Sometimes, the band is the standout performance.

What’s up, everyone! Welcome back to yet another installment of the J-Music Exchange/Rate! Your monthly source of Japanese music album reviews brought to you by yours truly and my good friend and fellow Japanese music fan Al from Omunibasu. If you’ve been rocking with us for a while now, then you already know the deal, but if this is your first time here and you’re not entirely sure what the Exchange/Rate is all about, please give the following primer a quick readー

The Exchange/Rate is a tandem album review series conducted every month by yours truly alongside my good friend and fellow Japanese music fan Al (from Omunibasu). Each month we decide on a specific theme with which our reviews would revolve around. We then pick out albums from our respective libraries which we think best coincides with that theme. We will then give the album we chose to the other person and vice versa (exchange), after which we then listen to and subsequently review the album we were given (rate). This project has not only allowed us to explore music beyond our libraries, but it provides an opportunity for us to see our favorite albums from a different point of view. It is our hope that this series is able to do the same for you and that you either find a new artist to try out and/or we offer you a fresh take on one of *your* favorite albums 

Al and I take turns deciding on a theme for our reviews every month, and for September we’re handing the reins back over to him. And I gotta say, I thought he came up with a pretty interesting one this time around, as we’ll be talking about albums that we feel exemplify an excellent group effort. Now, what exactly do we mean by that? Well, I don’t necessarily think it’s as simple as picking out an album where everyone involved is just really good at what they do. Rather, we’re looking at releases where you can genuinely feel the importance of everyone’s contributions to the finished work. Where the drums, bass, guitars, vocals, keys, production, or whatever else might be involved all feel integral to what makes the album what it is, and where taking any one of those elements away would leave you with something noticeably different.

Of course, how that group effort manifests can vary quite a bit from one album to another, which is also what makes this such a fun theme to explore. For my pick, I went ahead and gave Al Fooocus by Aooo, a release that I think demonstrates the concept particularly well with how each of its members gets an opportunity to bring their own musical identity into the fold while still working together as one cohesive unit. You can check out what Al thought of that over at the Omunibasu Substack!

Al, meanwhile, decided to send me Mani Mani by CRCK/LCKS, an album made by a group of musicians who, as we’re about to find out, have quite the collective pedigree between them. And perhaps more importantly for today’s discussion, they might just have a thing or two to teach us about what happens when you put that much individual talent in the same room.

Let’s get into it!

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CRCK/LCKS (クラックラックス) is a five-piece Japanese band formed in 2015, consisting of vocalist/keyboardist Oda Tomomi, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Konishi Ryo, guitarist Inoue Mei, bassist Ochi Shunsuke, and drummer Ishikawa Shun. Comprised of musicians with backgrounds predominantly rooted in jazz, the group brings together their respective expertise to create a style that freely moves between jazz, pop, R&B, and other contemporary influences, with an emphasis on intricate ensemble work and experimentation.

＜Ｍａｎｉ Ｍａｎｉ (まにまに)＞
(＊Spotify link to the full album)

CDJapan Affiliate Link(s):
Mani Mani / CRCK/LCKS

＜T ｒａｃｋｌｉｓｔ＞

０１・あらわらわ/arawarawa
０２・レンタル神様/rental kamisama
０３・真空パック/shinkuu pack
０４・Psycho Sky
０５・T.I.C.
０６・沖に出たら/oki ni detara
０７・枝と嵐/eda to arashi
０８・バラライカ/balalaika
０９・つまらない毎日/tsumaranai mainichi
１０・Tiny Mirror
１１・7月27日
１２・You say goodbye
１３・manimani

Ａｌ：Ever since I first discovered CRCK/LCKS a few years ago, I’ve always found them to be a pretty fascinating band. It’s possible that I didn’t fully grasp what they were all about at first, but their two Temporary albums were ones I’d always come back to randomly, just because of how avant-garde the songs were and their overall irregular take on pop music. One moment you could be hearing a groovy cacophony of guitar, bass, and even the saxophone going wild, and another moment can have you getting lost in an ethereal soundscape. They may be a group that I have an on-and-off listening relationship with, but their ability to come up with this nutty stuff never fails to catch my attention.

And I do feel like that’s why I came to enjoy their most recent album, Manimani, a lot.

