Half Japanese - Hear the Lions Roar

Pitchfork 69

For over four decades now, Half Japanese have been one of indie rock’s most reliable sources of positivity. Jad and David Fair started the band in the mid ’70s as a giddy experiment in the limits of guitar pop songwriting. They didn’t tune their instruments properly and they chose not to play chords, embracing the infinite possibilities that the electric guitar can offer if you approach it without regard for the patterns and scales most players find themselves locked into. Freed from the shackles of traditional pop songwriting, the Fair brothers embraced something a little shaggier, using their freedom as the basis for ebullient songs about love and monsters, as David once put it, each as unrepentantly gleeful as the gap-toothed grin of a young child. Their 2014 album was, appropriately, called Overjoyed.

All of that innocent abandon is still at the heart of the band on their sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar. Within the first 30 seconds of the album opener “Wherever We Are Led,” over brillo-scoured guitar work, Fair begins wailing, “Refuse to bend, refuse to break, only good we will take.” It scans as an unwitting mission statement for the record—a promise to follow their their muse and tell the good news through posi-pop sloganeering and slapstick surrealism. There’s little on the record in the way of anxiety or fear, unless you count the sci-fi Southern rock of “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” which recounts a bungled science classroom prank that results in the unwitting creation of bloodthirsty worms several stories tall—all soundtracked by the gentle wheeze of a distant slide guitar. It’s somewhere between genius and moronic, which is pretty much where the band have always set up camp.

As the years have gone by, they’ve become more proficient as musicians, transforming their early instrumental scribbles into legible riffs, at least if you squint at them right. Jad even admitted in a recent interview that even tunes his guitar sometimes. This goes a step further on Hear the Lions Roar, on which Jad is only credited with vocals, and the rest of the current lineup—John Sluggett, Gilles-Vincent Rieder, Jason Willett, and Mick Hobbs, all on multiple instruments—beef up the vibrant playing that’s come to define the last couple decades of Half Japanese releases into more standard indie rock.

The taut shuffle of “On the Right Track” or the gentle lilt of “Do It Now,” in particular, feel compact, tight, and forceful in a way that their material often hasn’t. But because they built their name on idiosyncrasy and spontaneity, that straightforwardness of Hear the Lions Roar can cut both ways. Some of Fair’s bug-eyed mantras feel even more impactful when the music can swell in tandem, but there’s also the threat of just sounding like a very good rock band than like the joyful mess that they can be.

But whatever the result of the newfound muscle, they never really slip into mundanity, solely on the strength of Fair’s voice and songwriting. After all these years, his wiry voice is still hits every song with a shock that’s equal parts joy buzzer and defibrillator, each barely in-key bleat alternating between laughable and life-affirming. That’s a big part part of what makes Fair’s music worth following, both with Half Japanese and on his own. He’s always succeeding in spite of his limitations—even when they’re self-imposed. As with all of their records, the worst you’ll come away with is a smile, and most days that’s enough.