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Atsushi & Yu-ta • Rehearsals for Tour -Izora-

BUCK-TICK Genshou - New World • Teaser

#buck-tick #atsushi sakurai #yutaka higuchi #2023 #2020s #my gifs #izora

SCARECROW

Before writing this, I spent quite some time thinking of the rich musical tradition of songs about Scarecrows, and all the metaphors these fairy tale figures encompass. I grew up on Pink Floyd's Scarecrow, Syd Barrett's charming bucolic picture of a simple man 'resigned to his fate, cause life's not unkind he doesn't mind'. I know that Imai was listening to a lot of early Pink Floyd before composing Sophia Dream on the previous album, so it's not impossible that DNA is in this track. Or perhaps, given Sakurai's well-documented love of Siouxsie and the Banshees, he's going with the more sinister bent of their Scarecrow. Myself, I'm a big fan of the cautionary tale of Circulus's Scarecrow, who attempts to escape his fate, only to meet a worse one due to a stray cigarette. If you know other scarecrow-themed songs, please feel free to drop them in the replies!

I don't really do much lyrical analysis on this blog, but I always interpreted Sakurai's Scarecrow as a metaphor for depression, for feeling stuck, friendless and paranoid. And on this track, Imai captures the dark, intense, circling atmosphere of the desperate, anxious type of depression incredibly well, like a brain pacing the cage of its skull.

The track starts with two interlinked guitar riffs circling round and round one another. Hoshino's guitar, on the right, is a bright, treblely tone - a Fender, I think a Jazzmaster in the live video? while Imai's on the left is more mid-range, slightly muted sounding. It's a constant theme on this album, musically, to let the two guitars spiral round one another in an interlocking dance, rather than cutting against one another, as has been more typical in their other work.

The first verse is just guitar and voice, haunting and plaintive yet deceptively pretty. Yet the moment when the full band kicks in around 0:18 is one of the densest, darkest, walls-closing-in moments of psychological horror since Muma The Nightmare. After two full years of plague, lockdown and death (the album was recorded right through the COVID-19 epidemic, which has left its mark) Izora is a far darker, more claustrophobic suite than the gentle, magical hopefulness of Abracadabra. So this SCARECROW is clearly going in a folk horror direction, rather than the gentle bucolic.

The second verse pulls back to solo bass and drums, to better highlight the desperate emotion of Sakurai's voice. I tend to concentrate so much on the musical arrangements that I can sometimes forget the sheer power of Atsushi's expressiveness as a vocalist. Will I risk the wrath of the Acchan-Onlies if I confess that I think he sometimes over-eggs the pudding a little? But just before he lapses into melodrama, there's a brief moment of respite from the melancholy on the jaunty little pre-chorus before a big farty bass squelch sweeps us off into the screaming, raging, eye of the hurricane that is the chorus.

There's a particular arrangement of vocal harmonies that I associate with the Big Epic Buck-Tick Goth songs - you can hear it at 1:09, coming in on 'Ore wa mou doko e mo' - the melody is definitely doubled an octave up, but I can hear other, intensely operatic harmonics that add a wonderful air of menacing hysteria. That repeated phrase of three minor, falling notes, and the way the melody ends so unresolved on 'doko e?' It builds the tension and terror, and then we're back to the circling guitars, but this time with huge, ominous bass drops tolling like the bells of doom while echoes of overtones reverberate in the background like a flock of bats emerging as a puff of smoke into the twilight sky. Yes! Go on, my gothic prince of darkness! There's even a set of synthetic rimshots in the background almost but not quite the drum pattern from Bela Lugosi's Dead.

Acchan's vocals at this point sound positively demented, a man in mortal fear of losing his mind. (The third verse reminds me a bit of the folk ballad, The Twa Corbies, but written from the POV of the dying knight begging carrion birds not to peck out his eyes.) And again those high, haunting minor harmonies coming in on the second half of the verses. The guitars have become detached from their whirling dance. Hoshino is carrying on the bell-like tones, but in the left channel, Imai has dropped down to a deep, scratchy, almost spaghetti-western tone, picking out low, sinister tones right by the guitar's bridge. And the pre-chorus doesn't sound like a relief this time, it sounds like all the banshees of hell are hot on Sakurai's trail. By the time the second chorus kicks in, Sakurai is no longer just fighting for his sanity; he sounds like a man fighting for his immortal soul, the gorgeous operatic harmonies carrying his pleas all the way to the heavens!

In place of a middle 8, they repeat the intro those pretty guitar arpeggios accompanied by minimal drums and Tim Burton haunted house trills. Listen to that little flourish in the background at 2:52 and tell me you don't imagine Jack Skellington playing it on a marimba made of rib-bones!

For the pre-chorus at 2:54, Imai stamps on his distortion pedal, dragging a howling gale out of his guitar for the riff. A wail of overdriven feedback, then a split second of silence (how effective are this band at using complete silence to heighten the coming crash of noise?!?!?) and Hoshino joins the distortion party for the cascading wild hunt of the last chorus. The guitars are chasing like the hounds of hell as Sakurai shrieks in desperation and fear. Do my ears deceive me or deep in the background, is there a brass horn-sound softly doubling up the root notes of the bass, to drive the song forwards? It's so low it's hard to tell if it's a vocal, a guitar or a synth, but it's magic.

And from there it's just the two whirling guitars again, this time echoed with a long step delay, catching and whirling the harmonics until there's nothing left but sustain, like the mist of a dawn that brings no comfort. Truly a masterclass in creating a sense of terror solely through sound dynamics!

Best Bit: 0:18 as bass and drums kick in, one of the guitars is caught in a loop of endless delay, slowly corroding into noise like one of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. It carries on for a full 10 seconds, before cutting out abruptly, like someone flicked a switch, which is somehow even more scary than if it had just faded away naturally.

#buck tick #track by track #izora #SCARECROW #buck-tick

SCARECROW

#buck tick #track by track #izora #SCARECROW #buck-tick

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