Artist pickup: Everything Everything

December 7th, 2010By Category: Culture

Note: Something new, here we take a look at some of the foreign artists and musicians who are starting to make in-roads into the Japanese music scene with the help of the guys at PTV.

Imagine a band who fuse three part harmonies with scalding post-punk guitars; floor-filling bass lines with syncopated rhythms and lyrics about everything from high-school massacres to R&B lotharios musing on their lot in a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

Not easy, is it? But then Everything Everything (Jonathan, Jeremy, Mike and Alex) aren’t here to make life easy. They’re here to challenge every knee-jerk convention of indie rock and dance on the grave of pointless retrogression “We’ve never been comfortable with the indie tag”explains Jeremy. “If it’s Girls Aloud or Slint, it doesn’t matter – if we like it we’ll listen to it and work out what makes it good. There are hundreds of years of amazing music to draw on. Why place restrictions on yourself?”

“My childhood began with the fall of the Berlin Wall” explains Jonathan.“It ended when I was sixteen when 9/11 happened. I grew up a tiny little village in rural Northumberland so I was very isolated during that period. I didn’t have a television until I was seventeen, so I listened to the radio a lot. I was making music all the time in my bedroom – my one rule was not to sound like anyone else. I’d go out of my way to avoid playing any obviously recognisable chord sequence.”

Having recruited his band-mates on the basis of shared orchestral backgrounds and divergent tastes ranging from post-rock to funk and jazz, the band set about avoiding cliché at all costs. “It’s all to do with how you present yourselves” explains Jeremy. “An R&B cliche can sound great when it’s played by four skinny white men.” Lyrically, influences range from Naomi Klein to Edward Lear and all stops

in between. “We belong to a generation that was too young to buy into Britpop fully, so we’ve had no significant pop cultural movement to throw our lot in with” explains Jonathan. “So there’s no defined viewpoint. Lyrically, for me, it’s as much about the sound, rhythm and tone of a word as the meaning.”

Everything Everything – “Man Alive” is out in Japan now. The Japanese version features three exclusive tracks and is available at Amazon Japan.

Second note: Video quality is not so hot…

Author of this article

ProfoundTV

ProfoundTV is a producer of video entertainment covering Japan's music, art and cultural scenes. Our broadcasts go out to thousands everyday via the large-screens standing at iconic locations including Shibuya's scramble crossing, Shimbashi Station and Akihabara. PTV also distributes its videos in the TV departments of Yamada Denki stores in the Tokyo area.

PTV is constantly expanding its media coverage, collaborating with magazines and websites meaning wherever you go for your entertainment – we've got something for ya.

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