2･0･1･2

Loudness’s 2・0・1・2 is an album that I really should like. The songwriting (in terms of the rhythms and melodies, at least) is stronger than on The King of Pain – not that that would take much. It also features a more thorough return to the thrashy aggression and fretboard pyrotechnics of Thunder in the East. Many of the tunes have real balls to them. But 2・0・1・2 falls flat, ultimately, on its whiny, preachy, dumbass far-right politics. Normally this wouldn’t be a concern for me: I’m fairly tolerant of the occasional degree of political stupidity in my music. But I’m not willing to cut Loudness the slack this time, for reasons I will go into shortly.

Even though the speed and the aggression are back in spades and the compositions are tighter – both of which are good things – the actual instrumentation is unfortunately still as ‘loose’ as on The King of Pain. They still haven’t got the mixing for the drums right; they’re too foregrounded. Niihara’s vocals are a blend of the hard-‘n’-heavy (but clearly glam-influenced) wails of his eighties heyday, and the disappointing crossover-lite barks and rips that failed to connect on The King of Pain. This would be a far more tolerable performance from him if he’d just stick to what he does best.

Everything from ‘The Stronger’ to ‘Driving Force’ is heavy as hell and fine-tuned like a factory-model Japanese race car. Takasaki still goes for broke on those solos on tracks like ‘Bang ‘Em Dead’, which is fun to hear. But later on in the album, when he gets called on to lay down a rhythm, he gets sloppy. There’s not really any other way to put it. Listen to the riff on ‘Behind the Scene’. Listen to how the drums consistently come in a sixteenth-beat before the guitars do? Even though that’s unquestionably a strong riff, it somehow doesn’t match up cleanly with what Suzuki’s banging out. I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not, but it’s grating. ‘Who the Hell Cares’ / ‘Spirit from the East’ lands us back in chugtastic muddy modern-metal territory, with hints of their earlier experimental-psychedelia stage. The speedier, upbeat ‘Memento Mori’ thankfully rescues us from that before it gets too wearing, but again the album closes on a goof note with the blippy-bloopy electronica/ambient closer ‘Out of the Space’.

To be clear: musically this album is very much a move in the right direction for Loudness, but it’s still nowhere close to the standard set by Thunder in the East and Lightning Strikes.

So why the low score? Well, now we’ve gotta talk about the elephant in the studio: the politics.

There’s a certain aspect to Japanese politics that outside observers don’t really readily grasp, apart from folks like Alex Kerr who’ve spent decades living there, or nerds who spend way too much energy studying it. The Japanese far-right (uyoku dantai) actually has deep roots in the Japanese state and big business (see: the Japan Conference), but still poses like an oppressed minority and readily appropriates punk-rock counterculture imagery for itself. They take up a narrative which goes like this. Japan’s rightful place in the universe is as an empire which spans from Sakhalin to Indonesia to Hawaii. Japan isn’t an empire any longer, and they’re very upset about that fact. In their view, Japan is the sole victim of an international conspiracy to parcel off its economy, cripple its fighting spirit, and brainwash its children with self-hating historical revisionism.

So, in practice, the far-right often adopts language that can sound like it comes from the far-left. Japanese right-wingers selectively excoriate politicians for being ‘greedy’ and ‘power-hungry’, but by this they don’t mean taking kickbacks or indulging in blatant graft (which plenty of politicians on the Japanese right routinely do). No: by this they mean things like, imposing pesky environmental regulations on Japanese businesses. Listening to concerns of schoolteachers. Acknowledging Japan’s culpability for the atrocities it committed during the Pacific War. Not kicking the Koreans and Filipinos out of Japan and back to where they come from. All these things are evidence, in their view, of moral corruption and acquiescence in the international conspiracy to weaken Japan.

Sound familiar?

Basically 2・0・1・2 is, not RAC or NSBM, but about as close as you can get within a Japanese context, from start to finish. (Perhaps we should call it ‘uyo-rock’ ウヨロック?) This album is basically what it would be like if Ian, Rob and Glenn came out in public support of Nick Griffin back when the BNP were still not completely irrelevant, or if Rudolf Schenker and Klaus Meine were the lead performers at a concert supporting the NPD. ‘2012 ~ End of the Age’ is kind of the prototype here, saying that: a.) Japan is ‘domesticated’ and under ‘subjugation’; b.) Japan is under threat from China and its ‘crimson urge for conquest’; c.) its children are being ‘brainwashed’ by ‘power politicians’; d.) egotism is giving rise to social disorder that can only be fixed by e.) a self-sacrifice to ‘come together as one’ nation.

I could forgive it if ‘2012 ~ End of the Age’ were a one-off, but the politics shoot through the whole damn album. ‘The Stronger’ urges historical negationism and urges Japanese to take power into their own hands. ‘Break New Ground’ is a proclamation and exhortation to ‘die with the flag on my back’, i.e. for national rather than personal glory. ‘Driving Force’ basically takes the uyoku dantai line that nations are out for themselves in a social-Darwinian free-for-all, and Japan needs to wise up and fend for itself. ‘Behind the Scene’ is about how ‘green’ environmentalists are spreading propaganda and brainwashing children in order to weaken Japan. ‘Bang ‘Em Dead’ is a vitriolic rant against supposedly ‘money hungry’ politicians who promote things like ‘black history again and again’ and bring a ‘falling empire under fire’. ‘Who the Hell Cares’ and ‘Memento Mori’ are hedged invocations of Mishima Yukio’s failed 1970 nationalist coup attempt and resulting death by seppuku (‘Just let it go, let it flow / carry out a coup d’état’). It’s hard to believe this is the same band which wrote ‘S.D.I.’!

