Symphonic Moon - Liv Moon - 2012

[scroogles]

It's been a while, so I thought, how about another novel of an album review? This time it's a curious little one from Japan. Enjoy! Symphonic Moon. That’s a violinist flashing their arse, right? Well, if you’re as puerile as I am, prepare to be swiftly put in your place. Symphonic Moon is actually the title of the latest record by Swedish-born, Japanese/Korean/Polish symphonic metal sensation, Liv Moon. She and her band of the rising sun might not have been going for too long, but, since starting out in 2009, they’ve churned out almost as many albums as Liv has passports, consistently releasing one a year. This is 2012’s contribution, and it might just be that rare sparkle you can’t do without. This being my first proper taste of Far Eastern metal, you might have thought I’d struggle to work out a whole album. Lucky for me, then, that this in no way qualifies as an “album”. What we have here is a pile of songs, many of which have so little in common with each other that they could have been assembled in literally any order. And so they have been. 12 tracks bubble excitedly from the speakers with all the coherence of a bag of pick-n-mix sweets, from brightly-coloured, tangy rocks of power-prog, to dark, swirled clusters of symphonic matter. Arriving at the final song, what small degree of cohesion existed is finally destroyed by a burlesque-themed marshmallow of a track with so little to do with any of its predecessors it that it could have dropped clean out of the sky. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the producers giggling impishly to themselves. Yup, it’s certainly bonkers. But anyone hoping for a metal revolution is in for a disappointment. The strange anomaly of track 12 aside, this is the fairly standard mix of power and symphonic metals that you might find in anywhere from Nightwish and Epica to Sonata Arctica and Rhapsody of Fire. Inevitably, there are hints of cheap imitation. The pelting rhythms and flashy riffs which dominate track 9, the foremost example of Liv Moon’s power metal style, entitled The Last Savior, are musically impressive but come as standard across that genre. The chorus of the album’s first full-blooded symphonic metal track, Alchemy, features rhythms and chord progressions that will be so hauntingly familiar to fans of Nightwish, that you might just start mumbling the lyrics of Amaranth to yourself. On closer inspection, however, the Liv Moon have been able to stamp their own distinctive marks all over this record. A lot of this can be traced back to the phenomenon of Visual Kei, a Japanese craze which inspires its followers to dress up as Anime caricatures of figures everything from pirates and the living dead to the deceased court of Louis XVI. And while you won’t find Liv Moon at the top of any Wikipedia lists of Visual Kei outfits (at least, I didn’t), there’s more than a touch of this expressive Japanese mania in the garishly dressed outfits and seductive facial expressions of the album cover. European metal has its fair share of strangely dressed fellows, from face-masks to spike-studded boots, but to my modest fashion consciousness, the absurdity of this Japanese style easily tops the lot. In the absence of serious personal interest in this trend, the only thing left for a majority of metal fans will be to submit to the madness. And the band’s music certainly helps this cause. Liv’s vocalisation is, quite literally, sugar and spice. Between softly-spoken interludes, her impressive vocal range fluctuates between syrupy sweetness in the bubbly Amen! and The Last Savior, and fiery passion in Kiss Me Kill Me, Shingetsuse, and Datenshino Emi. Her unique vocal chords flit around arcing melodic lines, providing colour to playful fairytale lyrics. When they’re dark, they’re naughty: “Take off the ring/Take off my clothes/Dance with me now” (Kiss Me Kill Me); when they’re mysterious, they’re true toyland: “Among the fancy clowns and grinning princes/I’m trapped inside a lonely masquerade” (Masquerade). Orchestral accompaniment offers another outlet for this bubbling folly, ranging from the massive string and brass ensembles featured in Black Serenade, to the whimsical hide-and-seek of plucked strings and woodwind in Masquerade and Fugitive (if you want to know what a fairy being chased by a butterfly net sounds like, check out the bizarre, glittering orchestral fills in this song). But all the pixie-dust in the work still couldn’t prevent a lingering sense of the music’s tackiness. The booming orchestral extravaganza that the band employ can be so overpowering