m-flo - Neven 13 March 2013
I have said before that I started uploading one album a day with the intent of introducing people to both older albums and Japanese artists they may not have ever heard of. So this upload is a rare change of form, the first time I’ve uploaded something which came out this year. I was simply surprised to see it was not available here. I’m about to go into one of my common long-winded rants, so the ‘TL;DR’ version is this: m-flo is awesome and so is this album.Often I like to provide some biography for the artist whose music I’m uploading, but m-flo is one of the most successful Japanese hip-hop groups in history. I’ll assume most of you have some idea of who they are—not that it will prevent me from rambling on about them. But what I’d like to try and do is frame the album Neven from the view of a fan who has followed their career from the start and how it stacks up against their previous albums.The first, immediately noticeable aspect of Neven is how it continues to carry on traces of Planet Shining, m-flo’s debut album from 2000. m-flo was undeniably a different group then. They were a trio: emcee Verbal Young-Ki Yu, DJ Taku Takahashi, and Elisabeth Sakura Narita, better known as Lisa. The music of Planet Shining reflected their mixture of abrasive urban sounds and soulful youth. The bright-red, photo negative album cover featuring the three members sitting among a faceless crowd makes a visually blunt statement: this was three people who were dead-set on doing their own thing in a country where conformity is the norm. But where’s the connection to Neven? You can hear it in the first ten seconds of both: the albums open with prologue of female narration that leads into the second track, and both albums have short tracks of dialogue laced throughout. The sonic nature of Planet Shining sounds a world apart from the house music of Neven but the both share an atmospheric structure built by the weaving narration.m-flo’s second album, Expo Expo, came a year later in 2001 and shared a similar structure. It is notable for showing the earliest signs of m-flo moving in the direction of the house/club music style of Neven, but also because it would be their last album as a trio. Lisa left the group on bad terms and began her solo career. Fortunately though they would reconcile later and begin collaborating again, but m-flo has remained a duo of Verbal and Taku ever since.Lisa’s departure triggered m-flo’s series of collaborations with other Japanese musicians: BoA, Bonnie Pink, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Crystal Kay, Bennie K, Miliyah Katoh, Emi Hinouchi, Akiko Wada, Ryohei Yamamoto, Sowelu, Diggy-mo, Yoshika, Namie Amuro—between 2003 and 2009 m-flo worked with more guest vocalists on their albums than I can name. This proclivity to bring in a plethora of vocalists continues with Neven, albeit with one interesting difference that I will mention later. Neven features:* Miliyah Kato* Minmi* Minami* Matt Cab* Kiko Mizuhara* UnicoThe last two make their debut on Neven actually. The difference I mentioned is that Neven does not explicitly mention the vocalists in the song titles. This is only the second time m-flo has omitted that information from the track titles; the first time was their 2012 album Square One. That album came at the end of a five year hiatus during which Verbal and Taku worked on solo projects. To be completely honest, I felt like Square One was disappointing. Verbal and Taku admitted that they were still somewhat in the mindset of being solo artists when creating the album, and there is a lack of overall cohesion that I find in their previous albums. Neven does not suffer from this problem. It’s release came so soon after Square One because the Verbal and Taku had rediscovered their ‘zone’ as a duo and were able to compose and create music with the pace and focus you see in albums like 2004’s Astromantic and 2005’s Beat Space Nine. In fact, m-flo was writing some songs for Neven just prior to the release of Square One.This all leads to Neven, their seventh album referenced by the name, having the sonic focus of older albums like Beat Space Nine mixed with the atmospheric structure of Planet Shining and the effective collaboration of Astromantic. Personally I think it’s a terrific album, but I admit to being biased as I love m-flo.Sorry for the lengthy rambling and ranting, as well as the later than usual upload. I hope you like Neven. And tomorrow I have two albums ready to upload instead of just one, for a reason I’ll explain then. Until then, as always, enjoy!