There’s another thing about this which grinds my gears: how disingenuous and cowardly it all is. Look, Loudness: you’re talking about how Japan needs to rediscover its national pride. But you’ve got Niihara singing in the language of the GIs who came and gave Japan a well-deserved kick in the peanuts when Tôjô pulled the nonsense you’re advocating the first time. What’s more, it’s almost certain that, outside a few nerds and East Asia expats like me, the foreigners listening to your English-language album completely lack the context to understand what you’re singing about. Your choice not to perform this crap in Japanese, to an audience that would get where you’re coming from, means you lack the courage of your convictions. There’s nothing metal about that. And if he were alive today, Mishima would hold your act in total contempt and derision.

The only real break we get from the uyoku politics is ‘The Voice of Metal’. And honestly, Ronnie getting a tribute on an album which is really otherwise just bitchy uyo-rock is fairly dubious. Of course, for obvious reasons, we can’t just go and ask him – but we can venture a guess. Dio wasn’t a political loudmouth. He would take strong stances on things in his songs, sure. He wasn’t a big fan of organised religion. He wasn’t a big fan of Dubya. He did charitable work helping out refugees in Eastern Europe (that’s why there’s a monument to him in Bulgaria) and preventing animal cruelty, organised Hear ‘n’ Aid to combat starvation in Africa, still has a fund which helps cancer patients. And you can easily tell, even from his fantasy-themed albums, that child abuse, human trafficking, porn and mistreatment of the vulnerable in general really pissed him off. But he wasn’t an ideologue or a fascist. And given that Dio’s dad – who supported him getting into music – was a US Army serviceman during World War II and literally laid his life on the line against this murderous imperialist ideology, I feel pretty confident in the guess that Dio wouldn’t be too fond of it either.

Normally the politics wouldn’t be that big a concern for me. But Loudness made the politics the whole point here, so in my view they’re fair game. Now, I happen to like albums by both artists on the political left (Hammers of Misfortune, Threshold) and artists on the political right (Forefather, Cromlech). But even the most stridently left-wing crossover bands, or the most nationalistic folk and black metal bands, that I tend to like – don’t spend almost an entire album passive-aggressively bitching about how their country needs to rediscover its pride, and showing none of their own. It’s hectoring, it’s turgid, it’s shrill, it’s self-pitying, and on this album it’s omnipresent. There are enough solid albums under Loudness’s belts for them to have earned the right not to be called poseurs, but this YouTube-ranting screed of an album has thoroughly shown them to be wimps. I preferred them when they stuck to mindless lyrics about rocking and getting laid.

2 / 20

Thirty-two years after their foundation, the Japanese Heavy Metal legend Loudness still rocks loud and proud on this twenty-sixth studio album. The band still manages to sound fresh and hungry and some tracks are even heavier than what they have done in their most successful era between the mid-eighties and the early nineties. As there are no ballads on this release, this might even be among the hardest records the band has ever released in its long career. The lyrics of the energizing hymn “Memento Mori” precisely explain the attitude of Loudness: “Let me tell you something – tomorrow’s another day – and yesterday’s away – no matter how fast you run – your life is only once.” Loudness really do apply this “Carpe Diem” ideology and deliver one of their best records ever on here.

The only problem is that many of those energizing tracks sound quite similar. We get crunchy and often simplistic mid-tempo riffs, a refreshingly and vividly pumping bass guitar, a tight but mostly unspectacular drumming and angry raspy vocals singing a couple of catchy and simple hooks. The songs are all great of you take them as single tracks but as a whole they turn out to sound a little bit repetitive. As highlights, I might cite first of all the great opener “The Stronger” that takes no prisoners and shows that these guys never get old. Especially “Driving Force” has a perfect title and features an amazing bass guitar break as well as one of the best and most melodic guitar solos on the entire record. The homage to the late Ronnie James Dio in form of “The voice Of Metal” is an excellent old school heavy metal track with some sing along passages and a few doom metal influences that also come back in the quite dark and heavy “Who The Hell Cares”.

Towards the end of this excellent record, the band even tries out a few more obvious experiments. First of all, there are two instrumentals in form of the mythic and slightly folk influenced “Spirit From The East” that shows us a completely new side of the band and then we also get “Out Of The Space” that sounds indeed a little bit Doom Metal and Ambient influenced and has a slightly transcending or spacey sound. The bonus track “Deep-Six The Law” starts with a great spacey instrumental passage and turns into a bass dominated Doom Metal part before the song gets even heavier and more grounded with really pissed off vocals and a lot of energy. This track happens to be one of the best songs on an absolutely outstanding release.

Shame over you, if you have forgotten Loudness over the years! These guys still rock out and easily beat their Western counterparts these days. If the Mayan prophecy turns out to be true, this band would have at least left planet Earth with one of their best records ever done and a solid dose of energizing and never too old fashioned sounding heavy metal. It’s a sad thing these guys are often ignored by Western media and as long as this continues I will try to put them back on your map.