And here’s yet another random single from a language that I know absolutely nothing about and must still continue to review with the best of my ability! At the very least, I’m just glad that I haven’t stumbled upon performers who are white men, which seemed to come in spades in the reviews I did before the official start of the challenge. Plus, this is officially the first j-pop song I’ve come across, which is a genre that I really want to start looking into. All I can muster about Tokyo Karankoron is that they were formed in 2007 in Tokyo, and eventually went on to provide the ending theme to the anime Shokugeki no Soma. I didn’t find out much else about them, but I did find this photo of them that I really like – so colorful!

It was so, so hard to find any reliable lyrics for this song. I ran the original kanji through Google translate, but most of the lines ended up turning into a pretty incomprehensible mess (as what tends to occur with running lyrics through Google translate). From what I can grasp, though, this is essentially a song about the love of music, or specifically the love of playing music and performing live shows and such. The “16 beat” of the title, from what I can surmise, refers to the tempo at which the drummer keeps the beat; in this case, 16 beats indicates a quick, uptempo rock song, like this very single.

Since I can’t rely on the lyrics to really parse on the song any further, I’ll just rely on how the track sounds from this point on. I think the one standout element is the guitar work, which carries the song with this prominent riff that sound pretty reminiscent of early Arctic Monkeys. The vocalist and drummer are quite alright, as is the keyboardist who adds in some special little flairs to the sound every now and then. Maybe I’m just not getting the most that the lyrics have to offer, but altogether this song just seems pretty average and bland to me. With THE ORAL CIGARETTES’ “Amy”, the feelings and emotions of the songs are felt through the performance of the vocalist as well as his backing band. This one just falls to much in line with the radio rock formula to translate into anything particularly mind-blowing or even mildly interesting. Still, it’s probably not as bad of a song as I’m making it out to be – I just wish I had more of a fluency in its language to appreciate it as well as it deserves.