Before we begin, let the record note the following statistics about the material addressed in this column in the past year. By genre, with some multiple-counting, twenty-two of the last fifty-two issues discussed music identifiable as "rock" in some sense, sixteen covered something vaguely "pop", eight dealt with synth-pop or New Wave of some form, six could be folk, four metal, three punk, three country and two noise. By nation of origin, twenty-six covered American artists, ten dealt with British artists, nine Japanese, eight Canadian, seven Scandinavian and two from elsewhere on the globe. Six of the fifty-two did not even masquerade as music reviews, and one was a best-of-the-year issue. These distributions were not planned ahead of time, but looking over them I see no reason not to assume that they will more or less represent continuing patterns. New fascinations may intrude, but my fascinations are generally additive, so you can expect me to keep caring about these topics in about these proportions. I make no claim that these ratios reflect any sort of qualitative assessment of music around the world, they simply correspond to the erratic expansion of my own personal tastes and knowledge, starting in Texas and Massachusetts and gradually overcoming borders and oceans.

If I were planning a world J-Pop package-tour, it would start with Every Little Thing and Do As Infinity. I can tell the difference between them, but they seem about as close in motivational spirit, to me, as any two bands ever do. For all I know, of course, they are actually mortal enemies and have to be pulled off each other in the aisles of Tokyo guitar stores on a nearly weekly basis; but I am still blessed with nowhere near enough ready Japanese vocabulary for reading gossip magazines, so I am safe with my illusions. DAI are slightly more rock-oriented than ELT, and perhaps slightly more current (or less affectionately nostalgic for New Wave). I thought their first three studio albums were well-enough summarized by the compilation Do The Best, but TRUE SONG, their fourth, holds my attention all the way through. "Kuusou Ryodan" ("Fantasy Brigade"?) opens the album gracefully, with quietly oscillating strings and Tomiko Van's increasingly assured lilt, but before long accelerates into blustery lead-guitar histrionics and stomping drums. "under the sun", last year's second single, is jubilantly methodical, deliberately repetitive guitar slashes and Van's range-spiking vocal measuring time against infectious drumming and reassuringly understated bass murmur. Guitars chop their way through most of "Good for you", too, synth noise whooshing around them as if the Wedding Present and Polara are slowly working towards an understanding, and "I can't be myself" rattles and whirs restlessly, drums clanging as Van stretches out across them. "Perfect Lady" tries to get by on a keening slide-guitar hook and a rushed sing-song chorus, but "Shinjitsu no Uta" (the title song, in translation), the first single, is probably the most intriguing style-synthesis in either ELT or DAI's repertoire, threads of wiry Japanese folk music woven into a sturdy, surging rock anthem. "Grateful Journey", as if self-conscious about that moment of sophistication, rips off all the native garb and slams into a straightforward pop-punk sprint Kay Hanley could profitably envy. The wriggly "One or Eight", "Shinjitsu no Uta"'s b-side, could have used a little more melody, I think, but the sultry "sense of life", tripping along on scratchy drum loops and bloopy water-drop noises, sounds to me like somebody handed them an American pseudo-r&b chart-hit checklist and they satisfied all the individual criteria without making anything remotely resembling the intended whole. "Wadachi" ("Rut", in the wheel-track sense) is start/stop in somewhat the same vein, but relaxes into its choruses. And "Ai no Uta", the conclusion, suddenly kicks through a fake wall nobody had even been looking at, as Gen Ittetsu joins in with a downright Celtic violin twirl, and suddenly it's transcontinental "Come On Eileen 2003", which maybe sounds like a bad idea, but cringing at concepts will enrich your life no more in music than it will in sushi, so don't panic. And this record, too, wastes our time with some blank space (iTunes feature request: an option to have it automatically skip all but five seconds of any silent span longer than that), but rewards patience (or holding down fast-forward) with a rousing concert rendition of "Touku Made" ("So Far Away"). I don't usually recommend reprising your best old song on subsequent albums, as it tends to project a lack of confidence in your newer material, but in this case this version seems to me to improve on the one on the recent live album in several important places, so I'd rather have it here than nowhere.

There are only really three Japanese groups that I feel the need to attach caveats to when I say that I like them. One, the pool bit boys, is perilously silly, but in a way I've supported before in groups from other countries (albeit with caveats in those cases, too). One is Puffy, who are their own story. The other is globe, who are probably the closest I come to liking a Japanese band that I wouldn't like if they weren't Japanese. globe are essentially a Eurotrance band, and not an especially imaginative one at that. Frighteningly long stretches of their extremely long songs consist of lonely synth pulses cycling desultorily through rather uneventful parameter sweeps, as if Tetsuya Komuro has become drug-inducedly fascinated with the almost undetectably slow rotation of his hand on some small and not terribly consequential control-room knob. They have a group member whose only job is muttering in French, their drum machines seem to only have two patterns (mordant thump and flanged robot-flam), and as of this album have added a fourth member whose unique contribution I am at a loss to identify. A part of me suspects that this is second-rate new-century disco in the same way that the coolest dance-club in Hartford still isn't exactly Ibiza.

If you're going to be afraid of somebody in Japanese pop, be afraid of Puffy. They're young girls, or at least they were when they started, and they preside over a sprawling media empire despite not appearing to possess anything you'd strictly refer to as talents. They've been to the US, and Sony seems to have big plans for them (although not big enough that they've bothered to release their new album here yet). They elude the dreary idol-pop stereotypes by not quite being up to idol standards for bland perfection, and by having the uncommon sense to hire actual musicians to write their songs for them. At times, on their earlier albums, they style-hop with the equanimity you only get by having no focused self-image, but on tour they fronted a surprisingly centered rock band, and when they let Andy Sturmer have his way he wrote them "Love So Pure", which sounds to me like the pop-song form very nearly perfected.