Puffy AmiYumi
Somerville Theatre, Somerville, Massachusetts
August 24, 2005
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, November-December 2005

Hey, remember the Josie and the Pussycats movie that came out a few years ago, the one that sucked wind in the theatres for a few weeks before reaching its final resting place on DVD, where it was seized upon as a subversive cult classic by people who like things that suck? Puffy AmiYumi would like you to know that they got it all wrong. They never said so in so many words; they appear to be far too polite to do that. But even if you disregard the fact that they have an actual cartoon, all the evidence was right there at their show at the Somerville Theatre, where they subtly and perhaps inadvertently criticized the movie by latching on to everything that it did wrong and then doing it right.

Hanging out in front of the theatre before the show, I talked to a man who had brought his children along for their first rock concert, and if there were others in the same boat (the audience seemed half Japanese and half prepubescent – not mutually exclusive groups, I should point out), then a new generation of music fans got off to an excellent start. A misleading one, too: a lot of these kids are going to be severely disappointed when they discover that most bands aren’t half as much fun. Holding court underneath a banner that helpfully announced “Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Rock Show From Tokyo Japan,” Yumi Yoshimura and Ami Onuki pillaged 30 years of big-spectacle pop music, from No Doubt to Cheap Trick, Sahara Hotnights to Jellyfish. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, since former ’fish Andy Sturmer (no stranger to blatant musical borrowings himself) has written a bunch of songs for the singers, whose bubbly version of “Joining A Fan Club” gave no indication whatsoever that they had the slightest clue what the words were about, especially in the televangelism-baiting second verse.

More than anything else, though, Puffy AmiYumi came off like a bubblepunk ABBA: here were two reasonably comely foreign women singing in dead unison – no harmonies whatsoever, and each only sang a handful of solo lines throughout the entire evening – while the men behind them played a lovingly imitated but subtly askew amalgam of the last few decades’ worth of pop music. In between songs, they read their English stage banter off of cheat sheets (Ami got a huge laugh by starting one segment totally at random with “By the way…,” so she turned it into a recurring joke) or, more often, chatted in their native tongue with Japanese members of the audience. Still, everything about their songs was outsized and fiendishly, cleverly kid-friendly in a way that needed no translation. By the time they closed with the keyboard-driven “Asia No Junshin,” which could have been a New Pornographers tune, Puffy AmiYumi had provided 90 minutes’ worth of fun, fluffy and utterly pointless rock and roll that succeeded despite itself. The kids are alright.

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