BAND-MAIKO

BAND-MAIKO is a seven-song album released by Nippon Crown on 3 April 2019 under the BAND-MAIKO name — the alter-ego project that replaces the maid conceit with a maiko one and the band's English-inflected lyrics with Kyoto dialect. Its first recording, the single "secret MAIKO lips", had appeared a year earlier on 1 April 2018. The framing puts the joke first, but what is actually playing is BAND-MAID. The opening "secret MAIKO lips" takes 'secret My lips' from Just Bring It as its base and layers on Kyoto-dialect lyrics and timbres suggesting shamisen and shinobue, while the riff construction and the sheer number of drum strokes are unchanged from the parent band. The correspondence runs across the record: 'YOLOSIOSU' answers 'YOLO', 'すくりーみんぐ' answers 'Screaming'. '虎 and 虎', 'ansan' and 'Akasimahen' push the Japanese colouring further forward. They signal 'traditional' through scale choices and ornamentation while the skeleton of each song stays firmly on the hard rock side, and the playing never slackens to accommodate the costume. The closing '祇園町', which also received an official music video, takes the name of the Gion district but answers it with a broad mid-tempo stance rather than with lyricism. That a name which began as an April Fools' conceit sustains a whole album comes down to what was actually swapped: the setting and the language, and nothing at all of the standard of playing.