Plastic Tree
Puppet Show

The Japanese music market is strange and ambiguous: it is hermetically closed to the outside (except in rare, exceptional cases), yet it is populated by people (of very high quality) who know very well what is being produced in the rest of the world. For example, Plastic Tree. This band, which recently celebrated its fifteenth anniversary, has gifted Japan wonderful albums that could easily break through in the West... if they ever got there.

Anyway, let's get to the review. "Puppet Show" is Plastic Tree's second album, released in 1998, and early fans consider it their masterpiece. In this album, Plastic Tree (singer/guitarist, guitarist, bassist, and drummer) channel all their love for the highest brit-pop, new wave, and all their passions; just as Oasis did in "Definitely Maybe," which already on the cover presented a programmatic piano of their music based on recovery and evolution of what they like.

"Puppet Show" is an album of paradoxes: it's composed of a very homogeneous mix of very different things, it's played by a Japanese band that seems like the third neo-Beatles band alongside Blur and Oasis, it’s sung by Ryutaro Arimura whose voice is so sweet it gives its best in the angriest tracks (like "monophobia"), the tracks have self-destructive titles like "May Day" or "Zetsubou No Oka" ("The Hill of Despair") and equally tragic lyrics and yet sound joyful and calm, and so on. Everything is totally contradictory, everything seems deliberately constructed, it seems everything is in contrast with everything, yet the album incredibly works: Plastic Tree stage their album on a circus track (as the opening "Intro" and the closing "Circus" remind us) and present the paying audience with the attractions they want to see; they do not sell out their emotions, but like good clowns, they craft exemplary performances for melodic construction and bittersweet music-lyrics contrast to show themselves to the world dressed in ridicule and reveal only a small part of themselves.

At times it feels like listening to early Cure (like in "Gentou Kikai"), at others to Nirvana (evident in "3 Gatsu 5 Ka."), and still other bands at other times. Is it therefore an album of plagiarisms or at least of borrowings? I would say no: the flaw, but also the main asset of Japanese musicians (in general) is that they are outside the global music market, but they observe it, and thus with a cool mind can analyze it carefully, they have the time to understand its dynamics and to absorb it not as form, but as substance, and to develop it by adding their distinctive sensitivity. With due proportions, Plastic Tree is like J.S. Bach: they invented nothing, but everything is at the highest level; in subsequent albums, the band will indeed innovate, but for now, this album stands as an exercise in style of the highest lineage, and above all, it is listened to with enormous pleasure.

Fundamentally, therefore, "Puppet Show" is a wonderful album with wonderful tracks whether brit-pop existed or not, because the Japanese band managed to go further in quality. It presents a great variety of tracks, all truly beautiful, and if we hear memories here and there, we can always call them quotes and never copies, which saves Plastic Tree from the abyss of photocopy bands and makes them decidedly appreciable, especially in the eyes of a Western market where genuinely identical bands and singers are not a concern. Recommended for lovers of 90s music, of which this album is synthesis and transcendence.