Fujiya & Miyagi

Key tracks:

Knickerbocker
Uh
Ventriloquizzing
Cat Got Your Tongue
Tinsel & Glitter

Label: Full Time Hobby

Read Description:

"Maddeningly catchy, evocative Kraut pop"

Fujiya & Miyagi are a intriguing hybrid of time and place. Their insistent grooves owe much to the pulsing motorik of 70s Germany – Can and Neu! especially – but their taut white funk and skinny beats jiggle somewhere between 80s New York clubland and early Human League. That’s not to say they’re retro. Like James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem, it’s the way they assimilate the pieces that makes them worthy of attention. They have got their pop mojo on as well as the krautrock rhythm section and produced one belter of a record with Ventriloquizzing, their fourth album.

After seven years of well received releases and sleeper hits from the Brighton duo comes Lightbulbs their first album proper, as a four piece. Wonderfully steeped in vintage music from evocative krautrock to deep soul, Floydian Englishness and the throbbing groove of Tom Tom Club, all filtered for modern times as though mixed by MF Doom. Using old synths to punctuate their beautifully-observed anecdotes on romantic triumphs and disasters, heroes and villains and the world at large, their rhythms palpitate to produce modern symphonies like no-one else. Lightbulbs is a cross country train journey littered with fragmented images, anecdotes from the sublime to the ridiculous, blurry stories that you feel you shouldn't have overheard. This is an eminently listenable album especially the tight drummed powerfully sonic ode to ice cream Knickerbocker, and Uh a swinging twisted string-laden repressed trip to boom chacka (and back-a).