Akari Nanawo 11/10/2019
By: Philip Brown
Tags: Japanese Music, Japanese Culture, Music, Japanese

Back to Cave- Be in Hiroshima. This place was as small as ever, I even hit my head on the door frame when exiting, and this artist must be popular because the place was packed. I counted over 150 people before the live started and they just kept on coming in throughout the runtime; by the end of it I was squished against the door next to the worker watching the door. I really feel for him since he was forcing himself to stay as serious as possible while someone maybe a foot taller was pushed into him by the scrum.

When the band came on the stage they were playing the Final Fantasy Chocobo theme… and this was just the beginning. This band was unique: the music was unique, the presentation was unique, the fact that it wasn’t really a permanent band (I think based on what she said) was also unique. According to the main singer she was just teaming up with another band because she is either doing, for now, or is permanently a one person band. That being said they had really good chemistry. The band itself was pretty normal until you look closely. An electric guitar, a base, drums, a singer with an acoustic guitar… all normal until you look to the really small woman with the computer and the megaphone.

She really was short, so much so that I could see eye to eye with her even though she was on a raised stage, (maybe 4ft or so?) but made up for it with sheer exuberance. Since the band played animations on a screen behind them and I guess she was the person with the computer to play the animations… The problem being that once she hits play she didn’t really have a whole lot else to do. So she was a DJ / cheerleader / and showed the hand-motions to the crowd. Since there was a dedicated person to just do hand motions the crowd had a lot of advanced dance moves; at least until we ran out of space to move.

If you were paying attention you might have noticed that I mentioned there were animations. Like this…

It was a cartoon about the song, similar to a music video and karaoke combined, which really helped make the concert exciting. Each animation had a similar style and vibe but all were unique. It was because of the animations that I would say that the music style was almost psychedelic rock for some songs. She is listed as rock but I would more set it as manic rock or psychedelic rock. Some songs would be great while looking at the stars and thinking about life while banging your head. They really matched the music to the animations surprisingly well.

The singer had a quite high pitched voice, more so than most of the bands I have heard in Japan, and singing style is exceedingly fast. Even with the lyrics showing up in the screen it was so fast that I probably wouldn’t even be able to keep up even if it was in English. Her normal talking style was also quite fast and a bit random, which didn’t help me understand what was going on sometimes.

That being said; they played a lot of songs over just under 2 hours (I counted 20 but there might have been more), which meant that the intermission time was fairly limited. She spent most of the early breaks to greet the crowd and then just continue playing after about 30 seconds. The longest intermission they did a tongue twister competition; which they seem to do fairly often which makes sense given how fast the lyrics of the songs are. Because Akari lost to the drummer, surprisingly, she was asked to do a punishment game… she told us the story of her first love. It really was quite cute because it was a story from nursery school, how she can remember that far I can’t even comprehend… The last intermission was a description as to why she made her new album, in her normal random style so I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and the encore intermission was to promote her t-shirts and other memorabilia. The t-shirt was also unique, it was a vertically striped white shirt with a tiny hand drawn picture on a random part of the front and the back; while cute it really matches the style that she is trying to present.

They kept the energy throughout the entire show and within 3 songs in I was tapping along and by the end I was dancing, in progressively smaller areas, with the rest of the audience. While I am not sure the music style really matches me they were really good and energetic. If you like faster rock and can deal with a slightly shrill singer this would be a really good singer / songwriter to listen to.

4.2/5