I’ll admit that the thought process for this month’s theme was based on how much more perceptive I’ve become when I listen to music, with me often trying to mentally separate the instrumental and/or vocal performances in a song, in order to really appreciate everyone’s efforts individually (and thus, understanding how well it all gels together). And with a band like CRCK/LCKS, who seem to display so many different elements in their music, it’s hard not to take interest in the mesmerizing or pleasant oddities they’ve been known for.

Especially considering how varied the song selection is on Manimani, as the band showcases a more rambunctious side in the opener’s ending sequence (“arawarawa”), the unbelievably calming jazzy nature of “edatoarashi”, or how the bouncy and weirdly hyper traits in song like “bararaika” made it a standout song during my initial go-through with the album… it’s a record that feels very familiar if you’re an existing fan of the band, yet their efforts still feel super fresh with how surprisingly varied it is, style-wise.

Another reason why I might’ve picked this one was because it’s described to be a cool celebration of CRCK/LCKS’ existence as a group, and every single member is featured on its songwriting credits. And after finding that out, it made it clear how much of a collective effort this album was, with everyone being able to chip in with their own ideas. And honestly, it resulted in an even more of an enjoyable experience.

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Now, I actually thought about doing this one a little bit differently than I normally do for Exchange/Rate album reviews. If you’re a longtime follower of this series and are thus quite familiar with how I structure my end of the reviews, you’ll know that I typically pick out, at minimum, four songs from the album to talk about. These aren’t necessarily always my four favorite tracks either. More often than not, I use them to formulate a framework for how I want to approach the record as a whole; what I find good or intriguing about it, what I think the artist is trying to accomplish, and ultimately what kind of music listening experience I believe the album has to offer.

In spending some time with CRCK/LCKS’ Mani Mani, however, I very quickly realized that I can’t really go about doing that here. Or, perhaps more accurately, I don’t think I should. Part of my reasoning for that is ultimately going to be at the heart of my overall thoughts on the album, but I think a good place to start this discussion is by first looking at the individual parts that make up CRCK/LCKS. Because if we’re going to talk about Mani Mani, I think we first have to talk about the people who made it.

The band is led by multi-instrumentalist and Berklee College of Music graduate Konishi Ryo, known primarily within Japanese jazz circles for his work on the saxophone. Joining him on keys and vocals is classically trained Oda Tomomi, with jazz guitarist Inoue Mei on guitar, Ochi Shunsuke on bass, and Tokyo University of the Arts graduate and credentialed percussionist Ishikawa Shun behind the drums.

For your everyday overseas Japanese music fan, I don’t necessarily expect all of those names to immediately jump off the page. For those more entrenched in the Japanese jazz scene in particular, however, seeing these five musicians come together in service of one collaborative project might read as something closer to a supergroup. Across the five members are numerous accolades and accomplishments within the Japanese music world, with each having established themselves through their own work and collaborations with renowned musicians both within and outside of Japan. All of which is to say that nobody in CRCK/LCKS necessarily needs the band to prove what they’re capable of individually. Everyone involved is already exceptionally accomplished at what they do. Which, naturally, begs a much more interesting question. What happens when you put all five of them together?

That’s ultimately where my interest in Mani Mani lies. With this much individual talent packed into one group, it would be incredibly easy to approach the album by pulling everything apart and pointing toward what each member contributes. But I also think doing so would miss what makes CRCK/LCKS so fascinating in the first place. The question I’m more interested in asking isn’t what each of these five musicians can do individually. It’s whether what they create together amounts to something greater than the sum of its parts. Given how skilled everyone in CRCK/LCKS is with their respective instruments, I think it would be perfectly natural to assume that there’d eventually be some sense of one member overpowering another. Put five musicians of this caliber together and surely someone is gonna end up taking over the room, right? Except, as you’ll hear even from the opening stretch with Arawarawa, and subsequently thereafter with songs like Rental kamisama and Shinkuu pack, that never really happens.

Instead, there’s this remarkable cohesion to the way CRCK/LCKS perform together where nobody sounds as though they need to tone down their own musicality simply to accommodate the other virtuosos playing alongside them. Everyone is still very clearly doing what they do best, only somehow without any of it coming at the expense of somebody else. You can still hear and appreciate Ishikawa Shun’s impeccable drum work without it ever distracting from Oda Tomomi’s lovely singing. Likewise, Konishi Ryo can bring his saxophone into the arrangement without completely stealing the spotlight away from Inoue Mei and Ochi Shunsuke on guitar and bass respectively. Nobody necessarily has to retreat into the background for somebody else to shine.

