‘Vanilla.Strawberry.Knickerbocker glory’. So goes the words to the latest single ‘Knickerbocker’ by electro krautrockers Fujiya & Miyagi, out 25th August on Full Time Hobby. This serving of lyrical genius is the first taster of the Brighton four pieces latest album ‘Lightbulbs’ out next week on the 1st September.
Imagine that Fujiya & Miyagi are mask-wearing technicians dissecting music, keen to magnify particles of sound to create a pulsing antidote to the ordinary. They speak in tongues, using language as a rhythm, picking words that sound good, rhyming ‘technicolour’ and ‘knickerbocker’.
Their songs are incisive snapshots of real lives that make household appliances sound threatening. They are steeped in vintage music from evocative krautrock to deep soul, with wafts of early Human League synth, Floydian Englishness and the throbbing groove of Tom Tom Club, all filtered for modern times.
In total, Fujiya & Miyagi don’t really sound like anything. Instead, they sound like everything condensed into perfectly arranged three minute chunks of infectious pop music, a strange hybrid of James Brown on Valium and Wire gone pop. Or maybe Serge Gainsbourg with a PhD in electronics backed by David Byrne’s Eno-produced scratchy guitar mixed by MF Doom. It’s Darwinism gone mad.
Formed in 2000 as an electronic duo of David Best (guitars and vocals) and Steve Lewis (synths, beats, programming), they released ‘Electro Karaoke In The Negative Style’ two years later, a minimal electronic set it hangs eerily on Best’s distinctive whispered vocal. Adding bass player Matt Hainsby in 2004, they released a series of ten inch EPs that took them to the hearts of fanzine land. Gathered together these parables of personal injury, both physical and mental, made up three quarters of the well-received (Pitchfork, NME, MOJO) album ‘Transparent Things’ in 2006. Named after a Nabokov brain dump on the relationship between the past and the present. It sums them up.
The first single ‘Knickerbocker’ is the perfect set up for their third album, ‘Lightbulbs’ - imagine 11 classic ideas clicking on above your head, now with real drums in places, courtesy of Lee Adams, and the picture is complete.
"Knickerbocker mixes my sister's and my memories of watching Lena Zavaroni on TV whilst eating ice cream as children." says David Best, fresh from festival appearances everywhere from Sao Paulo to Estonia this summer.
Fujiya & Miyagi have released these tour dates:
18th September Roisin Dubh, Galway
19th September Cyprus Avenue, Cork
20th September Spiegeltent, Dublin
21st September Stiff Kitten, Belfast
24th September Bush Hall, London
25th September The Deaf Institute, Manchester
27th September Stereo, Glasgow
3rd December Pavillion Theatre, Brighton