I describe this era of their music, it's because it's increasingly difficult not to think of Moonriders' work in the same way that you'd think about more traditional classical composition. It's not just that several Moonriders were actively writing scores for film and orchestra at this point, although they were. It's that their songwriting starts operating at a level of sophistication that goes beyond what pop music typically aims for.
(That's not to throw shade at pop songwriting: great pop music is great pop music. It's just a neutral statement that Moonriders were composing music with more intricacy, nuance, and subtlety than even the best rock or pop typically aim for. They were simply doing something new—and possibly unprecedented.)
They put out five albums in their last decade together as a band, each one an outright masterpiece. Then they said their farewells, with the exception of a brief reunion in 2022; in the following decade, they released a mind-boggling slew of solo releases. It's almost like, without their creative crucible, the six of them exploded riotously in every direction at once. But we won't be getting into their solo work here—at the moment of writing this, I have 196 albums attributed to them in my collective library, and neither of us has time for me to subject you to that treasure trove, wondrous as it may be.
DIRE MORONS TRIBUNE (2003): Nothing could better have announced the introduction of Moonriders' new era than the one-two punch of the manic, deranged "We Are Funkees" (sadly not available online, as of this writing) into Moron's Land, whose grandiosity alone suggests a band that's reaching further than they've ever cared to reach before. There's nothing pompous or self-serious about what they're doing here, though: Curve is a marvelous example of just how playful and colorful Moonriders insist on being, in ways that don't undermine their depth or substance. Elsewhere, Shizuoka demonstrates how the band can simultaneously write a killer pop song and imbue it with layer after layer of unusual, unexpected sound—deviations and interruptions that enrich, rather than undercut, the feeling at the heart of their music.
P.W. BABIES PAPERBACK (2004): A lightness of sound underpins most of this album, interlaced with an unmistakable sense of sorrow. Wet Dreamland, which namechecks the Beatles in both Japanese and English, sets the tone, which is both wondrous and anxious in ways that evoke childhood and youthful fears. Space Age Ballad extends that further, with a swirling arrangement of horns and synthesizers that feels, fittingly, like an anthem of hope for a new era, counterpointed by the song's words: "We are the Space Age; we know loneliness. The universe is vast, and this world is small." The album's climax, People Talk About People, takes a darker turn into moody, almost apocalyptic funk, evoking the hellfire of war and the love and grief of soldiers' families—the "post-war babies" that give the album its name, and the women who were left to raise them alone.
MOONOVER THE ROSEBUD (2006): This might be Moonriders' magnum opus: a tour-de-force of sophisticated rock and cool funk, folk songs and sarabandes, moments both grandiose and energetic. It includes what might be their single most poignant piece of music, Vintage Wine Spirits, and Roses, whose calmness belies an urgency that swells and recedes, leaving behind something richer and fuller in its wake. That's immediately followed by the astonishing When This Grateful War is Ended, which starts as a trio for violin, piano, and cello, evolves into something far more involved and no less sorrowful, then ends on a third movement that's both nothing like the other two and weirdly, strangely, perfectly appropriate. And in the middle of all this, you have WEATHERMAN, which almost feels like a Rosetta Stone for the band as a whole: different, disparate lines of music shift across one another, the song's sound and style continuously changing, yet feeling all the more coherent for it. (An earlier draft of this post opened with, no exaggeration, a seven-paragraph breakdown of all the shifts in WEATHERMAN; you have been spared.)
TOKYO7 (2009): Accompanied by the EP Tokyo Round and Round, which I mention only because its single Tokyo Navi implausibly incorporates square dancing into Moonriders' repertoire—Tokyo7 feels like an intentional shift away from songs that feel like "compositions" back towards songs that feel like "songs." Which is not to say that it's any less extraordinary. I Hate You and I Love You is a folksy power-pop song whose intricate arrangement gets more astonishing the more closely you pay attention to it, incorporating all six performers playing loud and fast and all at once—and shifting, perfectly, into a different interlocking arrangement as the song hits its chorus and bridge, every person suddenly playing something completely different without the music's flow so much as stuttering. Centaurus No Umi is a series of gorgeous and unusual musical choices, and then, very abruptly, something much different than what you've been led to expect; transitioning from something delicate and acoustic to borderline thrash metal is already a choice, but transitioning from thrash metal to, of all things, a french horn solo is the kind of swerve that nobody else could have devised. My favorite song off it might be Hontō Ni Oshimai No Hanashi ("The Absolute End of the Story"), though I couldn't tell you why. And the album closer, whose name roughly translates to "Six Paths of Past and Future," consists of six verses sung by each of the six Moonriders in turn, as the arrangement transforms to meet them.
