ANORAK! - ANORAK!

Once again, I have to tip my cap to Keegan Bradford. I’d been following these guys for a little while through his S***ify playlist showcasing 5th wave emo artists from Asia. I liked them so much that I imported a slightly-too-small ANORAK! sweatshirt. When they played their first overseas show in Guam, I crossed my fingers that they’d make the jump all the way across the pond. When they were tapped for FEST 22, I bugged anyone I knew with booking connections to try and get them a show in New Jersey. I ended up being able to see them in a pizza shop in Philadelphia with Aren’t We Amphibians last year. During one of the last songs, Tomoho Maeda was close to tears as he told the 70 or so people in attendance that so much of the music that inspired him came out of the city of brotherly love, and that tonight was a dream come true.

I love me some eastern Pennsylvania emo revival, but there isn’t an obvious Philly counterpart for ANORAK!’s crafty songwriting. Their brocaded open-tuning riffs have parallels in the likes of Glocca Morra and Algernon Cadwallader, but their songwriting is almost painfully efficient. Not a single song on ANORAK! by ANORAK! goes over two and a half minutes. Most of them hover around one and half.

I’m pretty sure all of the songs are named after train stations of Tokyo, which probably lends them some significance. Could they be based on memories made there, in those neighborhoods? I don’t speak Japanese, but most of the songs are in English anyway. Even where I had to refer to the lyric sheet or DeepL for translations, I was always able to feel the fatalism and longing in Maeda’s voice. His is not a Byronic romance, but a more unpretentious, relatably pathetic one. Maybe more of an M.O. Walsh character.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Kotaro Nakamura’s drumming on this record. The idiosyncratic parts that he writes control the emotional dynamics of the song in sync with the guitar and bass in a way I wish more bands would. He locks in like a machine to Mikuru Yamamoto’s bass on “Chofu” and “Seisekisakuragaoka”. Hearing him let loose on “Shimokitazawa” beneath Daiskue and Tomoho’s guitars is absolutely sublime. Overall, the performances on this record from all musicians are top-notch and worth study by any aspiring open-tuning two-handed-tapper.

ANORAK have a knack for catchy choruses, like on love-struck “ikebukuro” (“Looking for you walking with the sound of grass/I woke up almost touching your back”) and love-lorn closer “Kitasenju” (“It’s getting harder to explain/cause you’re forever gone”). They rarely dwell on any one riff or lyric too long. Shifts between songs are often abrupt and frenetic, with mid-song tempo changes and switch-ups more like hardcore than emo.

If I have a single complaint about the contents of this disc, it’s that this album is too lean. ANORAK! easily could have been a thirty minute album with the same number of songs, just with a little more refrain, a little more development of ideas. But unlike bands like OVENS or 100 Gecs, where I get the impression that they didn’t have enough ideas or stamina to craft longer songs, ANORAK! have simply trimmed too much fat from their roast and left good meat among the scraps. Oh, and the other complaint is that “Hatsudai” is too loud.

However, I do have complaints about this package. I’m pro-digipak, and I’m very pro-insert, but you can’t just throw an insert into your digipak without at least a pocket to hold it in place. Their single-sided, poster-style insert creates barely enough friction with the inside cover to not fall out while holding it tight. Release any pressure, and it falls into your hand. Said interior is a heavily-artefacted scan of a sketch and some basic credits. Everything except the text on the insert is just a hair jpeg-y, but that inside cover is the worst offender. At least the art is excellent. Sloppy motifs of rabbits and stars and horses are sketched on the disc, and painted on a matte green background. The lyric sheet is charming with cut out photos of the band and their environment. The music and art is enough to make up for the listener-unfriendliness, especially given the caveat of printing tour merchandise on a quick turnaround for a foreign country.

Some high-profile acts in the DIY emo scene have pivoted to cuddly slackerisms and facile self-empowerment songs over the past five years, but these guys deliver what I consider to be the core point of emo revival - catharsis. Instead of feeling like shit alone, we could feel like shit together. This album continues the ongoing trend of re-borrowing song structures from hardcore that indie- and math-influenced emo eschewed, making their songs way more fun to dance to. Their next album, “Self-actualization and the ignorance and hesitation towards it”, represented a major shift away from the aesthetics and structures of Philadelphia emo, but I’ll write about that one some other day. For now, I hope that ANORAK! will be remembered and referenced by twinkly bands in college towns for years to come.

ANORAK! by ANORAK! is a good album, and I like it.