W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part five of a five-part series, covering the band’s final years and post-breakup releases.

Happy End of You (February 1998)
	A remix album that never came out in Japan, which perhaps explains the selection of foreign producers. This is mostly a time capsule of late 1990s IDM/electronica, but a few things hold up, namely The Automator and Saint Etienne’s respective remixes of “Love’s Theme” and some of the drum’n’bass. Dimitri from Paris’ “Contact” old school house is fun, but out of place. The rest is, in most cases, literally just noise.
(Cswee) — Taking the loungecore out of loungecore

Playboy Playgirl (October 1998)
	Here we begin the final, mature years of Pizzicato Five, a period in which the band finds a unique, yet timeless sound rooted in 1960s analog with the speed of late 1990s electronic music. The album starts with the excellent “La Dépression” — a cheery joke about Japan’s own economic despair. And then we get to Konishi’s great weakness in sequencing his own albums, forcing the least exciting song into the prime #2 spot; in this case, the boring “Rolls Royce” goes on for eight full minutes. The band recovers with “A New Song,” P5’s best use of the moog synthesizer in a bright and shiny Hugo Montenegro pastiche. Other interesting sound experiments include the mega-blown out mixes of “Weekend” and “The Great Invitations,” the Austin Powers trend convergence of “Playboy Playgirl,” and minimal stutter snare of “Such a Beautiful Girl Like You.” If you remove the skits, this is one of the more consistently good efforts and a sound for the ages.
(A) — The groovy, moogy Pizzicato Five we should all remember

Darlin′ of Discotheque e.p. (April 1999)
	Is there a more fitting symbol of Konishian excess than an eleven minute version of “Darlin’ of Discotheque”? Except, what if those eleven minutes were incredible? The sampled drum breaks, the foreboding strings, and a strong melody building slowly to justify the time spent? Other songs on this also pay off: “Barbie Dolls” is a classic, and “Tout Tout Ma Cherie” is the Michel Polnareff cover P5 was always poised to tackle.
(A-) — The hits keep coming all the way to the finish line

Nonstop to Tokyo e.p. (July 1999)
	A few months later, another EP. “Non-Stop to Tokyo” itself is one of the band’s weaker singles, and “Room Service” sounds too much like an early demo of “20th Century Girl.” The real treasure is “Bossa Nova 3003,” which like “Lesson 3003 (Part 1),” are canon-wide mashups where P5 took the Double Dee and Steinski model and applied it to themselves (a fitting act for a meta-band like Pizzicato Five.) “Mademoiselle” oddly sounds like Sweet Pizzicato Five era house act.
(B) — Interesting moments in otherwise excess

PIZZICATO FIVE (November 1999)
	This most certainly should have been the band’s swan song: P5 at its most mature, most adult. Konishi removed almost all explicit synth/dance music references for a relaxed, organic sound based on a treasure box of 1960s jazz and Yé-Yé samples. The result is as if Konishi took revenge upon Couples… and won! (There is even a superior Nomiya “cover” of “Serial Stories.”) “20th Century Girl” is a keeper, and I wish that “Goodbye Baby & Amen” would have been the band’s final musical moments. The American-release “Fifth Release from Matador” (note all the overflowing enthusiasm in that album title) is basically identical with some original versions of songs replacing Konishi’s odd remixes.
(A-) — What should have been P5’s final, grand statement

REMIXES 2000 (March 2000)
	As far as remix albums go, this one may be the strongest, with a gaggle of producers from Konishi’s own lineage: Mansfield, Cubismo Grafico, Comoestas, and Sunaga Tatsuo. There is no weird electronic violence, just Shibuya-kei on Shibuya-kei. Even Iwamura Manabu’s meta-jazz works on “Roma” better than his own work.
(B) — The sound of the Shibuya-kei dance pop peak

Voyage à Tokyo ep (September 2000)
	And so begins the end. Here we get You the Rock rapping over Pizzicato Five and a weird mashup on “Les Grandes Vacances.” This is not an important EP but at least holds up compared to the dreck that follows.
(B-) — The gruel gets thinner, with a hip-hop influence

