Japan, Gentlemen Take Polaroids

Wes introduced me to Japan my senior year of high school, around the same time I was getting into David Sylvian. Convenient, that. With Japan, Sylvian was a little more of a showboat, his voice a bit more playful, a bit sexier than on his later, more somber solo recordings. The title track kicks off the album with a great vocal hook on the chorus that cuts straight to the heart of anyone who has ever watched a pretty girl wait for the train on a cool spring morning. Because Japan is no mere pop band, this song meanders for over six minutes before finally surrendering to "Swing", another catchy number more expanisive than your average pop song. That's true of most of the "proper" (i.e. non-instrumental) songs on this album, even the quirky cover of "Ain't That Peculiar", with its impossible-to-pin down rhythmic shifts and singular synth line at the end. "My New Career" has some terrific verses: I never wanted to be on my own, I could be wrong but / I just slipped away from home, and now I'm gone / well way down south, they have their minor ups and downs / but they're moving on ahead in leaps and bounds. The instrumental interludes are engaging enough to prevent them from being filler; "The Experience Of Swimming", for example, reworks the melody of "Swing" with tremolo guitar and a creepy synth line. "Taking Islands In Africa" is a tidy pop song with all-synth instrumentation just begging to be covered by one of today's better power-pop bands. The album's apex is its quietest song, the subdued waltz of "Nightporter". The spring of my senior year I spent a lot of time driving around in the rain with this song playing, thinking myself quite the melancholy new romantic. And of course I think it found its way onto every mix tape I made for a girl that year. Pretty advanced for a high schooler; pretty cliched for anyone even slightly older. But it worked at the time.

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