Worst CD of the Year... No, EVER!!!

幸せの可視　(shiawase no kashi)
Moon-light Record, Osaka (Dec. 2007)

Pikachu--the drum and vocal half of Osaka-based magical mystery international punk rock star duo Afrirampo heads in a new direction. Soon-to-be mother tries her hand at the art of singerly songwriterlyness, performing mostly on an un-tuned acoustic guitar singing songs with titles like "A girl is YURA YURA," "A elephant has nose on his back," and "You can seen the happy." Some tracks have drums that sound like they were recorded from 2 apartments away on the voice recorder function of my cellphone. It's not even an iPod. Other tracks have some wild vocal improvisations and synthesizer lines that could have been played on the "composer" function of your cell phone. To make it worse, each track is around 7 minutes long. A new era in the age of DIY, mobile recording studio arts?

It's the WORST album ever. Really.

This, I guess, is quite an accomplishment though, because 2 minutes into the album, I was totally convinced of the fact that I had never heard an album that was worse. Think about it--there's a lot of mediocre music out there. Some sad, some embarrassing, some meaningless, some pathetic. But something this BAD?! So bad it blows you away... so bad that it makes you question the meaning of art... life... the cosmos...

This may be a work of genius.

Or not.

And yet, Pikachu is like a combination of the coolness of Kim Gordon with the your-best-friendness of Kimya Dawson, and the open-your-heartness of Lavender Diamond. Delivered to you with tako-yaki flavor from the heart of Osaka. She's dripping wet, because when it rained, god drooled on her, or she's dripping wet because she woke up bawling after she dreamed that her mother died, and she's dancing in the sky shining brighter than the other (more famous) Pikachu (who caused little Japanese children to have seizures with his amazing strobe light way of being). Hanshin Tigers have nothing on this lady.

I may never listen to this album again, but it has forever made its mark on my heart.

Oh. Yeah, and it's a CD-R, and it comes with a sunflower seed taped to the cover of the sheet of glossy paper that is the CD case... so that your dreams may blossom so that you can "See the Happy."