Çà Et Là Du Japon (January 2001)
	This record is really, really, really, really terrible. Just complete dreck. I could maybe extract some good quotes from the lyrics of “Fashion People” (Nigo!) for a nonfiction book, and I am partial to the mambo-beats of 1960s cover “In America” but the rest is beyond cheesy — like a “JAPAN COOL” poster hanging in a provincial gift shop selling salty green tea. By taking Japan as a theme, Konishi produces a recursive error, like the scene where John Malkovich goes into his own head. Pizzicato Five throw all taste and class out the window and just go “Kimono” and “Sukiyaki Song” until you want to burn every album in their entire catalog. The only non-arguable bright side is the extension of Happy End’s throwaway “AIEUO” hiragana syllabary ditty into a fully fledged Disney symphonic song for the ages. An ignoble ending for the band, and probably not a coincidence that Nomiya Maki barely appears on the songs.
(D) — An Orientalist failure for masters of mukokuseki Internationalism

Pizzicato Five in the mix (December 2001)
	A DJ mix… claimed to be a “live” mix by Sunaga Tatsuo, but sounds computer-edited, and also, doesn’t really sound like a “live DJ mix.” The beginning hits on the house-y, club side of the band, but by the middle we’re on to the remarkably non-danceable “Triste” and a acoustic version of “The Night is Still Young.” For a band in constant need of editing, mixes can be a nice way to enjoy the catalog, but this one is overall unfocused and has no compelling narrative.
(C+) — Some random P5 songs in a random order.

pizzicato five I love you (March 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Pizzicato Five’s most mellow songs hand-picked by Konishi? Okay, I admit, I didn’t listen to this album. I confused it with the one below. But looking at the track list, this is a very strange selection from the catalog: drowsy songs that a very tired Konishi perhaps looked back fondly upon in his old age.
(C+) — Some random mellow P5 songs that Konishi happens to like

pizzicato five we love you (March 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Pizzicato Five’s most poppy songs? On first listen, I thought this was a waste of time. But as a Greatest Pop Hits — removing all of the band’s more experimental and dance oriented works — the songs shine through. The selection cuts out all the filler and reveals the band to have been masters of songcraft over a full decade.
(B+) — Nothing new, but a helpful distillation of the P5 pop sense

pizzicato five we dig you (May 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Japan’s DJs and producers mashing up the best of Pizzicato Five into a non-stop mega-mix in the vein of 2 Many DJs? Yes, please, that would be excellent. But that is not what this is. This is an hour of listening to your favorite three-second fragments of P5 songs linked up stochastically with very few moments of clever blending or recontextualization. Handsomeboy Technique schools everyone at the very end by making a song you actually want to listen to more than zero times.
(D) — The best Pizzicato songs mashed into formless oblivion

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part two of a five-part series, covering the band’s first eight releases.

“Audrey Hepburn Complex” (August 1985)
	Pizzicato V debuted as one of many “YMO children” on the Non STANDARD label. And as such, producer Hosono Haruomi (of Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra) roughed up P5’s dainty vocals, dainty melodies, and references to dainty 1950s cinema icon Audrey Hepburn with clackety drum machines, dissonant piano chords, and proggy structural complications. (No organic instruments were harmed in the production of this record.) The title song would function well as background music in a B-grade American 1980s film where the protagonist is walking town feeling tortured. On the brighter side, Hosono also brought us the delightfully wispy synth lines that carry both the Simon & Garfunkel cover “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and the vaguely-Hawaiian “Let’s Go Away for a While.” But no matter how solid the songs, the production never emerges from the gray fog of early 1980s New Wave.
(B+) — A dated Eighties sound, but an auspicious start

“From Party to Party” (October 1985)
	A Christmas-themed dance song relying on high-speed drum machine hi-hats, 1960s surf guitar, and James Bond ambience. In case you worried about commitment to the holiday theme, there is a vibraphone solo that morphs into “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Not a particularly important track in the band’s history, but musicologists will be able to dredge up elements of “Twiggy Twiggy” in the primordial swamp.
(B) — A demented Christmas song

“In Action” (January 1986)
	Although Hosono is still listed as producer, Konishi and co. managed to escape YMO’s exclusively electronic cell. “Action Painting” gets one step closer to the classic Pizzicato Five — bouncy piano-driven Motown-inspired vocal pop. But the sound is still buried under grey ‘80s reverb and fake synth horn stabs. “Boy Meets Girl” meanwhile is full out moody New Wave: primitive drum machines lacking any nuance, slap bass samples, fairy synths, and digital replicas of steel pan sequenced into rococo solos. A relatively robotic extreme for P5.
(B+) — Exactly as if 1990s P5 were transported back to the 1980s

