YAMA NO ATTCHAN (LP)

Limited vinyl LP repressing. 1984 album from the female Japanese punk/pop trio. Yama no Att-chan is the second album released by Shonen Knife and is almost exclusively in Japanese. The album was named after Atsuko, their drummer, the honorific "-chan" being added. Thus the title a bit of a pun, since the drummer's name is, when rendered Japanese style, Yamano Atsuko. Heavily influenced by 1960s girl groups, pop bands, The Beach Boys, and early punk rock bands, such as the Ramones, Shonen Knife crafts stripped-down songs with simplistic lyrics sung both in Japanese and English. Despite their pop-oriented nature, the trio maintains a distinctly underground garage rock sound rooted in edgy instrumentation and D.I.Y. aesthetics, which over the course of their long career has earned them a solid, worldwide cult following and made avid fans out of seminal '90s alternative rock bands such as Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Redd Kross.