Shoujo Soushite Saku
(2006)
The "Akiba-kei" strain of new wave and technopop is quite possibly the most irritating of all musical genres and if you can sit through an album's worth of it without it making you want to kill kittens, then you are either a stronger person than most or you are insane and a danger to society.

Urban Garde are very irritating, but they are weird enough that they get away with it. This mini-album's jacket image of vocalist Jun, bare arms decorated with elaborate tattoos, pointing a rifle at the camera could be just another example of the kind of cheap juxtaposition of cute and violent images that many technopop musicians think makes their infantile meanderings edgy; however, it is backed up on their web site by some entertaining psuedo-politics that at least show that they're into... well, whatever it is that they're into.

Musically, about half of it is straight technopop but twice as fast as it needs to be (and therefore twice as good), but it's the fifth track, Anna, that is their most insidiously effective. A sinister, drawn-out groove inflitrated by stabs of wah-wah guitar, distant, moaning violin, and strange synth squeaks and squiggles, it's heavily influenced by Brian Eno, and all the better for that. Ian Martin Dec.01.06