that foreign music blog🌎

I saw indie band Brian the Sun for the first time in a while, and it was like blast from the past. The first time I’d seen them was while I was a student in Kyoto four years ago, but it was like time had never passed. They’re still just as dorky and talented as before, just with a few more fans.

Spade Box, which is a small venue in Shin-sakae, was slightly bigger than the venue where I’d seen them in Kyoto, but it was still relatively small with about a hundred and fifty people. Maybe a little less. They’ve been gaining fame after being featured on the Baruto series with their song “Lonely GO!”, though.

While I haven’t said much about these guys in some time, it was extremely refreshing to see them again with their new album, ‘MEME’ under their belt. I hadn’t heard it before the show, but the song that really got me to buy it was ‘Re:mon’, which features both guitars playing opposing keys. It was really fun to see Shinji and Ryota playing face to face as if they were dueling, bringing an addictive energy to the audience. Unlike their previous shows, everyone was pretty hyped up, encouraging the band to show us their hearts.

After being recognized for their few anime songs, my friends and I were a little worried they might lose their roots, but the experience seems to have only broadened their overall sound. I will say that MEME completely drops their jazzy influence; I mean they were never really JAZZ, but if you listen to their first album and compare it to this one, there is definitely something considerably different. My cousin and I used to say that Brian the Sun had some jazz to it, and it could’ve been the drums in all honesty, but whatever that ‘feeling’ was is completely gone. You could say that this album has way more of an underground rock sound, and it was really cool to hear that for the first time live.

Unfortunately, it always seems like Brian the Sun is the only band I can never describe well. That’s not a bad thing from a music-lover’s point of view, but it’s frustrating as someone who’s trying to advertise them. In short, the album is very rock. Pretty fast. Pretty interesting. Pretty awesome. I feel they have gotten slightly darker with this album, in both sound and theme. While I can’t understand the lyrics, how they were delivered during the show made me feel that the themes of this album might be more serious than the others, which tended to be more quirky and thought-provoking. I mean, one of the songs on ‘MEME’ is titled ‘Death’.

Brian the Sun was never a very upbeat band, though. Perhaps you could classify them as emo; given that ’emo’ hasn’t been used since the early 2000s, it’s not something I really thought about until I read it in an article about ‘Humpback’…who I WOULDN’T classify as emo, but I guess it’s a better judgment than my saying that Brian the Sun had a jazz influence.

As far as the performance goes, they’ve gotten a lot better at working the crowd, with bassist, Haruki, as the main mood-maker. I learned this after seeing them a few years ago in…Osaka, maybe, as he did most of the talking. He’s also apparently a radio DJ! So, as expected, he did a really good job of making us laugh, which isn’t the most important thing at a concert, but I put it up there as being pretty high in priority. Entertainment is such an important factor of live shows, in my opinion.

Needless to say that I really enjoyed the show, though. I was pretty stoked to get a new poster with my CD purchase, too. I can add their name to the ‘signed merchandise’ category, although I still haven’t met them.