Vocals: 山田将司 (Yamada Masashi)
Guitar: 菅波栄純 (Suganami Eijun)
Bass: 岡峰光舟 (Okamine Kohshu)
Drums: 松田晋二 (Matsuda Shinji)

Don’t quite remember how I discovered The Back Horn, but I’m really glad that I picked up listening to these guys. Think I was randomly sampling albums on minglong BitTorrent Tracker when I found two albums by them. If anyone asked me what I listen to, this is probably the one band I would mention without any second thoughts about getting embarrassed for listening to what others might think is poor taste in music. Come on, how can you go wrong with a band that mostly plays hard rock?

Okay, their songs might be hard on the ears for some people, but do note that these guys are now popular enough to be considered more mainstream like Asian Kung-Fu Generation. I’m not really a fan of slow ballad-like music so it didn’t really take me too long to get used to. On the bright side, you will be able to listen to more of those hardcore underground rock without much problems if you get used all their hard rock tracks.

Personally, I like picking out bands if they have songs where you can actually pick up a distinctive bass line, but the real selling point to The Back Horn is the vocals. Heck, that’s probably what everyone says about bands. At least this is a case where you clearly know the reason why the vocals stand out so much here.

Anyway, Yamada’s an awesome vocalist if you’re really into emotional singing. It wouldn’t be wrong to say all of their top songs features Yamada screaming everything in his heart out. It’s just really intense. Quite surprised they don’t have any songs with touchy lyrics that promote violence though. Usually those kind of lyrics go well with angry screaming, but they manage without that. On plus side, Yamada knows how to go high and carry on notes. I think he sang with Utada Hikaru for something, but I’m not really interested her stuff to check it out. Eh, there’s still this one dirty song back from their old second album though. It’s about a man who has a girl tied up in his attic. That’s all I’ll say.

Can’t praise the rest of the band too much. They don’t pull out inspirational music all the time. The rest of the music like most of their recent album sadly fits into what you’ll categorize as radio rock or whatever you people call it. It’s still my favorite band though. Yeah, I would recommend the two albums Head Phone Children and Ningen Program. Ikiru Sainou isn’t very good, but does contain some of my favorites too.

Cobalt Blue

Namida ga Koboretara

Koe