“I don’t like dark, brooding music – I don’t understand the purpose of it,” Konishi mused during a 1996 interview I conducted with the pair that went unpublished until now. Juxtaposed against the furious flannel-clad sasquatches of the Pacific Northwest, P5’s worldly, feminine lightheartedness was even more refreshing than it would be today. Even the guitars were often downtuned to sound more ominous and growling.
Although the ’90s featured more successful women rockers than any other decade, the era’s sensibility remained traditionally male – loud, brash, barbaric.
The resulting electronica was hailed as “the new rock” while Britpop reintroduced previously retired orthodoxies. Even house music – severed by this point from its gay and black roots – was straighter, whiter, less melodic, and more formulaic. Their international arrival occurred between the sudden deaths of Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur, figureheads of the grunge and gangsta rap that defined American music in the ’90s. When popular music was at its bleakest and most monochromatic, Pizzicato Five were neon-hued and eclectic. When the act called it quits in 2001, Pizzicato Five had released 14 studio albums, at least that number of compilations, about as many EPs, and every kind of single conceivable. By the time leading American indie rock label Matador Records introduced them internationally with the 1994 samplers Five by Five and Made in USA, P5 was only two, the absurdly productive songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Yasuharu Konishi the sole original member. They’d started in the mid-’80s as an easy listening quintet, switched vocalists to favor smooth plastic soul, discovered samplers around the time their third (and defining) singer Maki Nomiya arrived in 1990, then morphed into a dance/pop-art/retro-futurist act that pulled from just about every musical genre and aesthetic movement since the mid-20th century. Pizzicato Five were many things, but never ordinary. Even looking back today, I still think about my initial 1995 encounter with P5 as one of the most startling, fully realized concerts I’ve ever experienced, and their records remain among my most beloved.
From the Vaults: Modcast #66 Welcome to the Fatbac.These are some of the words I wrote nearly 20 years ago about Pizzicato Five’s San Francisco stop on the Tokyo-based group’s first US/European tour.Later releases did equally well and the band's homeland popularity grew to superstar status until they broke up in 2001.
PIZZICATO FIVE TWIGGY FULL
In 1995 Matador Records collected their early singles into a full lengthy USA release "Made in USA" which quickly sold a quarter million copies world wide. The hip, motown tribute "Sweet Soul Revue," the trippy, funky, sampled "Baby Love Child," the swingin' Carnabyesque "GoGo Dancer," and "Twiggy Twiggy," the soft trip-hoppy "I Wanna Be Like You," the Brasil 66 like "Room Service," and I could go on and on. After that cool songs in both Japanese and English just seemed to pour out of the group. The duo gave the band a heart and soul that it had been lacking, and Pizzicato 5 set about launching the Japanese lounge scene, Shibuya-kei, which was heavily influenced by soul, latin jazz, bossa nova, and synthpop. The band actually started out in the mid-80s and went through a load of members and lead singers before hitting the jackpot in 1991 with the lead vocals of Maki Nomiya and the suave keyboard stylings of Ryō Kamomiya. With a super suave, sixties hipster style, and, a sound like Sergio Mendes drinkin' martinis on a midnight jet ride with Corrin Drewery, Pizzicato 5 took the international scene by storm in the mid-90s.īut it hadn't always been such a magic carpet ride.
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