Zoobombs, La Vie En Jupon

By Matt Keeley

Most of the Japanese bands I listen to seem to draw their inspiration from the late ’70s. Shonen Knife are heavily influenced by The Ramones and the Buzzcocks, while POLYSICS draw from DEVO, XTC and M. The Zoobombs on the other hand, while also influenced by the ’70s, draw inspiration from the earlier part of that decade. Their new collection, La Vie En Jupon, is much closer to Black Sabbath than punk. And, as far as Sabbath goes, they are less “Paranoid” and more “Electric Funeral.”

The Zoobombs broke in the US, at least partially, after opening for the Flaming Lips, and that’s a fair comparison in terms of sound. If you like the early Lips stuff, like In a Priest-Driven Ambulance, it’s fair to say you’ll probably dig La Vie En Jupon. It’s got that psychedelic sound combined with a (well-recorded) low-fi-ness that gives a bit of grit to the recording. It’s psych, but heavy. Many of the songs are long, drawn out jams, but not to the point of really overstaying their welcome. The Zoobombs have figured out the difference between jamming to infinity (bo-ring!) and songs that are as long as they need to be.

It’s probably that nature that makes them rather hard to write about. The songs are what they are, they are what they need to be, and they are good, but not in a really quantifiable or explainable way. You can kinda point someone in the direction of the type of stuff they do—like I tried to above—but actually describing their sound? It’s more difficult.

It’s not that the Zoobombs are doing something completely new and unheralded. They’re not the Save The Green Planet of bands or even the Un Chien Andalou. Hell, if they were, that’d make ’em easier to talk about. They do stuff that other people have done, sure, but they do it very well, and that’s always something to be commended.

Who will like this record? If none of that sounded interesting, maybe you won’t. Maybe if you thought everything the Lips did before The Soft Bulletin sucked and you weren’t sold on Embryonic. (If the Zoobombs did go on a Soft Bulletin/Yoshimi career-phase, to keep in with my Flaming Lips comparison, that’d be pretty neat.). I guess what I’m saying here is that I like good music. The Flaming Lips are good. The Zoobombs are good. Good things are good, and so is La Vie En Jupon.

La Vie En Jupon was released on March 29 by MB3 Records. They will be playing at Redwood Bar & Grill in L.A. on April 1 and 2. For more on the band, please visit their website.