So the other day someone I follow was tweeting about finding rad shit just searching through bandcamp and I had a whole lot of time on my hands so I was clicking about and listening to some shit and casually hating doing it because I was obviously wasn’t going to find anything good. Then I stumbled on something that couldn’t be anymore awesome. Friends, out of Japan, don’t have a big internet presence, their twitter is all in Japanese and searching “Friends Japan band” yielding weird results, all I have to go off of is their bandcamp. They currently have a tape out via Second Royal Records called Young Days Forever, which you can pick up for the cheap (?) price of 1,000 yen. But they’re giving away some of their demos for freesies here. I downloaded their demos on a whim because I was interested to see what Japan’s take on surf/lo-fi/pop/shoegaze was, and I gotta tell you – I’m fucking impressed. All four songs are really rad, but ‘Make It Better‘ is the obvious standout.
‘Make It Better‘ is a complete and utterly immaculate garage-pop gem. It’s completely perfect: warm, reverb saturated melody; sunny, uncommonly catchy riff; hooks for miles; distant, echo-y vocals — all coming in under two and a half minutes? There’s something so appealing about it’s immediacy, and the simplicity is what is so intoxicating — it’s impossible not to like stuff like this. If you’re sick of Beach Boys born, Spector raised fuzzy pop jams, then it’s not for you. But if you’re not, this is ridiculously good and is one of those songs that you just listen to again and again. I think I could wax poetic about how into this song I am, but I will spare you and just urge you to download below.
mp3 | Friends - Make It Better
Tags: friends
