Doctor Head’s World Tower (1991)
[click the image to buy the CD from yesasia.com]

Flipper’s Guitar was formed in 1988 by Brit-pop aficionados Keigo Oyamada (better known today as Cornelius) and Kenji Ozawa. It also included three other Tokyoite hipsters who quit a year later. Their first album — "Three Cheers for Our Side" (1989) — was only a cult hit, but just two years later their fringe culture had entered the mainstream and helped make the Shibuya-kei scene relevant to the rest of the world. The album "Doctor Head's World Tower" found the pop-duo at their peak of creative union. Shortly after releasing it, the duo abruptly broke up, each to pursue very successful solo careers.

Musically, the first word that comes to mind when listening to their music is “derivative.” Their first album is sung entirely in flatly intoned English, the melodies and words ("take off the badges from our anoraks") borrowed from British guitar pop bands such as Aztec Camera and The Pastels. They did this act of imitation, though, with enough awareness, sense of irony and style that the result was a very post-modern, somehow stupefying blend of sweet European kitsch and pseudo-hipness (this often went unnoticed in Japan and was misconstrued as just being really hip). This sense of self-awareness was heightened and sharpened as the two musicians progressed.

"Doctor Head's World Tower" is a culmination of their mischief — full of sampled sounds (and literal phrases) from the music of the 60s, the then-current British pop/rock scene, movies and visual art. In certain songs, such as the leadoff "Dolphin Song" ("God Only Knows" [Beach Boys] + "Porpoise Song" [Monkees]), "The Quizmaster" ("Loaded" [Primal Scream]), the samples are so obviously there, you'd swear they are composed entirely of borrowed sounds, though you can't deny that they sound oddly unique and exotic (Japanese). The songs tend to be long-winded, with twist and turns in their melodies and tempo. The whole concept-laden album chugs along languorously, culminating in a 10-minute opus titled "The World Tower": "Control is the name of our game, and all the rules are up to you," they sing in the last verse (in the "Cliffs Notes" the band issued for the press, they claimed this too is a quote from a book of the same name by writer Jack Tarr, but it sounds suspiciously like a practical joke on the critics).