CIAO! (2011): As meticulous and dramatic a farewell as their 1986 triple release was, but this time for real, Ciao! plays the same game as Animal Index before it: each member writes one of its first six songs and one of its last six. (Opening the album with a song cheekily called Who's Gonna Be Reborn First?—a callback to the opening of the album that resurrected the band in 1991—is a terrific joke and a fantastic flex.) Here, it feels like each of the member's two contributions feels like an intentional statement: a marker of who they were and why they mattered. Masahiro Takekawa contributes a flabbergastingly gorgeous string-and-woodwinds composition; Hirubumi offers two soulful numbers, one somewhat conventional and the other very much not. Keiichi Suzuki declines to have the first or the last word in the band that he had the biggest hand in creating, and makes his final contribution to the group an expression of simple joy. It's drummer Tetsuro Kashibuchi who makes the album's grand closing statement, The Last Fanfare; I am unsure whether it was Kashibuchi's declining health that led the band to declare themselves finished, but he passed away just two years later, in 2013. But Moonriders' final moments are anything but grandiose. Instead, founding member Tohru Okada closes the band's extraordinary 38-year run with The Vapor Theatre Playground, perhaps the most straightforward pop song the band had written in over a decade: "This stage, today's stage, was fun, but this stage is over."
But Moonriders were, from the start, an excessively ambitious band that wanted to involve itself with every aspect of music creation and production. They grew, not only as songwriters and performers, but as producers; their vision of what they could create expanded, unchecked, decade after decade. And their vision included that dimension of deep collaboration, too—which, by the 90s, had led to such strange territory that the band itself seemed to transform into something new between every song. Now, with three decades of fruitful partnership behind them, the band found new frontiers that they had yet to explore: frontier that, more than ever, put the focus on the nature of their collaboration rather than on the specific sound and feel of any particular song.
One immediate, obvious result was that it freed them to write looser and more strangely-shaped music than they'd ever written before. Moonriders' music, more than ever, begins to defy genre; their approach to instrumentation gets so idiosyncratic that it's hard to point to obvious reference points. Where they once explicitly wrote music inspired by the styles and approaches of different cultures around the world, here they incorporate and interweave influences so densely that the individual strands become impossible to separate. That doesn't make their music any less accessible, enjoyable, or heartfelt—but it makes their music harder to describe than ever before.
Even when they write more conventional-sounding songs, though, something deeply strange is afoot. In part, this is because they place such emphasis on the fact that there are six of them, and find ways to incorporate all six into their compositions simultaneously. A blues-rock song might be accompanied by a subtle, strangely-effective synthesizer, a muted trumpet, and one more guitar than you'd expect to hear. A straightforward pop song might introduce an unexpected counterpoint, running throughout the piece in a different time signature than everything else that's going on. And if I start referring to "compositions" and "pieces" as I describe this era of their music, it's because it's increasingly difficult not to think of Moonriders' work in the same way that you'd think about more traditional classical composition. It's not just that several Moonriders were actively writing scores for film and orchestra at this point, although they were. It's that their songwriting starts operating at a level of sophistication that goes beyond what pop music typically aims for.
(That's not to throw shade at pop songwriting: great pop music is great pop music. It's just a neutral statement that Moonriders were composing music with more intricacy, nuance, and subtlety than even the best rock or pop typically aim for. They were simply doing something new—and possibly unprecedented.)
