Japanther – Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt

In the last few months, Japanther has become a sort of inside joke with my friends and I. Ever since we saw them open for Against Me! in September, we all agreed that they were one of the worst bands we had seen live. Despite coming on with a cool stage presence and some of the most inventive microphones we had ever seen, the music and their show did not impress us. We found their stage persona arrogant and cheesy and their music was weak with too much emphasis put on samples and the use of a drum track despite there being a drum set on stage (it seemed as if the drummer was pretending to drum during some parts of their set). Yeah, it was bad.

Imagine my surprise when I moderately enjoyed the first song on Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt (well, first song if you skipped the dismal spoken word introduction). It’s not that Um, Like Your Smile Is Totally Ruling Me was a great song, but it was catchy enough to listen all the way through. There was something in the incredibly distorted vocals that just sounded better on the recording than they did live. The thump of the bass along with the beat of the drum filled the song with a steady rhythm that was actually rather memorable and enjoyable. I thought that maybe, just maybe, there was hope for them yet.Bumping Rap Tapes came next and while it wasn’t as good, it didn’t feel as painful as they were live. It was a bit poppier with electronic beats and staccato drum parts and catchy vocals.

But soon enough Japanther went downhill and Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt became unbearable and sleep educing. The horror came in the form of Africa Seems So Far Away, an essentially spoken word rant that lasts over ten minutes in length. TEN MINUTES! Ten minutes of just gloomy, haunted vocals telling a story over a constant bass drum and occasional high hat. It was boring and painful and instantly brought Japanther back into the realm of running jokes.

The New York duo do redeem themselves with The Dirge, a song I actually remember enjoying when they played live that sounds just as good here with a closing couplet of “I love you, no matter where you spend the night. You can always come back to me because I’m nothing and you are everything” being repeated over and over again. But that shining moment soon fades out as just two songs later they bust out yet another long, boring and painful tribunal spoken word song, The Indigene. At nine minutres, that too lasts way too long and they never recover again. The distorted chant of “1,2,3,4 Fuck The Cops” onRadical Businessman can’t do it and neither can Before The Sun Goes Down.

So yeah, there’s two songs on here that sound pretty good but two songs is not enough to make the record listenable. Plus, no matter how good those two songs could ever be, they could never make up for over twenty minutes of monotonous samples and spoken word “songs”. It’s safe to say that they’ll remain an inside joke for a few more months until we forget them all together.