Japan may have a reputation for neatly-packaged schoolgirls singing near-identical pop but it's also responsible for some of the world's most eccentric and inventive popular music. Shiina Ringo is a prime example. A member of the wonderfully-named girl group Marvellous Marbles as a teenager, she went solo in 1998 with Muzai Moratorium, an album of punky pop and darkly sexual lyrics which garnered mainstream success and critical comparisons to Bjork and Liz Phair. She capitalised on her notoriety with the video to Honno (Instinct) which saw her dressing as a nurse and getting friendly with a female patient.

The pinnacle of her career, however was the insane concept album Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana (Chlorine, Semen, Chestnut Flower). Time Magazine described it thus: "Through its 45-minute running time, KZK contracts and expands like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album; it's a bursting yet impressively seamless pastiche of influences including (but not limited to) '40s Big Band and swing, Indian sitar, avant-garde atonal music, trance-house psychedelia, church-organ fugues, electronic multiprocessed voice-overs and traditional Japanese koto, shamisen and flute music. ". It proved to be Shiina's last solo CD. In 2004 she formed the slightly more traditional rock group Tokyo Jihen. Torikoshikurou is taken from KZK, her cover of Bobby Darin / Frank Sinatra's More from 2002's Utaite Myouri.


Buy Shiina Stuff

Shiina Ringo - Torikoshikurou

Shiina Ringo - More