They put out five albums in their last decade together as a band, each one an outright masterpiece. Then they said their farewells, with the exception of a brief reunion in 2022; in the following decade, they released a mind-boggling slew of solo releases. It's almost like, without their creative crucible, the six of them exploded riotously in every direction at once. But we won't be getting into their solo work here—at the moment of writing this, I have 196 albums attributed to them in my collective library, and neither of us has time for me to subject you to that treasure trove, wondrous as it may be.
DIRE MORONS TRIBUNE (2003): Nothing could better have announced the introduction of Moonriders' new era than the one-two punch of the manic, deranged "We Are Funkees" (sadly not available online, as of this writing) into Moron's Land, whose grandiosity alone suggests a band that's reaching further than they've ever cared to reach before. There's nothing pompous or self-serious about what they're doing here, though: Curve is a marvelous example of just how playful and colorful Moonriders insist on being, in ways that don't undermine their depth or substance. Elsewhere, Shizuoka demonstrates how the band can simultaneously write a killer pop song and imbue it with layer after layer of unusual, unexpected sound—deviations and interruptions that enrich, rather than undercut, the feeling at the heart of their music.
P.W. BABIES PAPERBACK (2004): A lightness of sound underpins most of this album, interlaced with an unmistakable sense of sorrow. Wet Dreamland, which namechecks the Beatles in both Japanese and English, sets the tone, which is both wondrous and anxious in ways that evoke childhood and youthful fears. Space Age Ballad extends that further, with a swirling arrangement of horns and synthesizers that feels, fittingly, like an anthem of hope for a new era, counterpointed by the song's words: "We are the Space Age; we know loneliness. The universe is vast, and this world is small." The album's climax, People Talk About People, takes a darker turn into moody, almost apocalyptic funk, evoking the hellfire of war and the love and grief of soldiers' families—the "post-war babies" that give the album its name, and the women who were left to raise them alone.
MOONOVER THE ROSEBUD (2006): This might be Moonriders' magnum opus: a tour-de-force of sophisticated rock and cool funk, folk songs and sarabandes, moments both grandiose and energetic. It includes what might be their single most poignant piece of music, Vintage Wine Spirits, and Roses, whose calmness belies an urgency that swells and recedes, leaving behind something richer and fuller in its wake. That's immediately followed by the astonishing When This Grateful War is Ended, which starts as a trio for violin, piano, and cello, evolves into something far more involved and no less sorrowful, then ends on a third movement that's both nothing like the other two and weirdly, strangely, perfectly appropriate. And in the middle of all this, you have WEATHERMAN, which almost feels like a Rosetta Stone for the band as a whole: different, disparate lines of music shift across one another, the song's sound and style continuously changing, yet feeling all the more coherent for it. (An earlier draft of this post opened with, no exaggeration, a seven-paragraph breakdown of all the shifts in WEATHERMAN; you have been spared.)
TOKYO7 (2009): Accompanied by the EP Tokyo Round and Round, which I mention only because its single Tokyo Navi implausibly incorporates square dancing into Moonriders' repertoire—Tokyo7 feels like an intentional shift away from songs that feel like "compositions" back towards songs that feel like "songs." Which is not to say that it's any less extraordinary. I Hate You and I Love You is a folksy power-pop song whose intricate arrangement gets more astonishing the more closely you pay attention to it, incorporating all six performers playing loud and fast and all at once—and shifting, perfectly, into a different interlocking arrangement as the song hits its chorus and bridge, every person suddenly playing something completely different without the music's flow so much as stuttering. Centaurus No Umi is a series of gorgeous and unusual musical choices, and then, very abruptly, something much different than what you've been led to expect; transitioning from something delicate and acoustic to borderline thrash metal is already a choice, but transitioning from thrash metal to, of all things, a french horn solo is the kind of swerve that nobody else could have devised. My favorite song off it might be Hontō Ni Oshimai No Hanashi ("The Absolute End of the Story"), though I couldn't tell you why. And the album closer, whose name roughly translates to "Six Paths of Past and Future," consists of six verses sung by each of the six Moonriders in turn, as the arrangement transforms to meet them.
