On the surface, for someone who may be idly clicking through last.fm looking for new bands to listen to, plingmin looks very much like your typical one-off Japanese pop group–that is, someone who will release one album, maybe two, before fading into pop obscurity. Their profile pictures are bright and bubbly, their vocalist is a female, and (the kicker) they’ve even done an anime theme song. The first glances into one of their videos would most certainly confirm this notion, too.
But beneath the surface, plingmin is much more than a pop group. In fact, it would be a mistake to even consider calling them that, even casually. Their self-titled full-length album is almost shockingly good, and unexpectedly diverse in ways that may not even be appropriate for a band this young. Color me surprised.
“This world is yours,” the aforementioned anime theme, is by no means the standard for the rest of the material on plingmin; along with “Go ahead!”, it stands as one of the only tracks that sounds “mainstream” enough to be used as an anime theme. Rather than “This world” defining the sound of the rest of the album (read: sellout), it does its thing and then moves on to nearly completely different kinds of music. Like I said already… on the surface, it might fine to assess plingmin as a pop act, but this is merely one of the types of music they’ve tackled.
“This world” included–since you can hear fragments of it even there–it would be more fair to compare plingmin to groups like toddle, or even pre-Cue uinona. The mid-album “Thank you for the sadness” is almost a dead ringer for the material on uinona’s 1 release, to tell the truth. Then there are even bits of what could almost pass as detroit7 (in “Car#27″) or a post-rock act like miaou… believe it or not. It’s a feast of musical experimentation and differing styles, but there’s still common threads tying all the music together, making it hard to listen to this release and consciously say “this is way different.” But this widely differing music can leave you with the feeling that the group isn’t well-defined–that they haven’t completely figured out what they want to do just yet.
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Listening to the album opener “Ima, Kimi e” is definitely the fastest way to get clued in on what this band is really about. It’s a mellow blend of shoegaze and pleasant indie rock; vocalist Mayumi has a voice that is neither grating nor sweet (although she’s capable of taking on a more cutesy singing style at times, as evident in the appropriately Engrish-y “Thank you for the sadness”). There’s also something to be said about the simplicity of the music–less is more, in this case, and the songs are pleasant in their lacking of electronic additions or editing.
plingmin is a band that you should most definitely look into. Their music is solid, and there’s more to them beneath the surface than you might think. They’re good for post-rock fans, shoegaze fans, indie rock fans… and music fans in general. Frankly, they’re just plain good, and as long as they can better define themselves, I think they have a bright future ahead of them.