The Nelories
Hello Recording Club – April 1993 (Hello CD)

In the wake of the more genuinely enjoyable j-pop that has come to American ears in the past several years, this EP comes off as kind of quaint, although when it first came out it was a cool little oddball thing. John Flansburgh's Hello Recording Club issued this as its second installment, marking the debut of the Nelories, whose sound can be described as a meeting place for They Might Be Giants and Shonen Knife, but with far, far less accurate pronunciation.

The four songs are sprightly pop songs with typically "funny" Japanese/English pop song titles ("Waiting," "Banana," "Bubbly," "Plastic Sky"), and they're all fun and memorable. I wish I could find my Hello newsletters from back in the day to determine personnel info – I'm pretty sure the Nelories were (are) sisters, and it sounds like the EP was produced by Flans and/or Linnell, with very TMBG-sounding drum programming and accordion. Whatever the case may be, it's one of the Hello issues that I remember most, and was one that I listened to a lot at the time.

I guess my feeling now is that a little j-pop tends to go a pretty long way, and furthermore I think that the artists are fully aware of how "odd and out there" they are coming across. I would be willing to bet that your average j-pop artist has a pretty damn good command of English and knows exactly how to say stuff weird just to get American listeners to think it's funny.

Ah, yes. The Nelories definitely have a very real lack of understanding of English, but it doesn't come off as funny or annoying, rather, it's just the way they pronounce things and string words together. The songwriting is very cheesy in a good way, and makes the language irrelevant. In fact, I'd have preferred Japanese lyrics. Anyway, the highlight here is "Bubbly," which sounds like "Girls" by the Beastie Boys crossed with "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

"Plastic Sky" sounds very Shonen Knifey; it's easily the most produced track here. "Banana" is also produced, sounds like what Mono Puff would have sounded like if Flansburgh had formed it around the time of Lincoln. "Waiting" is the opener and it's a fairly annoying little accordion number that serves more or less as a good intro to "Banana." Ultimately, it's not hard to see why the Nelories never took America by storm, but it's still a good deal better than, say, 98 Degrees or something like that.

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Review by Howlin' Mountbatten