Nakatomi Plaza – Ghosts

Nakatomi Plaza were one of those bands that were always out there on my peripheral vision; over the years, I kept reading their names in random posts and articles and because it’s a unique name, it stayed in my memory. However, I never got around to actually listening to them; that was until I got their final swan song: Ghosts – an eleven track album released two months after the band bid their loyal fan base a fond farewell and decided to pursue other horizons.

Of course, I didn’t know they were broken up yet when I saw the CD and was, instead, just excited to finally hear a band I had heard about so many times in the past.

They kicked it off with Bomb Shelter, a dark pop-punk tune that had some moments of Animo in there mixed with some interesting bass lines, guitar flourishes and nicely contrasting female vocals singing backup.  It was a good start and one that got me excited to see what else would happen.  The rest of the album kept the same vibe up in a way, delivery some dark pop-punk songs like a heavier/more rock-based Alkaline Trio.

Ghosts had some memorable moments in it – like Pigs Will Pay (Redux) which saw the female vocalist take over the lead vocalists in a song that sounds remarkably similar to Holy Roman Empire – but it rarely fully grabbed me.  There were certain elements that stood out –the hollow choruses of 4017 juxtaposed against the heavy guitar-led verses for one – but as a whole, Ghosts seems somewhat flat.

I left the disc in my CD player for a couple of weeks and played it repeatedly and each time the same moments stood out and the rest fell into the background. It never truly grew on me, no matter how many times I listened to it and it just stayed stagnant instead. There’s something here, it’s more technically proficient than most bands but it’s missing that certain element that a great CD needs to keep the listener coming back for more. Yes, the acoustic number Words jumps out but just because of the sudden change in tempo and sound – not because it’s a phenomenal acoustic song. As it is, Ghosts is just a marginally impressive album that spends far too much time sitting in the background and never fully embraces its potential.

Since it is the band’s last record and was released after they broke up, all three members contribute a little essay to the liner notes. While they do reflect on all the good times they had in Nakatomi Plaza over the past decade, they also mention a strong distaste for the current music industry and the difficulties of being in a band fronted by an Asian-American and a female bassist. They make some very interesting and valid points which do deserve to be examined further (Al Fair’s line “If you can count all the bands that aren’t filled with straight white people, there aren’t enough bands that aren’t filled with straight white people” is a line, and concept, that definitely stands out); however after finally listening to Nakatomi Plaza, I can’t help but think that the fact that they’re fronted by “a tweeked-out, short, Asian-American, shredder/screamer who stands off to stage left” isn’t the reason why they never truly got popular – it’s more likely because their CDs, if their older ones are anything like Ghosts, just don’t fully captivate the listener. That’s it, that’s all.