CIAO! (2011): As meticulous and dramatic a farewell as their 1986 triple release was, but this time for real, Ciao! plays the same game as Animal Index before it: each member writes one of its first six songs and one of its last six. (Opening the album with a song cheekily called Who's Gonna Be Reborn First?—a callback to the opening of the album that resurrected the band in 1991—is a terrific joke and a fantastic flex.) Here, it feels like each of the member's two contributions feels like an intentional statement: a marker of who they were and why they mattered. Masahiro Takekawa contributes a flabbergastingly gorgeous string-and-woodwinds composition; Hirubumi offers two soulful numbers, one somewhat conventional and the other very much not. Keiichi Suzuki declines to have the first or the last word in the band that he had the biggest hand in creating, and makes his final contribution to the group an expression of simple joy. It's drummer Tetsuro Kashibuchi who makes the album's grand closing statement, The Last Fanfare; I am unsure whether it was Kashibuchi's declining health that led the band to declare themselves finished, but he passed away just two years later, in 2013. But Moonriders' final moments are anything but grandiose. Instead, founding member Tohru Okada closes the band's extraordinary 38-year run with The Vapor Theatre Playground, perhaps the most straightforward pop song the band had written in over a decade: "This stage, today's stage, was fun, but this stage is over."
What then?
Like I said, I will not be getting into an extended overview of every Moonrider's solo career, particularly the ones they had after the band broke apart. Suffice it to say, they paved six extraordinary paths—even Tetsuro Kashibuchi, whose final album was nothing short of breathtaking.
The band, minus Kashibuchi, reunited for a surprise album release in 2022, It's The Moooonriders. I'm intentionally leaving it out of the scope of this piece, in part because I'm not sure I can fully digest a Moonriders album in only four years' time; as with Ciao! before it, though, I suspect that the album was motivated in part by a band member's failing health. (Tohru Okada died a year later; I eulogized him then, and did an overview of some of his many, many side projects.)
Moonriders' catalogue remains frustratingly difficult to access, either digitally or physically. (For one of Hirobumi Suzuki's solo album releases, I wound up having to write Suzuki's record label by hand; we negotiated an overseas shipment, and when it showed up, it unexpectedly came with a hand-written thank-you letter from Suzuki himself. I'm delighted to see that that album is now available online—in my opinion, it might be his very best.) Albums are made available for streaming haphazardly and without rhyme or reason; other albums can be found for download on very sketchy Russian web sites, but that too can be unpredictable. Hunting down what I could of Moonriders' extended catalogue became a hobby of mine for half a decade or so; even so, I know of a few albums that I still haven't managed to track down.
The band, minus Kashibuchi, reunited for a surprise album release in 2022, It's The Moooonriders. I'm intentionally leaving it out of the scope of this piece, in part because I'm not sure I can fully digest a Moonriders album in only four years' time; as with Ciao! before it, though, I suspect that the album was motivated in part by a band member's failing health. (Tohru Okada died a year later; I eulogized him then, and did an overview of some of his many, many side projects.)
Moonriders' catalogue remains frustratingly difficult to access, either digitally or physically. (For one of Hirobumi Suzuki's solo album releases, I wound up having to write Suzuki's record label by hand; we negotiated an overseas shipment, and when it showed up, it unexpectedly came with a hand-written thank-you letter from Suzuki himself. I'm delighted to see that that album is now available online—in my opinion, it might be his very best.) Albums are made available for streaming haphazardly and without rhyme or reason; other albums can be found for download on very sketchy Russian web sites, but that too can be unpredictable. Hunting down what I could of Moonriders' extended catalogue became a hobby of mine for half a decade or so; even so, I know of a few albums that I still haven't managed to track down.
It's hard to draw the line, sometimes, between "justified interest" and "obsession." Can I honestly say that every one of the ~200 Moonriders-adjacent albums I've acquired is near and dear to my heart? Absolutely not. Do I still listen to maybe 50 or 60 of those albums regularly, and do I feel the need to make an impassioned case for each and every one of them? Actually, yeah, kind of. It doesn't even feel like fanaticism, exactly: they just do such quality work, and in such a dizzying variety of styles, that many of their productions have become go-to staples in a couple dozen of my favorite genres.