Couples (April 1987)
	Whether it was their new record label Sony or an old obsession with Roger Nichols & The Small Circle of Friends, Pizzicato Five decided on a collection of soft vocal pop for their first full-length album. They evidently sought out a cozy studio with no synthesizers and very comfortable couches. The result is a Bubble economy version of easy listening, equivalent to one of the song titles on the album: “Two Sleepy People.” There are occasional flashes of energy from Tom Jones pastiche, but otherwise, many flute flourishes and whispers for bedtime. Surely it was strange for a Japanese band in 1987 to make a 1960s muzak album with nods to Walter Wanderley and Sergio Mendes, but they had yet realized there could be danger in mining for forgotten lounge sounds.
(B-) — Whispery sweet nothings for your nap date at the trendy café

Bellissima! (September 1988)
	At Sony’s request, P5 fired singer Sasaki Mamiko, so Konishi went out to request the services of Tajima Takao, male vocalist of J-blue-eyed-soul band Original Love. Pizzicato Five, Attempt Two bares little resemblance to the previous incarnation. No more manic pixie girls: Tajima belts out smooth invitations straight to the bedroom over upbeat, funky, and organic sounds from real life musicians. By the second track “Temptation Talk,” it is unclear this album has anything to do with the indie music of Hosono and Non STANDARD. At its worst, this is Terence Trent D’Arby, but even at its best: Tony Bennett? Trivia: You will recognize the song “Couples” from its melody’s re-use in “Baby Love Child.”
(C) — Maybe the least canonical true album: dated, cheesy, unrelated

On Her Majesty’s Request (July 1989)
	Konishi felt that Bellissima! was “too serious,” so on the second album with Tajima, the mission was to keep the male singer but bring back the levity of their past songs. The opening instrumental track “Holiday for Audrey H.” achieves this through trumpet solos and hyper-speed harpsichord, foreshadowing their later work. There still may be too much vibraphone, but synthesized beats replace the jazz drumming to reintroduce a sense of speed. “Bellissima ‘90” and “T V A G” are both solid J-pop songs with rock footing, and the latter brings back a few New Wave elements plus a Buffalo Springfield melody reference. Konishi and co. offer a fun suite of songs under fake film soundtrack “Except from the music for film ‘EROTICA Operation,” and then “Satellite Hour” makes club pop from Fairlight vocal samples — thanks to a guest duet with future singer Maki Nomiya. Lowlights are the Tajima-penned funk-lite.
(B-) — Music gravitates back to Konishi’s strengths, but scattered

Soft Landing On the Moon (May 1990)
	With this compilation of reworked old songs and outtakes, the band inched towards the peak Pizzicato Five sound. But progress is a slog. The new version of “Party Joke” adds a more sophisticated loungecore to their list of capabilities, but then why do we need a hard rock cover of “Bellissima” or a Soul II Soul-esque remix of “Temptation Talk”? Maybe we don’t. A funny moment is the guest voice-over appearance from Sasaki Mamiko to imply that she’s cool with being kicked out of the group. Overall, there are more pronounced club beats and drum loops, and hey, there’s even a Ohtaki Eiichi cover for good measure. But any album where we have to hear Tajima sing a song called “Sex Machine” just doesn’t hold up in the long-run.
(C) — All the worst parts of the Tajima years, but even less essential

Hi, guys! Let me teach you(May 1991)
	A throwaway collection of cheesy instrumentals for use in an educational TV show. Tajima is gone, but the muddily-mixed live band sound lives on. The entire CD sounds like hack musicians at a TV station trying to rip off Pizzicato Five’s 1960s retro but coming up with the worst genres of the past: flute muzak, Ventures instrumentals, and dentist office bossa nova. By the time a harmonica steps in to play the melody lines, you want this root canal to end. A small charm: The song “Matt Dillon ni naritai” (I want to be Matt Dillon) gets the absurd English title “I’ll see ya guys on saturday night, right?” Otherwise, avoid.
(F) — A cheesy take on the most boring side of P5

Part Two: The Nomiya Maki Years 1991-1993