More pop today!
Bland: this Sydney four-piece doesn’t seem to be bland, their latest track “The Common Ground” is a very fine jangly track. This song will be included in their upcoming EP titled “Life After Love”.
Midnight Clay: Indonesia keeps providing us with top quality indiepop. This new band from Bandung is no exception. They are planning to put out a 6-song mini-album on October 6th called “Shall We Dance or Lean to Each Other?” and we can preview one of the tracks to be included, the superb “Rising Tide”. Can’t wait to hear the rest of tracks!
Cotton Range: Sango Records from Wuhan, China, is releasing a very fine band from South China called Cotton Range and I am very excited. I just wish there was a physical version for this mini-album titled “Galaxie Bus”. There doesn’t seem to be one, just digital. But maybe someone will pick it up? I hope so, the 7 tracks included here are very sweet.
Spunsugar: a shoegaze band from Malmö that sounds terrific. Nothing new there I guess. I just discovered Spunsugar through their latest track, “Native Tongue”, and I am hooked. The song is a digital single for now, and on Bandcamp the lyrics are available just in case you want to sing along.
David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights: the legendary ex-The Clean member is back with a new album called “Bobbie’s a Girl” on September 20th. The album will be available on CD and LP and will include 10 brand new songs which is very exciting news for any fans of the Dunedin-sound and Flying Nun Records! At the moment three songs are available to preview, “Smoke You Right Out of Here”, “Coming From Nowhere Now” and “Looks Like I’m Running Out”.
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I am on a Japanese indiepop journey, discovering lots of great music from the early 90s that has been unknown to me. I am so very happy to find out about these sounds now, and I feel there’s even lots more waiting for me!
Today I found this sweet sounding band called The Spotnick Candy. I am curious about their name first of all. Is it a play on words of Sputnik? Or what? Or maybe it was a real candy in Japan? Who knows. The thing is that the band would only release a 7″ and two compilation appearances between 1992 and 1993. Later on the band members would rename their band to Snapshot, and under that name the band would put out many releases on Escalator Records.
The Spotnick Candy was formed by Yugo Katayama and Yukari Takasaki. As I mentioned earlier they released an EP, the 1992 “Love! Love! Courtney Love!” 7″ (BOMB-08). It came out on Time Bomb Records, which was a label that mainly released bands from the Kansai underground, operating from a record shop in downtown Osaka. I suppose the band hailed from that area then?
The A side had three songs, “Love! Love! Courtney Love!”, “Actizol Gumball 3” and “Count the Numbers”. The B side just two, “Yeah!” and “Hosedog 11 (is a Football Club)”. Yukari Takasaki wrote the A2, A3 and B2. Yugo Katayama wrote the other two. It is also interesting to mention that they both switched instruments all the time. I see Yukari and Yugo playing guitar and drums on different songs.
The band appeared on the 1992 compilation “Television Personalities From Japan, Too” (TT006) that was released by the very fine A Trumpet Trumpet Records on CD. At first I thought it was a EP of cover versions of the TVPs but it seems the 4 songs, by 4 different bands, that appear on the comp are original tracks. The Spotnick Candy opens the CD with the track “Seurat 1859-1891)”. The other bands on it are Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Candy Eyes and Sweet Petticoat. I suppose the band were big fans of the great Georges Seurat. They even had his birth year and the year he died at 31 on the song title.
Georges-Pierre Seurat (French: 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist. He is best known for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. While less famous than his paintings, his conté crayon drawings have also garnered a great deal of critical appreciation. Seurat’s artistic personality was compounded of qualities which are usually supposed to be opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility; on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind. His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.
The other band’s appearance was in 1993, on a Japanese cassette called “Let’s Muc Out On Sound” that was released by Loose Sound (LSCT-001). I believe this tape was only limited to 100 copies. On this cassette the band appears twice. On the third track of the A side with the song “Cast a Shadow” while on the second track of the B side they have “AM7/8M7”. On this tape the band Tricycle Popstar also appears, a band that I’ve been lucky to have interviewed in the past.
As I mentioned the members went to become Snapshot afterwards. Yukari Katayama would gain success later on as Yukari Fresh. He was also involved in another project called Yukari Rotten while Yugo Katayama released records under the name Miniflex and was the producer of Yukari Fresh. So they kept working together.
It is really cool how they evolved and became successful musicians. But I am curious about this early period of theirs. I love the freshness of The Spotnick Candy and I definitely want to know more about them. Did they have more songs? Did they play live a lot? Were they from Osaka? Who remembers them?
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