Mosquito were such a great experience live that there's no way that they could reproduce it on CD. Sure, they're such terrific musicians that you could just stick a microphone in front of them and press record and you'd have a tape full of deliciously eclectic but reassuringly coherent genre-straddling noise but you'd miss the details that lift their performance from the merely brilliant into the extraordinary. The way guitarist/vocalist Yoshino Kaoru (with more than a hint of The Hives' Howlin' Pelle to him) swings a theatrical outstretched arm towards his bandmate Odaka Hideki to introduce a bass solo. Or the way tireless multi-instrumentalist/keyboard-shamaness Shihomi "Bob" bounces hither and thither, one minute on trumpet, next on handclaps next on kazoo. It just wouldn't be the same on cold shiny plastic.

And it isn't. But it's still great. The music is impossible to describe because it borrows elements from every musical genre under the sun; psychedelia, prog rock, new romanticism, jazz, krautrock, punk, europop, the list is endless. Still, after about a million listens I can tell you that the two main forces battling it out for supremacy over this five song collection are that kind of early eighties art-punk that made Mission Of Burma the beloved granddaddies of a thousand imitators that they are today, and a hyper-kinetic version of the kind of indie-dance crossover that many thought Buffalo Daughter had perfected on last year's "Pshychic". It's fast, relentless, seamlessly executed and well worth anyone's while, even if last track "Lion Girl" does sound like Aqua.

You can buy "Bataashi Hangyo" directly from the band for 500yen. -Ian Martin, Apr.03.04

Bataashi Hangyo (Demo)