I was not, until recently, an Asiaphile. Or perhaps I was all along, but I only just discovered it. Either way, I now realize that something significant happened to me one night last summer, when I flipped to a Canadian music-video channel and happened across two Japanese girls meandering placidly through a psychoactive mock-Mardi Gras march. I've been enchanted by last halves of videos more than once before (American Music Club, Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette all initially reached me this way, for example), so other than scribbling the credits info on the back of a Cambridge Soundworks brochure, I didn't think that much of the encounter. I bought the album, Puffy AmiYumi's Spike, and liked it. Tracking down the rest of Puffy's albums took a little longer than usual, as my main import sources are all Euro-centric, but eventually I found them. And since there are only a few, it was a pretty short story: one random lead, one entertaining band, no personal cultural upheaval.

My J-Pop repertoire expanded from two to three in an especially random manner: some Ayumi Hamasaki web searching led me to a compilation put out by a Japanese cosmetic company, whose web page had clips of two songs. One was Ayu's "appears"; the other was Nanase Aikawa's "SEVEN SEAS". The second clip was only a few seconds long, part of a verse and one chorus, but that was enough to sear the thing into whatever part of my brain is responsible for supplying the melodies I hum to myself in moments when my environment neglects to provide one. And although "SEVEN SEAS" has an airy (and partly English) chorus that could stand with any delirious moments out of pop history, it's actually not much at all like Puffy's "Love So Pure", with which I paired it on my 2001 song list. "Love So Pure" is classic understated upbeat guitar pop, American by both authorship and temperament, succinct and only sparingly embellished. "SEVEN SEAS" is a sprawling, clattering, multi-faceted, all-devices-blinking five-plus-minute rock song. Guitars squall by in various formations, some sounding like people playing them, some like samples; synths blip and hiss; a bass pulses gracefully, as if not quite noticing the relentless drum-machine battery. Cacophonous vocal samples on the verses and bridges alternate with soaring backing harmonies on the choruses. There are enough ideas and motifs for at least three songs. It's the chorus, though, that elevates it from technical tour de force to co-song-of-the-year for me. Just as the guitar histrionics reach the brink of implosion, the whole song banks into a perfect, arching turn and ends up in the simple, heady, timeless refrain "Flying over seven seas, looking for your love". The in-between lines in the chorus are in Japanese again, so I don't know what use Nanase is making of this statement of purpose, but as with Puffy's "Love So Pure" and "Violet", I'm even more fascinated by it for this reason, as if of course the substance of a declaration of love is couched in a private language. Not knowing what she's saying, I'm free to imagine that's she's saying a million things at once, which a sentence in a language you understand tragically can't do. I wonder, as I did watching Maborosi and kind of wishing I could turn the subtitles off, whether learning some Japanese isn't in a way counter-productive and anti-magical, and mundane comprehension will end up supplanting some of the awe currently engendered by ignorance. But that's no argument; true magic isn't a trick you dispel by watching carefully, it's something whose effect you can't explain even after you know how it works.

After Puffy, Ayu and Nanase, though, my progress began to pick up noticeably, and in the last month or two I have ascended, in my rough estimation, from complete ignorance to merely serious ignorance. I have heard enough J-Pop albums to start disliking some of them, plus several hours of theme music from Japanese TV shows and video games, and even (although you'll have to take my word for this for the moment) a few J-Pop bands with male vocalists. And I now feel ready to pick a first favorite from the genre. They are called Every Little Thing, and although branding them a younger Japanese Roxette makes it seem like I've found the thing in a new genre that most resembles something I already loved in a different one, I still think it's the best description. They were a trio for their first three delightful albums, with keyboardist Mitsuru Igarashi responsible for production and most of the songwriting, but thrown back on their own resources as a duo for this fourth album, guitarist Ichiro Ito and singer Kaori Mochida make what I think is by far their best record yet. If you don't like Roxette, it wouldn't surprise me much if you didn't like this much, either. The two bands share a sense of pop grandeur, a knack for meshing burbling synthesizers and affectionately blustery guitars, an unshakeable faith in sparkle and melody, and an uncanny ability to leave me, at the ends of songs, gasping for breath and incredulous that they managed to find so many different notes that go together so effortlessly. "Graceful World" (the title phrase, one of only two English interjections in an otherwise Japanese song, comes out sounding more like "Caress the World" in Kaori Mochida's not-too-confident-sounding accent) is stern and stirring, something like Roxette's "Sleeping in My Car" with a more rubbery bass line. "JIRENMA" is brighter and faster, spiked with synth buzzes and stabs borrowed from deep in the Eighties. Track three (scratchy-symbol title...) is an "It Must Have Been Love"-level power-ballad, rendered only marginally smaller, if at all, by the slightly more impish vocal timbre. "Good for nothing" is sputtering and bubbly, underpinned by a crisp drum-machine groove and a lumbering synth bass. Track five is sedate and pastel, like "Milk and Toast and Honey" with a little extra stage-musical lilt. "sweetaholic girl" is an epic arpeggiator collage, a song like I imagine Garbage might make if they stopped worrying about being cool, although towards the end Ichiro Ito betrays a little guitar-god ambition that Per Gessle and Butch Vig would probably both have suppressed. "Home Sweet Home" is a glittering synth-pop gem I only barely talked myself out of including with "Love So Pure" and "SEVEN SEAS" in an own-rule-defying three-way tie for the year's best song. "fragile" is almost sappy enough for Hollywood, but "No limit" is an object lesson in restraint, the core of the arrangement a springy two-note synth-bass oscillation and a simple drum-machine loop, with fake piano and light synth pads sheened glisteningly over the top. Guitar and synth soloing get hold of parts of the otherwise understated "force of heart", and "One" strays back into soundtrack territory, and too soon it's over, which is probably all that nudged the album just out of that top ten for me. One more song, one more upturn, one more glorious arpeggio to go out on, instead of a diffident New Age guitar figure and a slow fade out, and I'd have followed this record anywhere. As it is, instead, I sit here watching Every Little Thing fondly, content to wonder what they will become. Per and Marie are still working, of course, so we don't need to replace Roxette just yet. There's time.