that it hinders the development of musical themes. In particular, tracks 7, Black Serenade, and 9, The Last Savior, feature such dense musical textures throughout that almost no room is left for crescendos into rip-roaring choruses. A seeming lack of discipline also afflicts the vocals, where Liv’s spectacular extravagance often borders on the absurd. By track 9, as the Japanese singer pelts out “Saviour’s coming”, it becomes clear that excessive vibrato and screeching pitch are not the only problems afflicting the vocal lines. All too often, English lyrics sound what they are, literally foreign. On the one hand, the phrasing of lyrics often doesn’t quite work: see, for example, the seemingly unfinished lyric in Kiss Me Kill Me, “How can I change/Who can change me/No one can do”. At the same time, Liv’s Japanese tone just fails to capture the English sounds. In Kiss Me Kill Me, “Dance with me now” becomes “Dance wiss me now”, while “throw the dice” in Alchemy turns into “srow the dice”. As unwarranted as this attack on English pronunciation might seem, it should serve to highlight an important point: Liv Moon are a band which are best when unhindered by the expectations of others’ musical styles. Immediately noticeable, for example, is how much more comfortable the band’s Japanese lyrics sound than the English, giving full expression to what is a superb vocal talent. Between mouthfuls of Jasmine tea and uninformed mutterings of “those Japanese”, we might like, therefore, to ponder the some more of the band’s successes. There are a number of peculiarities with the record, which bring various influences to the fore. In particular, this includes the stylings of modern film music. The impact of film soundtracks on metal has been enormous, from the cataclysmic orchestral landscapes of film scores providing inspiration to bands seeking similarly formidable sounds, to film composers stepping in to orchestrate for bands directly (a good example would be Norwegian composer, Gaute Storås, who has arranged orchestral scores for Dimmu Borgir). The booming orchestras of Symphonic Moon are used to create exactly such cinematic landscapes, in particular through the regal, sloping orchestral lines of Kiss Me Kill Me, Shingetsuse, and Datenshino Emi. Meanwhile, intricate, flickering melodies which run above these deep harmonies replicate the best tradition of the classic film score. In the final track, Masquerade, French horns which would hardly have been out of place in a James Bond movie enter, giving a wholly cinematic feel to the occasion. But while these booming orchestras may suggest the influence of European cinema music, the film scores that seem to have given most to Liv Moon seem to me to have been those of the Japanese filmmakers, Studio Ghibli, and, in particular, legendary Japanese composer, Joe Hisaishi. Hisaishi has developed a two-pronged approach to his music, which involves bold and majestic strings, on the one hand, and soft, misty textures full of intrigue, on the other. These distinct sounds are recreated on numerous occasions in Symphonic Moon, perhaps most noticeably in Kiss Me Kill Me, when, towards the song’s climax, all instruments but for orchestral strings are dropped from the ensemble. Powerful violins, superbly exploiting the song’s 6:8 time signature, drive forward with a majestic waltz which could have been spun straight from the production floor of Howl’s Moving Castle. In the following song, Koorino Hitsugi, misty strings and dense, foggy brass cloud music in a damp, mysterious fog, which returns in track 11, the instrumental Interlude by the Ruin. All of these little innovations make Symphonic Moon a unique and thoroughly enjoyable experience. Liv Moon have a fascinating sound, and have been able to make such effective use of their considerable talent that they almost obscure all the blatant shortcomings which plague this record. But only almost. The unrestrained exuberance which persists throughout gives rise to wild vocal wailings and lavish use of orchestral tones, creating a sense of complete musical indiscipline. This can only partly be explained away as a manifestation of the band’s openly playful approach to their music. More disappointing are barely-disguised efforts to replicate the established sounds of European metal, at the expense of the band’s own distinct style. But when you can simply skip from one track to the next, there’s always the temptation to ignore these flaws. In this freeform collection of songs, it’s probably best to pick and choose. Select your favourites, power up the volume, and embrace the moon! Score: 68/100