We were worried there for a second. After Supercar's unremarkable last album, "HighVision", and their latest few soporific releases it seemed like they'd given up on the whole pop game and settled into making drab but tasteful albums for people to leave on their coffee tables.

Well the first good news is that their new album "Answer" comes in a package so big and gaudy that it would disfigure any coffee table. The second comes as the opening track "Free Hand" starts to pour out of your speakers. Rarely have bongos been employed with such intent and sense of purpose, the usually tired sounding voice of Koji Nakamura doesn't sound like it's going to drop off for at least another twenty minutes or so, Miki's bass is insistent and funky and Junji Ishiwatari's guitars explode in and out of the song to powerful effect.

The third good news is that there's more and better to come. All Supercar albums hold together very neatly, often due to the overwhelming similarity of many tracks, but this is their first album where each song has a distinctive flavour. The influences are wider and the sound more varied with the poppy and jazzy "Sunshine Fairyland" rubbing up against the XTC-esque "Wonder Word" with barely a crack of daylight between them and with the Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced "BGM" gaining a new lease of life, sounding sharper and tighter in the context of the album than it did on last year's single.

After that it does seem to go to sleep a bit, with "Harmony", "Recreation" and "Golden Master Key" making a pleasant trio but lacking the punch of the first half of the album. After that however, they play their aces. First with the eerie "The World Is Naked", Rovo's Yuji Katsui providing a chilling electric violin backdrop to the brooding beats and loops, and second with the epic jazz-influenced "Siren" which is what the Twin Peaks soundtrack would have sounded like if it had been made by Can. Both tracks are what Radiohead fans wish "Hail To The Thief" had sounded like.

The album closes with "Time", the only song on the album to use Miki's vocals, which uses a ticking clock sound effect to pointlessly illustrate something or other which may or may not be the same thing Pink Floyd were annoying people by trying to illustrate thirty years ago. Nevertheless this is a big album by a band who are still striving for something more and if it occasionally slips into what seems like pretentiousness then all the more kudos to them for their ambition. A great start to a new year in Japanese rock, this is the one to beat. -Ian Martin, Feb.28.04

Answer