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For their debut disc, Demonstrations of Live in Japan the three members of Live in Japan pull together roughly an EP and a half's worth of emo-tinged pop and rock songs.  True to the emo rock mind-set, the bulk of the group's compositions are laden with the languorous instrumental work and deeply personal lyrics that have more or less come to define the genre.  On the lyrical front, the album would seem to have come by its melancholy thread rather honestly, choosing to investigate a decidedly somber collection of themes.  "Without" (I thought I saw you sitting/ I thought I would approach you/ It's been so long/ I've never been without before) is a sparsely worded, yet remarkably vivid, treatise on relational isolation and loneliness.  "Squad Car" tells the story of a close friend's arrest.  And "Home Remedy" (Under a thin blue lip line/ A smile is slowly draining) and "Hospital" (The back of my neck/ The heat of your breath/ Floating over/ My left hand shoulder) paint intensely poignant images of death and dying.

If the album features a mostly stirring set of word pictures and themes, its musical side is a bit less uniform.  A good number of the songs, such as "Home Remedy," although graced with an engaging atmospheric attribute, are rendered mostly listless by virtue of their overly repetitious melodic structures and lack of dynamic variation.  Others, such as "Mea Culpa" and "Before I Go" are beset by an equally lackluster vocal delivery that frequently tends to veer off tune.  On the positive side, however, entries like "King of the Laundromat" (She takes black and white photographs/ We are to be married in July/ She pulls the paper from orange crayons/ Uses them until nothing's left) exhibit a pleasantly varied musical attack that ties together nicely with the song's oblique lyrical inclination  Similarly, the airy "Without" is a study in both mood and moderation, unwinding its dark textures over the course of the song, rather than all at once.  And the best of album "5," with its low, twangy guitar lines and catchy start-stop drum rhythms, is laced with the hook-driven pop sensibility that informs the best work of modern day pop revivalists like Teenage Fanclub and the Elms.  While the preponderance of weaker material on Demonstrations clearly works to relegate the album to less than stellar status, the members of Live in Japan still exhibit enough lyrical skill and pop/rock know-how to warrant an optimistic outlook for future releases.

Bert Gangl 8/28/2001