I made my peace with the Oscars live last night (and archived here). What a ceremony. So today, naturally, I'm going to talk about Japanese pop/rock music. Who isn't?
Babymetal is one of the more unusual music acts I've been introduced to from Japan. They're a heavy metal trio that sing like pop stars. As in, amazing heavy metal arrangements (distortion, thrashing guitars, and mile a minute bass) with pristine pop vocals. It's a trip.
That is their live music video for "Give Me Chocolate," an obvious topic for heavy metal music.
All snark aside, something about Babymetal sits really well with me. I appreciate the skills necessary to play the really hard heavy metal music. Strumming and fingering that fast is hard. I know I can't do it. I need a midtempo indie or jazz groove to survive on guitar. I just really struggle to listen to the vocals.
Nothing makes me cringe like screaming vocals. You can tell very easily that they are grinding their vocal cords for effect. I'm way too sensitive to that sound. As someone who performs and teaches vocal music, I'm way too self-conscious about vocal health to just relax when I hear that kind of singing.
Babymetal has a very clean pop vocal over the heavy metal music. It's an odd pairing purely because you're not used to that combination. Even more melodic heavy metal has an edge to it. It's even true when a metal band has a really trained singer as the lead, like Kristen May in Flyleaf, there's almost this prerequisite of bringing in a rasp or a scream to fully get into the heavy metal/hard rock style at some point in every song.
Not with Babymetal. The teenage trio is comprised of screamers Moametal and Yuimetal and singer Su-metal. Except the screaming is more shouting and they all sing and dance more than they do anything else. It's...gentler to listen to. There's no rasp, screaming, or edge to the vocals, creating a little musical ambiguity when you first hear that pairing.
In the same way, Babymetal doesn't quite meet the J-pop expectations, either. Look at the choreography in the videos. It's really aggressive. They are headbanging, punching, kicking, and clawing at the camera or audience. They're dressed in stark black and red in all of the public appearances and are always grouped really close together. The singer even controls her bandmates in an almost dismissive manner, a slight act of domination that betrays the unison movements and even distribution of vocals standard in most J-pop.
I've shared a couple of their videos with friends who like heavy metal and they all come back with a similar response: they wouldn't mind Babymetal if it was just an anime or video game theme. There is something to that reaction.
A lot of their music falls into the same kind of pop-fusion that Konami thrives on in their rhythm games. I could see a killer Maniac (or whatever they call the hardest single player mode in Dance Dance Revolution now) chart to "Megitsune." "Give Me Chocolate" feels like an alternate opening theme to Naruto or Death Note. It's that not quite metal/hard rock sound that shows the anime has a little bite to it.
But Babymetal (so far) isn't performing TV or video game music. They're performing a rather refreshing blend of heavy metal and J-pop that sits well in the range of the young vocalists. It takes a lot of training to not blow out your voice doing heavy metal and I wouldn't feel comfortable with 14 and 16 year olds singing that style. Babymetal has strong songs and a hook that could keep audiences interested for years.
Thoughts? Share them below.