Fujiya & Miyagi // Ventriloquizzing
Fujiya & Miyagi - Ventriloquizzing.
Whoa whoa whoa there Daniel-san, before you start waxing off about the prospect of cinema’s finest sensei releasing a hip-hop opus, Fujiya & Miyagi are a quartet that indulge in “whisper-electro” and hail from, er, Brighton. This is the band’s fourth album and while 2008’s ‘Lightbulbs’ was a funkadelic smorgasboard this is very much a wedding buffet, banal and predictable. The band have retreated to the minimalistic approach of their early releases and, despite being billed as ‘funky’ and ‘full of twisted humour’, this album is as hilarious as Come Fly With Me and as funky as a rotting fish. The title track ‘Ventriloquizzing’ provides the album a promising start before nose-diving violently into insipid mediocrity, indeed ‘Tinsel & Glitter’ employs the lyric ‘we blend in with the furniture’, and you do wonder whether these guys would struggle to show up a beige DFS three-piece. The whole thing just sounds lazy and repetitive with David Best’s allegedly sexy vocals more symptomatic of laryngitis than corpulent lust. The lyrical content essentially consists of monotonous repetition of random idiomatic phrases your nan used to batter you with as a child (e.g. “there’s no use crying over spilt milk”) while some other muppet mercilessly mashes the sample button on the Yamaha key-tar / guit-board they got from Santy Claus. Unfortunately the fact is that there are numerous out there that do this far better (Hellooo Hot Chip!) and surely you peeps deserve more from your hard-earned dollar.
2/10 Mike Jarvis
