"Rezisto"

Blood, flesh, bones, words and a bit of poison We were created from that recipe Blood, flesh, bones, words and a bit of poison We were created from that recipe

His poem scatters pig entrails That’s one of the organic methods Moonlight howl, death dance, he is an impulse His heels match the rhythm, the night is deep

Yeah, today I’ll again hurt and keep living It would be good to be a rebel

Blood, flesh, bones, words and a bit of poison We were created from that recipe Blood, flesh, bones, words and a bit of poison We were created from that recipe

His poem scatters pig entrails That’s one of the organic methods Moonlight howl, death dance, he is an impulse His heels match the rhythm, the night is deep

Yeah, today I’ll again hurt and keep living It would be good to be a rebel Yeah, today I’ll again hurt and keep living It would be good to be a rebel

[T/N] an interesting detail is that the "will hurt and keep living" (傷つけて生く) part is written with the character for "live", rather than being left in hiragana. normally this construction would simply mean "i'll go on hurting [others]", but adding the kanji deepens the meaning to a more existential one ("to go on living is to cause harm")

the "it'd be good to be a rebel" line isn't 100% clear to me. "なれたらいい" can mean "i wish [i] could become X", literally "it would be good if [someone] could become X", but because of the lack of context we can only speculate if it expresses a person's wish to become a rebel, or is meant to be advice to others ["better become a rebel"], so i did my best to keep my translation vague too

kanji & romaji under cut

On first listen, it was the little electronic squiggle that hooked me. Sure, it’s the prowling panther bassline that shapes the song and gives it its swaggering, slightly menacing power. But it’s that repeated hook of three descending minor notes that scratches at my brain like an itch.

Rezisto is not as flashy as some of the other electro bangers on the record, but it’s the one I keep coming back to. Maybe it’s the soft yet ominous urgency of the vocals - this is the quality of Imai’s voice that I love best: the same gentle, breathy, whispered sing-speaking that made me first fall in love with his singing style on 愛かわらずの「アレ」のカタマリがのさばる反吐の底の吹き溜り. It’s a relatively quiet song, but it feels dramatic, almost cinematic in its scope. A nighttime song. A song for stalking down dirty, narrow, rain-splashed alleys in a long leather coat, stepping between pools of neon-coloured light. I listened to it on headphones while walking along deserted industrial areas by the river in East Berlin late at night, and suddenly felt like a Cold War spy, a rebel in the Resistance.

The circling, portamento-warped bassline gives the verses their startlingly claustrophobic, paranoid feel. I can never quite tell if it’s a synth-bass or that’s just Yuta stretching the strings to bend the notes. The repeated three-note squiggle comes in first at 0:04, and is repeated, chopped and edited at 0:09 - it runs through the whole song like a pedal point around which the melody stalks like a double agent hunting a spy, bending and changing with the surrounding chords. The electronic filter sweeps drive the song’s urgency with that sense of constant movement. And that flickering, tightly edited, glitching guitar! It’s the most human element to the music, and yet the clever edits make it feel like a simulation, a retreating figure glimpsed only through the VHS static of a black and white security camera.

The song evokes such a specific time and place, it sent me searching through my record collection to try to work out what lost EBM or Wax Trax classic that squiggle reminded me of. So many three letter acronym bands I danced to in dirty Industrial clubs in the late 80s / early 90s: Meat Beat Manifesto. Front Line Assembly. Front 242. Nitzer Ebb. Renegade Soundwave. KMFDM. Ministry, LARD, Revolting Cocks… I can almost smell the sweaty leather and clove cigarettes. And yet that’s the magic that Buck-Tick work: they manage to evoke entire genres, moods and time/places without ever lapsing into plagiarism. The closest I could find to that three-note squiggle was an early NIN song (comes in around 0:14 on Down In It) but run through the extreme EE-EE-OU-OO-OH filter sweep of 808 State’s Cübik (comes in at 0:18)

On early listens, the over-brightness of the choruses confused me, dazzled me a bit too much, like stumbling out of a dark, neon-spangled alley into a four-lane, floodlit boulevard, crowded with people and speeding cars. I wanted the song to drop the sudden major chord cathedrals-of-sound distorted guitar fireworks and go back to the irresistible electronic squiggle. But as I struggled to translate the opaque lyrics, I realised that the contrast is the whole point - the sudden bursts of insight. “嗚呼!” is an interjection something like “alas!” Today, yet again, life will hurt. To be human is to suffer; and in suffering, cause pain to others. That’s an inherent quality of being human, rather than divine. The small quantity of poison, the tiny bit of bile among the blood and flesh and bones.

What are we resisting? What are we rebelling against? Giving in to suffering and pain? I've never really been a lyrics person, but Imai's impressionistic snatches of Stoicism and Hedonism have always urged me to live, rather than merely exist.