As is often the case with genres I discover, I have begun with Japanese music in the shallowest possible present, and am only slowly beginning to work backwards into even its most recent past. Due to factors that I'm pretty sure have nothing to do with me, the bulk of the Japanese artists I've latched onto don't actually have much past. Out of about a hundred non-retrospective Japanese albums currently in my iPod, only sixteen of them have original release dates earlier than five years ago, and those come from working backwards through the catalogs of only five artists (the lowish-fi rock trio pillows, the crazed punk-pop-metal band Feel So Bad, the borderline hair-metal band Siam Shade, the eventually-atmospheric dance-pop group globe, and Glay), all of whom I found through more-recent compilation appearances or best-ofs.

BUMP OF CHICKEN, who might have Glay's place in my life if they had more records, started working towards a fourth one late last year with the first single since jupiter. Whereas with Glay (and Siam Shade and Feel So Bad) I usually like whole albums as much or more than individual songs, with BUMP OF CHICKEN (and pillows) my reactions to individual songs vary much more widely, an effect that BUMP OF CHICKEN exacerbate by indulging in drastic style swings. "Snow Smile" (actually "Suno Sumairu") itself is oddly muted, relying on Motou Fujiwara's frayed singing to give the instrumentation a purpose. An unlisted bonus, marooned on track thirty-three of a disc that only claims to have two, is a disposable "Wipe Out" pastiche. But in between, the listed b-side, "Holiday" (literally "Horidei", another phonetic one), is almost perfect, implacable drums snapping under burbling bass and Byrdsy guitars, while Fujiwara sings nearly within himself and the band sighs in support.

The unlisted track on the second new single is a jittery acoustic rant that seems to be plagued by mariachi nightmares. The official b-side, the pingingly Glay-like "Rosutoman" (which I assume is supposed to be read "Rastaman", although there's nothing remotely reggae-like about the music, so maybe not), is airy and poised, slipping deftly into gear for the humming choruses. But this time the title track is the prize, a restless sprint held together by bass runs as the drums drop in and out. Rhythm guitars fill in spaces, lead hooks spiral up out of the middle or squeal along the sides, Fujiwara swoops from quick, close verses to arching, yearning choruses. In these moments I'm willing to believe that BUMP OF CHICKEN can join Idlewild and Jimmy Eat World in dispelling the disappointments I've accumulated from a decade of passionate rock bands that skidded astray, single-handedly fulfilling the collective scattered potentials of "Years Later", "Stone Cold Sober", "Anyone Can Play Guitar", "La Tristesse Durera", "Local Boy in the Photograph", "Driftwood", "Sixty Mile Smile", "Hey, Jealousy", "Freshmen" and "We Are the Normal".

"BUMP OF CHICKEN", "Glay" and "Gackt" are three of my favorite Japanese band names, "BUMP Of CHICKEN" because the capitals mean I get to always say it like I'm annoyed, "Glay" because it's obviously supposed to sound like English (you can't even write it in Japanese) but means nothing, and "Gackt" because it sounds like Bill the Cat struggling with a hairball. This last is about the diametric opposite of the image Gackt the artist is aiming for, which is more like a cross between an overeducated Trent Reznor with a period-costume fetish and an airbrushed Geoff Tate with even more opera training, or perhaps like Tom Jones recast as an androgynous elf prince. Gackt's hyper-ornate former band, Malice Mizer, made Tate's Queensrÿche sound like AC/DC, and the three Gackt solo albums, Mars, Rebirth and Moon, may be a little more propulsive but are even more intricately conceived and meticulously produced. If you can't abide histrionically mannered singing, you'll despise Gackt. Investigate if you wish that Steven King books were written like Nabokov, or that you could somehow combine The Matrix's cool with Spirited Away's sophistication, or that Sisters of Mercy sounded more cloistered. "Kimi ga Oikaketa Yume" (something like "You Are (My) Chased Dream"), presumably an advance single for an eventual fourth album, rides on frantic drums, sinuous guitars, hooks that tangle each other into lattice, and Gackt's unearthly voice slithering along the curves of the music. The b-side, "birdcage", starts out with measured acoustic guitar and dolorous viola, but after a couple minutes runs out of patience with this restraint and freaks completely out. Karaoke versions of both allow you to verify that you cannot sing like this.

Performances styles in Japanese music seem, at least in my erratic experience so far, to be even more rigorously gender-linked than they tend to be in the US and the UK. Tsukiko Amano and Nanase Aikawa are rare women whose styles are more rock than pop, and Feel So Bad is the only wholly inarguable rock band I've found that has a female singer. In the other direction, although there are plenty of sappy Japanese boy bands, I've found very few male artists with the kind of shiny turbo-pop exuberance of globe, move or Ayumi Hamasaki. I did find the belief-staggeringly cheerful pool bit boys, but they were defunct by the time I discovered them, and it's somewhat unsatisfying to take life-affirmation from the dead. T.M.Revolution, Takanori Nishikawa's relentless mechano-pop project, actually existed before pool bit boys, and has outlasted them. It took me a while to figure out that he used to go by "Takanori Makes Revolution" before contracting the first two words, which slowed down my usual catalog-acquisition process. But I found a best-of, to stand for the handful of other albums, and coordinate is the first new one while I've been paying attention.

T.M.Revolution are an extreme, but the truth is that pop extravagance and production ambition, in various forms, are basically my growing Japanese canon's unifying themes. I don't know whether this is cause or effect, but I seem to have reached a stage in my life where bands as transparently shallow as globe or day after tomorrow, at their most plastic, seem charming and uplifting to me, while Broken Social Scene bore me into amnesia and the New Pornographers seem intolerably smug. I can identify at least six distinct factions of kids out here in the West, all of whose music I don't even begin to care about, which is enough to make me wonder whether I was wrong, and age will catch up to my musical taste just like it caught up to all those other people I figured just got lazy. But if I get what the kids are listening to in Japan, then maybe my alienation back home is just temporary, like it has been every other time so far.