bass :	guitar :	vocal :
Shunsaku Okuda	Ryou Matsui	Tomoko Kawase (TOMMY)

With me it's rarely ever a case of love at first listen. Most of the bands you see listed on this site took me a while to truly appreciate. After an initial phase of sampling a variety of their music, I eventually grew to enjoy it more and more. It's a gradual thing that takes anywhere from a month to a year. However The Brilliant Green are one of the few bands that didn't take me a while to warm up to. The very first time I heard their hit song There Will Be Love There I was instantly drawn to them even though I had never heard of them before. Music listeners in Japan must have felt the same since the song became a long lasting chart topper and won them nationwide fame.

The Brilliant Green (sometimes contracted to simply BuriGuri) is a pretty new band on the scene having made their major debut in fall of 1997. They were formed in February 1995. Matsui and Okuda who already had their own band met Tomoko who was then singing at a live music club and asked her to join them. For two years since they played independantly until being picked up by a major record company. After an initial success with limited releases through certain CD shops, they released two maxi-singles later that year. Bye-Bye Mr. Mug and Goodbye and Good Luck. Both did fairly, but nothing extraordinary. It was in the Spring of 1998 that they made it big with There Will Be Love There which was used as the theme song for the TV drama Love Again. Their 4th single Tsumetai hana released soon afterwards was equally successful and established a stronger fan base. Then their first full album was released that summer and sold over a million copies in a couple of days. The album which was well recieved further proved that this band was no one-hit wonder.

Their style is rock, but more in the classical sense. Not at all heavy. So their music is well recieved by all types of music listeners. But they're mostly popular with the younger crowd. Their music takes a lot of different influences of 60's and 70's American rock balancing it out with a modern British folk-grunge sound. But lately they've also been playing a lot with psychadelia and college alterna-rock in their music.

You may hear people point out that they use a lot of English lyrics. Nearly all of their songs contain far more English than the average Japanese song. Almost half of them are entirely in English. But for a Japanese band to attempt entire songs in English is a daring move, especially if they're not really fluent with the language. Thankfully the lyrics are perfectly understandable and at times they're even surprisingly poetic. Tommy's English pronunciation isn't bad either. It's not that good mind you, but better than the norm. Still the composition of English lyrics isn't perfect, but I am being knitpicky about this. I know more than a few English speaking fans who are amused by lines such as the one in Tsumetai hana that is supposed to to say "I'm feeling like myself again, I'm feeling better now", but the song omits the "like" part unintentionally changing the entire meaning of the sentence to something more humorous. But those kinds of occurences aren't too common at all since Tommy's English lyrics are written in a relatively natural sounding style.

I know I often go on and on about how flashy showmanship is one of the things that I feel makes Japanese music performance more exciting to watch than most of today's American music. But even I have to admit that sometimes the visual aspect of performance becomes overemphasized with certain bands. So even though I love visual bands, still it's nice to see bands like The Brilliant Green where it's all about the music.

 

Mason's Favorite Album Terra 2001 Before it was released I had previously wrote on this page that as good as the new album would be, it couldn't possibly live up to the fondness I had for their debut album. Looks like the Brilliant Green have proven me wrong. From the moment I bought this CD and popped it into my CD player, this one took over. Any fears I may have had earlier in the year that the band had already run out of freshness were totally washed away. This is one of the freshest albums I've bought in a long time. If it weren't for half of the songs being in Japanese or Tommy's Japanese accent when singing in English, this could easily pass for an American or British alternative rock album. Although that kind of statement might mislead since this is far better than what I've heard from most American alternative rock groups in a long time. Most of the group's songs used to have a similar folk-grunge sound which was usually played straight and narrow. Wonderful music, but with little variety. That means individually all of their songs were breathtaking, but when played together, started to feel the same. There were some exceptions, but most of the songs had a similar mood. I had no real complaints though since it was all so well done. But that's not even an issue with Terra 2001. There's so much variety and fun packed into this album and each and every song is stylistically very distinct. Tommy's vocals for example sound a little bit different in every song whereas it used to be the same from song to song. Her singing is so awesome now. I don't know how it happened but the trio have really learned to interject a wider range of styles into their music. In addition to their trademark 70's folk-rock sound they're also a little bit 60's psychadelic rock, a little bit 80's glam, a little bit 90's punk and a lot 90's brit college rock. If you didn't think The Brilliant Green had any new tricks up their sleeves, you gotta get a load of this album.

(1999/9/8) 1. BYE! MY BOY! 2. Ai no ai no hoshi 3. Brownie the cat 4. CALL MY NAME (English ver.) 5. Maybe we could go back to then (76 ver.) 6. SEPTEMBER RAIN 7. FUNNY GIRLFRIEND!! 8. Round and Round 9. Sono supiido de 10. CAN'T STOP CRYIN' 11. Nagai Tameki no you ni