UPDATE: MTV Iggy’s Chatmonchy @SXSW Review!!
Tonight, if you’re lucky enough to be at SXSW, there is one thing you should do. Get yourself down to Japan Nite at the Elysium and please, stay till Midnight. That’s when headliner Chatmonchy comes on.
Hyped as Spin magazine’s #1 buzziest band, the three-piece female rock group from Tokushima have had real hits in Japan — where they’ve been signed to Sony since 2005. Though they happen to be powerful women who produce a tight garage rock sound, this wasn’t founded to make an angry statement about the music industry’s sexism. “We want to establish our reputation as a rock band rather than a ‘female’ rock band,” founder Eriko Hashimoto told the Japan Times.
Singing at such a high range, they instantly recall pop chanteuses. Nevertheless these are punk songs that have just been slowed a tad. Drums run through the tracks in double time. The guitars are angry. And vocalist Hashimoto has power and hate in her voice. This is the a-political Japanese Le Tigre, with less electro and more raw power. And they’ve got real range. While “Dai Dai” could be a track from Matt & Kim, “Sekai Ga Owaru Yoru” sprints in with Nirvana-esque grunge, then unfolds into one of their most sentimental, whispery tracks.
Japanese listeners love the band for their lyrics — which the women write before they set down a note. Why the weird process? They don’t want their sound to define what they want to express, and prefer the complexity of a sad song, sung quickly or a happy song sung in a minor key. Explained Hashimoto:
Here to bare their all. Photo Credit: Ki/oon Sony Japan
“Sometimes we make happy lyrics and turn the tune into a sentimental ballad (and) we can do that because we add the music later….Even though a song has the sense of high-speed, it could be melancholic by using minor chords and it is easier to share the feeling of a song, simply because we create the lyrics first.”
We think that’s totally awesome. Think of all the happy Beatles’ songs in minor keys (“Blackbird”) or all the sad Elliott Smith songs pasted over happy guitars.
On March 24th, the band’s releasing a compilation of its hits — Hyoujyou – which will come with a bonus disc of acoustic versions. That will be their fifth full-length release as a band together. Formed in 2000 by Hashimoto, who had been a member in a brass band for six years in school, the band stayed a three-piece group, without a bassist, because, Hashimoto she has said, she liked the “cool appearance” of such a simple combo. Upon graduation, however, the other members went their separate ways — but she kept the name they’d come up with, a nonsense phrase inspired by the name of a monkey in a Japanese cartoon, Monchhichi. Hashimoto remembered:
“She wanted to name our band ‘something-monchi’ or ‘monchi-something’ and we chose ‘something-monchi,” “We looked up a word that matched for monchi in a dictionary and found the word ‘chat,’ which caught our eyes when it was written, and so we became Chatmonchy!”
New incarnations of the group cycled through a male drummer, but they settled with the present lineup in 2005 of Eriko Hashimoto (guitar, vocals), Akiko Fukuoka (bass, chorus), and Kumiko Takahashi (drums, chorus). Touring the country in a van, selling their self-produced record for gas money, they were roped in to Tokyo by Sony’s Ki/oon label who has produced the band’s last three records.
Next step: America. And though big Japanese bands — such as Bonnie Pink, Detroit 7, and Ellegarden — have played showcases at SXSW, hoping to get distributed in the US, they’ve never really made it. Maybe Chatmonchy can change things. Listen on their MySpace,
Tour Dates
Mar 19, 2:30 SXSW Cafe Mundi Austin, Texas
Mar 19, 11:45P SXSW Japan Nite (Elysium) Austin, Texas
Mar 21 Bowery Ballroom (Japan Nite Tour) New York, New York
Mar 22 Cakeshop New York, New York
Mar 24 Amoeba Music Los Angeles, California
Mar 26 Amoeba Music San Francisco, California
Mar 26 The Independent (Japan Nite Tour) San Francisco, California
Mar 27 Viper Room (Japan Nite Tour) Los Angeles, California