Matthew Kelly1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear
#121: Chai – Chai (2023)
MATT KELLY was once a fan of Japanese pop band Chai but their first album has completely killed his enthusiasm as their fake funk give up subverting convention to become that convention.
With their first three albums being titled PINK, PUNK and WINK, Chai’s failure to name their fourth album WANK is only the first act of creative cowardice on this album, which regardless of what the name is, actually is wank.
Rarely have I seen artwork lie this hard. I love this exuberant photo of the band, bursting with joy and promising a world of fun inside. Instead you’ll find astonishingly poor music like ‘Game’ which approaches “How dare you charge people money to hear this” levels of lameness as vocalist Mana arses around over a blatantly unfinished dollar-store house track. It’s not even mixed properly.
I’m not enjoying writing this. Just a few months after Janelle Monae’s The Age Of Pleasure, we’re again seeing an immensely talented artist potentially pissing their status away by making music that Just. Doesn’t. Matter.
I was a big fan of Chai’s first two albums and got excited about their potential as a force in the future of pop and rock. I urge you to check out early classics like ‘Neo’ and ‘Choose Go’ – there was weirdness, hooks and attitude to spare in their bold blend of punk, new wave and J-pop.
But with third album Wink, the band made a strange decision to go into watered-down R&B, making for a largely pointless album with none of that memorable Chai character. I chalked it down to a genre experiment that didn’t pay off, and looked forward to them moving on from it. Instead, they seem to have decided that the problem with Wink is that it wasn’t watered down enough.
This self-titled dunger sounds like demos – and not good demos – for a run-of-the-mill J/K-pop band. Excellent rhythm section Yuna and Yuuki are criminally wasted, having nothing to do as the band pisses about with generic, dull city-pop throwbacks like ‘Para Para’.
The record also features one of the classic red flags of listening to garbage in that it’s only 29 minutes but feels overlong. Opening track ‘Matcha’ goes on forever at three and a half minutes – there’s just so little to sink your ears into on these minimal, melodically cliched, foot-dragging R&B numbers. Listen to a song like ‘Karaoke’ – those drums are so dry and nasty, the sounds thin and mired in tropes. It’s so sad to see the act that began as an awesome subversion of the kawaii aesthetic and J-pop conventions becoming those conventions.
It’s that sad moment when an artist becomes someone you don’t recognise anymore. But as I’ve said before and probably will keep saying as long as this list continues, the legendary David Bowie made Tonight and then followed it with Never Let Me Down and Tin Machine, yet remained legendary. Chai are still young and hopefully will have lots of chances to make better music, but if this and Wink are what the band is now, I’m no longer a fan. It would be forgettable if it wasn’t so depressing.
