Ballsack’s J-Pop Midlife Crisis , pt. 2: 眉村ちあき

Starting sometime last year, I started really getting into Japanese music. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I had always thought I hated singing in Japanese. Turns out I don’t! In the night threads for the following week, I’ll write a little about each of my favorite artists that I’ve discovered, and share a streaming album for you to dutifully ignore.

Chiaki Mayumura (眉村ちあき) is someone I discovered relatively recently. The usual way I go about discovering new J-Pop is just by poking around on Ototoy (a digital storefront that has a lot of Japanese music): going through the recommended, and customers who bought this also bought this. Unfortunately, that tends to favor artists with the most striking album covers. I do remember seeing the cover of Mayumura’s major label debut, 『めじゃめじゃもんじゃ』 (Meja-Meja-Monja), several times, but for some reason I didn’t bother to give it a good listen.

In fact, it wasn’t until I listened to her 2022 live album, 『眉村ちあきの音楽隊 (at 中野サンプラザ 2021.9.17)』(Mayumura Chiaki no ongaku-tai (at Nakano Sunpuraza 2021.9.17)) that I really started to pay attention. Normally, Mayumura uses backing tracks that she created, though she also plays guitar, but in that live album (and Blu-ray), she has a full band for a good portion of the concert. Now, she’s become another one of my favorite artists (and, like Seiko Oomori, a considerable strain on my wallet). In contrast to Oomori, I would classify Mayumura as much more whimsical. She has a traditionally better singing voice. For instance, she opens her 2020 album 『日本元気女歌手』 (Nihon genki on’na kashu) with “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen”, the Queen of Night’s aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. As seemingly not classically trained 24 year old pop singer, that takes some really chutzpah. She begins her concert here with it, much to the amusement of the crowd.

I’m pretty sure she started out her career in a now defunct idol group, and then in 2017-18, she released three CD-R albums independently, and all of those, with better recorded vocals and some more robust instrumentation, can be found on the 2019 album 『ぎっしり歯ぐき』 (Gisshiri haguki). That album is quite a treat, and has some of my favorite songs on it, but I would still recommend 『めじゃめじゃもんじゃ』 as a starting point. It’s probably her most solid album.

Oh, I should also mention that Mayumura will be at this year’s SXSW. It seems like she’s actually performed in the US a couple times, mainly on cons, but it’s pretty cool that’s she’s performing at a more major festival. I’m not going, of course.