REVIEW: girugamesh - GO (2011)

girugamesh - GO (limited edition)
26/01/2011

girugamesh have always had a way with opening tracks - bass-heavy or techno and energetic - but right off the bat this intro is too slow, and too quiet. It doesn't bode well, but it leads nicely into the already-established Destiny.



Great sing-along vocals carry the song through the verses while good rocky guitar does its work inbetween, even enjoying a little six-stringed breakdown of sorts in the middle. The chorus is much lighter, more pleasant if you will, but it all rides smoothly along that encouraging girugamesh fire that burns underneath.

EXIT comes along to put that fire out.
Well, that's being slightly unfair. The song starts with the good get-going guitar you'd expect to find in the middle of an album, but then kicks into vocals that want to be closing a tracklist. Here is where one of the fundamental problems with this album begins: the music and the vocals do not want to mix. On several occassions - beginning here - nice underlying bass and good heavier guitars could make a pretty ok rock track, and then pop vocals come in to mix it up. And not in a good way. For this reason, EXIT comes across more as throw-away filler. It's a shame, but every album needs them.

It's easy to miss the transition between songs as COLOR bears exactly the same problem - pop vocals betraying rock music. The only consistency here is the lack of consistency. That's ... not good consistency there, boys. An easy throw-away song. Again. But just when you're losing hope, MISSION CODE happens.



So it opens with synth and gutsy check-out-my-attitude vocals, and well-trained by the rest of the album so far you prepare yourself for a promising start to quickly descend into cheerful pop, but when the rest of the band chime in with the group refrain SHAKE IT SHAKE IT DOWN you start to realise that something might actually be happening here. Finally, five tracks in, you're hit with a track that maintains its energy and vibe throughout the whole piece. A painfully simple yet totally catchy guitar riff powers through the majority of the song, leads us into a chorus which doesn't stop for breath, and then a nice three-part guitar-bass-guitar breakdown in the middle sends us back for a great outro on the home-run. Selling point of the album right here, if only they could keep it up.

The only note I wrote next to 見えない距離 (mienai kyori) was "Please, no more of this". Skip it enough times and you'll forget it exists. Slowly but surely, it's working for me. Come the end of the track I'm feeling mildly suicidal, which is when I realise with apprehension that they haven't had a ballad track yet. Oh.

再会 (saikai) takes that spot, and I will admit here that I simply dont know what to say. I don't think that such a soft ballady style suits the band musically, but lyrically the song is something else. It almost brought a tear to my eye, I'll admit that, and that makes it difficult to judge. Objectively speaking, it earns bonus points for actually sounding different to every other track so far, which is something. The ballad was a risk worth taking, but not worth repeating.



I said from the start that I would never like a song called Never Ending Story, but I admit that it's definitely catchy. It could be clever placing after the requisite ballad track, but it's a song that's difficult not to sing along to. It's just a shame that - just like EXIT and saikai - it sounds like it belongs at the end of the album.

Speaking of which, イノチノキ (inochi no ki) comes to put things to an end in a very ... similar fashion to the rest of it really. This is a song which really could be ok, if it didn't sound exactly like the majority of the tracks that preceed it.


Overall, GO is an album full of songs that could well be ok if they didn't all sound like carbon-copies of the others. The genre-mixing is finally becoming a problem too, and as a damn good rock band they need to figure out if they are just dipping a toe into pop waters or if they want to take a complete dive. If this album is mere experimentation then it was a good attempt but it exposed lessons to be learned; if it is a sign of things to come then there is going to be a problem.


★★☆☆☆