The Great Crossover Potential

How many times have we heard another Band saying they're 'Big in Japan'?...

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE WE HEARD AN Other Band saying they’re ‘Big in Japan’? A lot, frankly. And The Yellow Monkey are no different: “We’re really big in Japan,” they say. Cleverly, though, they say it in Japanese, because they are actually [I]from [/I]Japan. Beat that, Shampoo!

‘Punch Drunkard’ is their seventh album. The last (and first commercially available in the UK) was called ‘Sicks’ because it was their sixth album. They number four and they have big hair, loud clothes and huge guitars because they like their rock to be hysterically, slobberingly over-the-top.

So this is remedial rawk with a side order of weirdness thanks to the fact that all but four of these 14 tracks have Japanese titles. One of the English tracks is called ‘Sugar Fix’. During it, Kazuya Yoshii sings – apropos his ‘Sugar Fix’, aka his bay-beee – “[I]There’s nothing that my dental hygienist could say that would make me cut down[/I]”, and the lad has a point.

He also has a way of wailing and roaring which, when aligned to his fellow Monkeys’ sturdy metal dynamics, can get rather wearing after a few hours of headbanging argy bargy.

Mind you, track 12 is brilliant, a high-velocity glam workout which incorporates roughly 17 tunes and leaps out of nowhere (ie, near the end), which means that ‘Punch Drunkard’ sounds absolutely fantastic. Once.

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