And I think that’s an important distinction to make when talking about Mani Mani. The impressive thing isn’t simply that five extremely talented musicians are able to play well together. You’d probably expect that much given everyone’s credentials. It’s that they can seemingly play to the full extent of their abilities at the same time and still sound like a band rather than five individually impressive performances happening on top of one another. Part of me wants to simply chalk that up to the members being incredibly compatible with one another. At the very least, you don’t get the impression listening to Mani Mani that anyone feels the need to constantly prove themselves or overshadow everybody else in the room. But I do want to pose another possibility as to why CRCK/LCKS work so well together, and that’s the fact that all five of them come from jazz backgrounds.

Obviously, there’s already going to be some preexisting overlap there. Having five musicians who operate within the same general musical space naturally gives them a shared foundation to work from. What I’m more interested in, however, is jazz itself and how the characteristics of the genre might have helped provide CRCK/LCKS with that unifying thread. Jazz is, by nature, a remarkably loose and unrestricted style of music. One of its most defining characteristics is improvisation, which inherently asks musicians to be responsive not only to what they’re playing, but also to what’s happening around them at any given moment. A performance can shift depending on what somebody else decides to do, leaving everyone involved to react and find their place within it.

There’s a certain volatility to jazz in that regard, but I also think that’s precisely what makes it so conducive to having this many different elements operating at once. And perhaps that’s part of why CRCK/LCKS never feel overcrowded despite how much musicianship is constantly on display throughout Mani Mani. These aren’t simply five talented musicians who happen to be playing alongside one another. They’re five musicians coming from a musical tradition that, at its core, places a tremendous amount of value on listening and responding to the people playing alongside you. So when Ishikawa changes something on the drums, or Konishi comes through with the saxophone, or Inoue and Ochi start working something between the guitar and bass, everyone else has the musical vocabulary to respond accordingly. Their individual contributions don’t have to be planned around as obstacles; they become opportunities for everybody else to build upon. In that sense, jazz isn’t merely one of the styles that informs CRCK/LCKS’ music. It might very well be the reason all of these moving parts fit together as naturally as they do.

In that regard, I do view Mani Mani as something closer to one big jazz jam session between the members of CRCK/LCKS more than anything else, and this is again largely why I decided not to approach this Exchange/Rate the way I normally would. Rather than viewing the album as a collection of individual songs and picking apart specific moments contained within them, I think Mani Mani works better as a showcase of what these five musicians are capable of creating together. It’s less about waiting for any one member to step forward and give you that big standout performance, and more about listening to how everyone continuously interacts with and plays off one another as the album moves along.

Though there’s another side to that too, which is that there honestly aren’t that many singular moments throughout Mani Mani that I find myself wanting to isolate in the first place. And I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism. If anything, part of what made it so difficult for me to pick out four songs to talk about is that the individual tracks themselves don’t really stand out that much over everything else on the album. There are certainly songs I enjoy more than others, with You say goodbye being the one clear exception for me as a song that I absolutely adore and would probably call my favorite track off Mani Mani simply for how beautiful it is. But beyond that, I rarely find myself listening to the album and thinking about one song being the song. Instead, CRCK/LCKS just… play.

They create, they experiment, they respond to one another, and then they move on to the next idea. There’s a free-flowing quality to Mani Mani that makes the boundaries between those individual tracks feel considerably less important than the experience of hearing the band perform across the album as a whole. In that sense, listening to Mani Mani reminds me a lot of sitting down at a jazz bar and taking in a live set. You might walk away remembering a particular melody or moment that caught your ear, but that’s not necessarily why you enjoyed yourself. Sometimes the pleasure comes simply from sitting there and watching a group of incredibly capable musicians do their thing, seeing where the music takes them and appreciating how naturally they’re able to find one another along the way.

That’s more or less how I find myself listening to Mani Mani. And perhaps that’s the best explanation I can give as to why, for once, I don’t really want to pull the album apart into four songs and tell you what makes each one work. The thing I find most interesting about Mani Mani isn’t any singular moment contained within it. It’s CRCK/LCKS themselves.

＜Ｗｈａｔ　Ｉ　ｔｈｉｎｋ　ｏｆ　Ｍａｎｉ Ｍａｎｉ ＞

So, after all of that, I suppose we’re left with the question that I posed at the very beginning: is CRCK/LCKS as a collective greater than the sum of its parts? Well… yes and no. If we’re looking at Mani Mani purely as a showcase of what happens when you put five incredibly accomplished musicians together and let them create, then I do think the answer is a resounding yes. There’s a level of musical understanding between everyone involved that allows each member to perform at an incredibly high level without ever making the album feel like a competition for your attention. Nobody gets lost, but nobody has to overpower everybody else either. Instead, their respective talents continually feed into one another, and I think the jazz background shared between them goes a long way toward explaining why that interaction feels as natural as it does.

