Beat Laments The World

A metal-infused take on Asian music & other stuff

Well, that’s the catchphrase for it anyway.

9mm Parabellum Bullet. Though they’re often kind of hit and miss for me with only around every other album being awesome, every other one not so much… if the above track is anything to go by the next one’s going to be another good one. Still, even though they are kind of uneven for my taste, I love ‘em. I don’t know what it is with them but they’re the only band whose releases I still keep religiously buying. Plus, I suppose if I didn’t like them, it’d have been hard to keep up with translating their blog for nearly two years now.

I find that they’re just so damned interesting, a good example of it being the track above. It’s not particularly musically “difficult” I don’t think, but there’s enough twists most of the time to keep me interested. I don’t just mean the insane endings to their songs which are, by the way, often cool enough to tear me a second asshole. I mean, even when they’re covering Territorial Pissings of all songs, they manage to crank it up even heavier whilst also overdoing it and making it ridiculous:

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I dunno… when I listen to 9mm, I hardly ever feel bored. And that’s an achievement in itself.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I might as well have another little stab at this topic. This is what it was about. wu-san wanted me to expand on something I’d asked previously:

I f****** wish he’d explore a line he throws up in more detail.

“Would you really listen to this (music) if it wasn’t Japanese?”

Christ, it’s something I always think about, however menacing or impartial it may be.

Would I be listening to J-music if it wasn’t from Japan? In my original response, the 18-year-old me said it was something I find myself pondering about quite often. Nowadays? I no longer think about it. Firstly, it really is of minimal importance. Secondly, I now have (what I feel is) a better answer.

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9mm Parabellum Bullet is a f’ing amazing band that I occasionally mention on here. They have a blog which I’ve decided to start translating into English. Click on this little pizza I made if:

1. you want to read all about 9mm Parabellum Bullet’s antics, but more importantly…
2. you agree that a pizza without a shitload of pineapple on it is not a pizza worth eating.

Release date: 2007/11/14

Tracklisting:

1. Psychopolis
2. Discommunication
3. Heat-Island
4. Sleepwalk
5. Suna no Wakusei
6. Heart-Shaped Gear
7. Sundome
8. Battle March
9. Butterfly Effect
10. Termination
11. The World
12. Punishment

I realize it’s already been nearly half a year since this album was released but I don’t really care. :o

9mm Parabellum Bullet is a rather new acquintance for me. I don’t remember now why or how I decided to check them out, but I’m very glad I did. I feel it’d be a bit useless to do a track-by-track review as, really, every track sounds quite alike. It’s all very much in their own, unique style.

Yes, their style and sound is, at least to my ears, very unique, though I’m not really that versed in the Japanese music scene to be able to say that… but yeah, I haven’t heard anything quite like these guys before. They are of course in the rock vein of things, going from furiously fast beasts of songs that have fast guitar riffs, fast drum beats and often blistering leads, but are yet amazingly catchy (Psychopolis, Heat-Island, Punishment), kind of the same but slower and perhaps catchier songs (Termination, The World, Discommunication, Sleepwalk) and then the much more laid-back albeit still very much rock type songs that might be the catchiest stuff of them all (Suna no Wakusei, Heart-Shaped Gear, Sundome).

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