Masahiro Takekawa's A Journey of 28days is a gorgeous somewhat-recent folk album, to pick a random example. And you'll have to trust me that Ryomei Shirai's "surf jazz" sextet Surf Trip makes for phenomenal background music, because their cover of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" is not available online, but while Shirai's jazz work is hard to track down, his weirdly-unclassifiable instrumental group For Instance has enough digital presence to tantalize. (And if you're gonna try to tell me that No! Blood! isn't an absolute bubblegum 80s banger, and that I shouldn't pretend to do aerobics routines to it at least once a week, well, I just don't know what to tell you.)
Sometimes I go to them because they make things I know I want to hear, like Keiichi Suzuki's nightclub music for sleepy people in PJs. And sometimes I go to them because they make things I never knew I wanted, like Keiichi Suzuki's marching band music for people trying to conjure demons. And those are two data points chosen more-or-less at random out of dozens, for one of the six people who made Moonriders what they are. I listen to them because, time and again, they show me that they know how to make music I like—and because, time and again, they show me that they'll take me places I'd never think to go on my own.
If you're looking for a new obsession, I can strongly recommend Moonriders as a great option. If you'd just like something nice to listen to, well, Moonriders are great for that too. And if all you want is a song or two, just click any of the blue words up above. Don't even read them. Seriously. Just go nuts.
__________________________________
While I've done my best to research and fact-check this piece, I should not be considered an expert by any means; Moonriders is not an easy band to investigate if you're not fluent in Japanese, and ten years of half-hearted Moonriders-inspired Duolingo attempts just weren't enough to get me far. I focus primarily on the band's sound, productions, and compositions because that's what I can study with my ears alone; on some level, this is reductive of Moonriders as a band who wrote songs about things, and from what I gather, they are fairly acclaimed as lyricists. I'm also not qualified to discuss Moonriders' political views and statements, which I regret.
If you happen to know more about any of this than I do, don't hesitate to reach out to me! My interest in this subject is borderline limitless.
Masahiro Takekawa's A Journey of 28days is a gorgeous somewhat-recent folk album, to pick a random example. And you'll have to trust me that Ryomei Shirai's "surf jazz" sextet Surf Trip makes for phenomenal background music, because their cover of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" is not available online, but while Shirai's jazz work is hard to track down, his weirdly-unclassifiable instrumental group For Instance has enough digital presence to tantalize. (And if you're gonna try to tell me that No! Blood! isn't an absolute bubblegum 80s banger, and that I shouldn't pretend to do aerobics routines to it at least once a week, well, I just don't know what to tell you.)
Sometimes I go to them because they make things I know I want to hear, like Keiichi Suzuki's nightclub music for sleepy people in PJs. And sometimes I go to them because they make things I never knew I wanted, like Keiichi Suzuki's marching band music for people trying to conjure demons. And those are two data points chosen more-or-less at random out of dozens, for one of the six people who made Moonriders what they are. I listen to them because, time and again, they show me that they know how to make music I like—and because, time and again, they show me that they'll take me places I'd never think to go on my own.
If you're looking for a new obsession, I can strongly recommend Moonriders as a great option. If you'd just like something nice to listen to, well, Moonriders are great for that too. And if all you want is a song or two, just click any of the blue words up above. Don't even read them. Seriously. Just go nuts.
__________________________________
While I've done my best to research and fact-check this piece, I should not be considered an expert by any means; Moonriders is not an easy band to investigate if you're not fluent in Japanese, and ten years of half-hearted Moonriders-inspired Duolingo attempts just weren't enough to get me far. I focus primarily on the band's sound, productions, and compositions because that's what I can study with my ears alone; on some level, this is reductive of Moonriders as a band who wrote songs about things, and from what I gather, they are fairly acclaimed as lyricists. I'm also not qualified to discuss Moonriders' political views and statements, which I regret.
If you happen to know more about any of this than I do, don't hesitate to reach out to me! My interest in this subject is borderline limitless.