YMCK, Family Music

Holy fucking shit, this is bizarre. I’m sitting here listening to what sounds like mid-century swing-jazz as interpreted by a band made up of Koopas and little mustachioed Italian guys, and I’m not immediately clawing the headphones out of my ears. Which is crazy, because the music, with the vintage Nintendo keyboards, breathily sweet female vocals (all in Japanese, naturally, although some of the song titles are in English) should be, generally speaking, utterly maddening to me. Thankfully, the disc is blink-your-eyes-and-miss-it short, or I have a feeling I’d be stabbing myself in the eyes with a ballpoint pen. As it it, there’s just enough to leave a slightly intoxicating taste in your mouth (er, ears) without the sugary sweetness doing any permanent damage.

And yes, you’re reading the above correctly — YMCK’s Family Music was completely and totally constructed using the sounds of old video game consoles, particularly those ancient 8-bit Nintendo machines. The band apparently rewires (I’m guessing) the old consoles into their keyboards and then uses ’em to create some surprisingly intricate ’50s-style jazz, with a serious nod towards ragtime and the Big Band era. “POW*POW,” in particular, sounds to my ears like it could be a Cole Porter song, transposed to the mid-’80s and used as the backdrop for one of the Mario Bros. series of games.

Then there’s “SOCOPOGOGO,” which, with its badly-digitized samba rhythms, makes me think of “Girl From Ipanema”; “Synchronicity,” which pretty much announces itself as pop-jazz from the outer reaches of space; and “Tetrominon – From Russia with Blocks,” which is a funkier, more “modern”-sounding bit of swirling, fluttering J-pop (and is dedicated — yep, you guessed it — to the intensely addictive Tetris game that pretty much started the GameBoy craze). “Yellow, Magenta, Cyan and Black” runs along the same lines, a J-pop-ish, crush-like ode to the wonders of the CMYK (YMCK in Japan, I take it?) palette. Finally, the album closes with “Your Quest Is Over,” which sure sounds like a lounged-up version of the music you used to get when you completed Legend of Zelda; it goes a bit long, but it still brings back fond memories of hours logged in front of a TV, controller in hand.

Taken all together, I don’t really know what to make of this. I can’t say I’ll be listening to it often — heck, I may never listen to it again in its entirety — but at the same time, I don’t have the urge to frisbee it across the office or microwave it or do something else destructive and childish. Despite my expectations, I find myself not hating this but rather admiring it in a weird way. Maybe it’s the innocent joy of it that disarms me somewhat — while this sure sounds like a joke to me, I think the three members of YMCK (vocalist Midori Kurihara and keyboardists Tomoyuki Nakamura and Takeshi Yokemura) are passionately, intensely serious about this. Maybe somehow, that makes it okay…or maybe it’s because they’re actually decent songwriters, musically (no clue about the lyrics, beyond the chorus of “Yellow, Magenta, Cyan and Black”), and capable of turning an idea this weird into something strangely catchy.

Is Family Music for everybody, then? Got me, there. Possibly not, unless you’re already a fan of either the J-pop “genre” or utterly obsessed with old-school Nintendo games. Come to think of it, though, I may need to get a copy for my anime-fanatic/game-addicted little brother…