At the same time, I do think there’s another side to that equation when we start looking at Mani Mani specifically as an album. Going back to my comparison of listening to the record as being akin to sitting through a live set at a jazz bar, there are naturally opportunities for the mind to meander between songs. And I did find myself doing that here. There were a couple of times listening through Mani Mani where I noticed my attention starting to drift, only for the band to pick things back up instrumentally and pull me right back in again. Curiously enough, I almost wonder if that’s somewhat intentional. There are a lot of starts and stops throughout Mani Mani, along with these little interstitial tracks scattered between the more fully realized songs, to the point where it can sometimes feel like you’re supposed to lose track of exactly where you are in the album. One song ends, another idea comes in, the band pauses, something else begins, and eventually you look down and realize you’re three tracks further along than you thought you were.

In most cases, I would probably consider that a knock against an album. After all, you’d generally want the songs themselves to leave enough of an impression that you can distinguish one from another. And as I mentioned earlier, outside of something like You say goodbye, there aren’t really many tracks on Mani Mani that I personally came away viewing as these huge individual landmarks. But I’m also not entirely convinced that Mani Mani wants to be experienced that way. The more time I spent with it, the less I found myself approaching the album as thirteen separate tracks and the more I started treating it as one continuous performance. Sometimes you’re completely locked in on what CRCK/LCKS are doing. Other times you let the music play while your mind wanders elsewhere. Then Ishikawa comes crashing back in on the drums, Konishi’s saxophone cuts through, Oda catches your ear with a vocal line, or Inoue and Ochi find another groove together and suddenly you’re paying attention again. And honestly, there’s something kind of pleasant about that. It makes Mani Mani less of an album where I’m constantly waiting for the next song I like to come on, and more of one where I simply enjoy spending time in the presence of the musicians playing it. The individual tracks become less important than the ebb and flow of the performance itself, which I think explains why trying to pick four of them apart for this review never quite felt right to me.

So, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? From a purely musical standpoint, absolutely. CRCK/LCKS are five tremendously accomplished musicians individually, but what makes Mani Mani interesting isn’t simply getting to hear all five of them demonstrate what they’re capable of. It’s hearing what each of them becomes in response to the other four. As an album, though, I think that same collective quality comes with a tradeoff. Mani Mani can be so free-flowing that its songs occasionally lose some of their individual identity along the way. But perhaps that’s also the point. Sometimes you don’t go to a jazz bar because you’re waiting to hear one particular song. Sometimes you go because the band is playing.

＜Ｍｙ　Ｒａｔｉｎｇ＞


４ ｏｕｔ ｏｆ ５

＆

８ ｏｕｔ ｏｆ １０

Mani Mani is, in a lot of ways, both memorable and unremarkable And I realize those two things sound like they shouldn’t be able to coexist, but I think that’s ultimately the best way I can summarize my experience with the album. Outside of something like You say goodbye, I don’t necessarily see myself walking away from Mani Mani remembering a bunch of individual songs or singular moments that completely blew me away. What I will remember, however, is the experience of listening to CRCK/LCKS play together. Because even during the moments where my attention started to drift, I don’t think there was ever a point where I questioned the quality of the musicianship on display. If anything, hearing five musicians this accomplished play alongside one another with seemingly very little interest in individually taking over the spotlight made me appreciate the collective that much more. Perhaps that’s also what makes Mani Mani such a fitting album for this month’s theme. When everyone involved is already this talented individually, it’d be easy for the appeal to simply become the novelty of hearing all of them on the same record. Instead, the most impressive thing about CRCK/LCKS is how quickly you stop thinking about any one member at all.

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What are your guys’ thoughts on CRCK/LCKS’ Mani Mani? Let us know down in the comments!

Likewise, what albums come to mind for you when you think of an excellent group effort? Whether it’s a band where every member feels integral to the music or simply a group of musicians who bring out the best in one another, we’d love to hear your picks!

Lastly, before I let you guys go, don’t forget to check out Al’s review of Fooocus by Aooo over at the Omunibasu Substack if you haven’t yet!

Happy Listening!