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Coverville darlings and recently featured favorites Me First & the Gimme Gimme’s have released a new EP called “Sing in Japanese.” Coming just a few months after releasing “Go Down Under,” an EP dedicated to Australian artists, MFGG decided to do their usual business on Japanese songs. Not knowing Japanese, the lead singer, Spike Slawson took to learning each song phonetically and listened to the songs meticulously to get the pronunciation correct.
For being a bunch of English speaking dudes singing in Japanese, it is very impressive listening to their work on this EP. It makes you want to learn more about the original artists and hear the songs. “Linda Linda” ends up being a spirited little ska-reggae ditty while “C-C-C” is a straight up punk blitz and I think I actually heard some English in there somewhere. Out of the six songs on this disc, there isn’t really a bad song, however it is a bit hard to get into the music at first because you don’t know the language. After a few listens, I realized that that may be the point. Even though I have very little idea what is being said, this CD is really fun to listen to especially if you know what these guys put into it just to connect with their Japanese fans. And even though the language may be foreign to you, it certainly doesn’t stop you from at least wanting to sing along. (Great, now I have Japanese voices in my head). The band has intentions to follow these up with more EP’s covering bands in German, Spanish and possibly French. I hope MFGG’s do these “world EP’s” so I can have an even more eclectic mix of languages I don’t understand rolling around in my head.
Reviewed by Brian Kieckbusch (a.k.a. Tat2dfreq) for Coverville