The Destruction
Godzilla’s Coming To Town
It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone to say that I’ve been a bit down lately. Nothing serious I guess, just, y’know, the current state of global affairs is kind of a bummer, that’s all. Retail therapy isn’t entirely healthy (or sustainable) and I know that. But sometimes when I go out record shopping I find something so marvelously bizarre/stupid/great/amazing that it does help to dull the pain of reality at least for short time and bring a smile to my face.

Such is the case with the album I purchased today, Howl: The Grunts and Growls of all Toho Monsters. Like the name suggests, it’s an album comprised almost entirely of the sounds made by various Toho kaiju, including but not limited to Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Gorosaurus and many more. But that’s not why I bought it. Sure, having 20+ minutes of various monster growls, howls and roars is fun, but for me, the centerpiece of the album is the opener, “Godzilla’s Coming To Town,” a megamix of monster sound effects set to a killer backbeat.

This existence of this makes me so very happy. It’s Art Of Noise with monster roars. It’s great.

This is credited to “The Destruction” but a quick skim through the liner notes shows that the track was composed and arranged by one Kenji Iwakura. Never heard of him before, but apparently he was in a little-known Japanese synthpop band called Spy. They released one album in the 80s. It was produced by Kazuihiko Katoh, who is one of my all-time favorite musicians. I guess that means I’ll be picking up that record in the near future. Iwakura also worked on a few (lesser) Yukihro Takahashi records as well as an album of Hudson Game Music. Between his kaiju work, Takahashi collaborations and his game music releases, quite frankly I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of him sooner.

The track also features Hirofumi Tokutake on “acid country guitar.” Never heard of him before either, but thanks to Discogs I now know that I have at least four releases that feature him (including this). He’s on the YMO album Technodon, as well as the accompanying live CD. He also shows up on the Takeshi/Jensen collaboration PulsexPulse and on a Sketch Show album as well. This all ties into my theory that if you buy any Japanese electronic music release from 1978 to 1999, you’ll find at least one person who worked with at least one member of YMO at some point.

This is stupid. Please enjoy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2017 at 4:37 pm and is filed under soundtrack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.