Punks in Vegas | Images: One's Truth, Take Mind's Place, Nicotine, Just Chronicle, Across The Universe July 1, 2016 at theGAME (Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan)

My senior year of high school I went to a Mustard Plug / The Pilfers concert at a hole-in-the-wall venue in Portland that I had never been to before, and that probably shut down shortly after. Opening the show was a band from Japan called Nicotine, who (in my opinion) blew the other two bands away. For everyone that is unfamiliar with them, they are (similar to Hi-Standard), who also sing in English. Over the years I’ve downloaded their many releases, and always enjoyed their fast technical punk-rock that would please any diehard 90s Fat-Wreck fan. I have often hoped they would return to tour America at some point (after all, their albums have been released by Asian Man), and I think I’ve put them on my dream Punk Rock Bowling lineup several times, but unfortunately it has never happened. It has always been a dream of mine to go see them play again in their home of Japan, and I was finally able to achieve that earlier this month.

An odd thing I learned about shows in Japan was the pre-show ticketing process. On the flyer for the show, there was an email address to contact about tickets. It seemed straightforward enough, I assumed I would email them and they would point me to a site to buy tickets. However, after I emailed them requesting two tickets I received the following response:

“We have accepted a reservation for your ticket. You can admission in advance fee”. It turns out that in Japan when you want tickets to a show, all you have to do is email about them and they’re held for you. You’re just sort of “on your honor” to show up if you commit to a show. I can’t imagine this working out well for bands in Vegas.

The venue the show was held at was called “theGAME” and located in Shibuya, one of the many neighborhoods of Tokyo. It is about equal in size to The Dive Bar in Las Vegas, a capacity of maybe 200-300. Much like Vegas shows too, there were maybe 50 people there, standing around arms-crossed when I showed up. I was impressed by how well the show ran, (much like everything else in Japan) being exactly on time. All bands had 25 minute sets (roughly 6 songs), with 15 minute setups between bands, and no one ran over or under that. Between bands only American punk-rock was played, and while there I heard Offspring, Lagwagon, Sum-41, and Blink-182 amongst others on the PA.

Nicotine took the stage 5th, and quite a few more people had shown up by this point. I was super excited when I saw their setlist and recognized almost all the songs. Kicking off the show was “Black Flys,” which was off their Asian-Man release Samurai Shot. More recent songs “Mest” (I don’t think this is named after the band), and “Remember” are both super catchy, but the highlight of the night for me was “Soundquake” a song from their album of the same title. I guess I had forgotten how much I liked that song, but damn if it isn’t catchy. The chorus is: “Have you ever seen it with unblinking eye, have you ever heard about ‘Soundquake’. If you see the light with annoying sound, I can say for sure it’s ‘Soundquake.'” To be honest, I have no idea what the hell this song is about, but that didn’t stop me from singing along anyway.

I realized at the show while trying to take notes, that it’s pretty difficult to write a review when you don’t know what anyone is saying. That being said, here are some observations about the rest of the show:

While Nicotine has a 90’s Fat-Wreck kind of sound, the other bands were younger, probably by about 10 years, and seemed to fit stylistically into mid-2000s pop-punk like Fall Out Boy.
English expressions like “Are you ready” were thrown out quite often to pump the crowd up.
Between song banter definitely seems to last forever when you don’t know what is being said. It was probably only a few seconds but seemed as long as a NOFX show.
Many jokes were told.
Guitar throws were very plentiful.
The urban legend that circle pits in Japan rotate backwards simply isn’t true.
While I had hoped to see some usually timid Japanese people completely “lose their shit,” the show was basically very similar to shows at home.

-Aaron Mattern | https://www.flickr.com/photos/akmofoto/