Tokyo singer-songwriter closes out the first part of our increasingly-inaccurately named Amnesty Week.
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Kylo Nocom: “A-Punk” via “Bubble Pop Electric,” not quite matching the pep of either but turning out nicely once the synths multiply and the bleacher-stomping beat comes in.
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Iain Mew: The pattern of blaring siren synths and the rubbery bass are a perfect counterpart to how Zombie-Chang sings (and shouts) “Saredo Shiawase” with a calibrated level of abandon. It’s like watching someone carefully chalk out a space and then wild out without ever stepping over the lines, and it’s a lot of fun.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A cutesy, peppy track that might be the perfect theme song of some sitcom, cartoon, or anime. There’s not much substance here, but the “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”s sure are fun.
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Nortey Dowuona: A wrapping, recording synth loop with headlight shrieks provides moving stage mountains for Zombie-Chang as she skips across the simple, loping drums. Slithering synth professions are pulled onto the stage then withdrawn for a brief blackout and breakdown, then returned, shielding her until she disappears.
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Vikram Joseph: I’m getting strong 2006 indie disco vibes from this — Clap Your Hands Say Hai, if you will — and I like the way the synth train noise that recurs at the end of each line conveys a sense of constant, exhausting cyclical motion. The production feels flat and tightly compressed though, which restricts the sense of delirious euphoria you feel Zombie-Chang is trying to convey here.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: A kraut-y electropop jam beamed out of the 2000s wherein Zombie-Chang laments her young adulthood. A song for those who feel like they should’ve been where they are years ago, and still feel far off from where they should be. “Even so, I’m happy/I can keep going,” she concludes at the song’s end. The pulsing beat makes you believe she’ll keep moving forward.
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Edward Okulicz: This certainly flirts with greatness but that warp/siren noise that actually makes me think of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner is getting in the way and driving me to distraction. Everything else about this is fun, as if exhorting me to go out and live, but then it’s also reminding me to do the vacuuming, and that’s not fun.
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Katherine St Asaph: By now I think I’ve heard enough nu-new wave songs to fill the entire ’80s end to end with listening, and yet I don’t remember many capturing, like this does, the sense of freewheeling fun. I also hear a little Lorelei de Lux or NV (which is maybe to really say I hear EarthBound), both always welcome.
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Ryo Miyauchi: The tendency for Meirin Yung’s synth-pop as Zombie-Chang to chase its own tail has enabled her to explore anxieties from listlessness over the last few years. But as committed “Saredo Shiawase” is to its infinity loop as her other songs, the music plays with an especially impatient urge to finally break out of its set tracks to instead become something different. The antsy mood is a response to Yung’s own frustrations with her life trajectory: “I’m so tired of myself/who can’t seem to ever grow up/a side of me who stays in her daydreams/keeps getting in the way,” she opens the song, and the rest is a classic case of millennial burnout, bitter from being cheated out of life’s promises. The song could end there, just moping around in her bed thinking how her twenties aren’t unfolding as she imagined. But it’s her saying fuck it and moving on in the best chorus ever written this year — “I don’t care anymore/I give up” — that differentiates “Saredo Shiawase” from other millennial burnout anthems. Instead of mere reportage of the current climate, Yung gives us an image of what’s possibly out there after we stop crying and throw out everything that we were told to believe. “Lastly, just dance with me/That way, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she closes out the song. Giving up never sounded so fun.
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