Grapevine: a shoe-gazing rock nerds' charismatic leader?

The jacket shows the band in a nature trail, the photo set to the side with a wide margin on the left. The cover as well as inner sleeve artworks are peppered with random, ornate dingbats, perhaps to suggest a woodblock letterpress look. The ambitious (not always successful, in my opinion) graphic design of Grapevine's album covers is what attracted me to the band at first, and "ambitious" and "labored" seem to apply to the band's music as well. Their songs are largely of mid-tempo hard rock variety, building momentum and volume with tension-and-release repetition. The arrangement is minute and intricate; the string arrangement in "Reason" is particularly beautiful.

All three members of the band write songs, and their skills in this department are impressive. There are a lot of 70s rock influences — fast guitar passages, high-toned voice, persistent mid-tempo. Sabbath, Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye (from whose song the band took its name) and CCR are all there somewhere. The nasal styling of Kazumasa Tanaka takes some getting used to, but is very latter-day John Lennon. The high-literature-minded lyrics, penned by Tanaka, reference such literary figures as Kafka, Maupassant, Ango Sakaguchi and Kobo Abe. His sometimes introspective and self-referential words achieve a really vague, apathetic and gloomy, but — in the end — optimistic mood:

korekara bokuraha kurikaeshiteku
    Hereon, we continue the repetition
sadamaranai shiseide nanikani tatimukauyou
   standing up against something, with a vague, undecided pose
issou oyoge
   swim on

Tanaka's nasal delivery renders his words pretty much incomprehensible without the text. That forces the listener to study the aforementioned highly designed inner jacket, bringing the experience full circle. It makes me reminisce about my boyhood, poring over the record jackets to find revelations in the songs of The Blue Hearts or Boowy, or the clumsily translated words of American rock idols like Mellencamp or Springsteen. I would've loved to have this band around when I was 14.