Honolulu Rush

2005 debut mini-album "Kyōshū Nostalgia," originally released on New York’s Beekeeper Records, founded by Nick Sylvester (later of Mr. Dream and Godmode Music) and Matt LeMay (later of Get Him, Eat Him). The 12-song, 19-minute genre-hopping bilingual song-cycle saw kind reviews from places such as Stylus Magazine and Splendid (“a composer who can stuff a 90-second pop miniature with more ideas than many of his peers offer on an entire album”). The album’s single “Neoplasticism vs. De Stijl” was included on the compilation CD accompanying the final 2005 issue of Japanese indie music magazine Beikoku Ongaku.

From the original press release:

It's 1988, and David Marx is ten years old, plopped on a couch watching The Wonder Years. 80s American culture was extremely nostalgic for the 60s, and The Wonder Years was not only a show about the 60s – it was the show about dealing with 60s nostalgia. Between television and oldies radio programming, 60s nostalgia had become unavoidable, and there in Pensacola, Florida, the young Marx soaked it all up, his only respite coming in the form of Contra and Blades of Steel on the once cutting-edge Nintendo Entertainment System. Now Marx is 25. He's done the 90s American indie guitar rock thing, and these days he's been studying in Tokyo while paying the bills with freelance translating work and stints with mags like Beikoku Ongaku and Tokion. Everything would be just swell, except for years now Marx has grown increasingly nostalgic for his 80s childhood – and for the 60s nostalgia that defined that era's popular culture. It is this cultural-emotional feedback loop of "nostalgia nostalgia" that inspired Marx's debut mini-LP Kyoshu Nostalgia ("kyoshu" is Japanese for "nostalgia"), a fast-paced 60s psych-pop trip through the lens of a NES-playing, globally aware American twentysomething. You'll hear the familiar and intensely melodic traces of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Zombies, Free Design, the Kinks, and the Sonics, but what makes Kyoshu Nostalgia so compelling is Marxy's nostalgic-nostalgic vantage point: he's playing with genre without destroying it. He's introducing rhythmic and musical figures that would dizzy the Wilson brothers, but without sacrificing the accessibility of his melodies. He's imprinting Japanese orchestral pop and shoegazer noise onto the Western pop of the 60s, while acknowledging that, of course, 60s pop came first. Songs are highly stylized without being parodies, and most importantly, the past is confronted without being simply regurgitated. Marx has taken the 60s musical tradition with which we're all quite familiar, and he's documented his struggle to make the era something of his own. Simply put, the album's as impressive as it is irresistible, smart as it is emotionally potent, and you can't say that about much pop music these days at all.

Kyoshu Nostalgia (full album)

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Honolulu Rush

R. Stenson

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