Otoboke Beaver @ The Belasco [3/2/2024]
Photos by Chloe Gonzales
I visited Japan for the first time last winter. Roaming around Kabukicho and walking past multiple cabarets flaunting their sexiest, most profitable hostesses, I slowly began to realize just how much of a commodity female sexuality has become in cities like Shinjuku. Of course, this isn’t unique to just Japan. In fact, for tonight’s show, we were asked to not upskirt any of the performers and sell pictures online because allegedly this has happened multiple times before. It’s no wonder Otoboke Beaver’s so fed up with all this.
Diving deep into Otoboke Beaver’s discography reveals that they’ve always been plagued by this sort of hypersexualization. On their 2019 release ITEKOMA HITS and their 2022 release Super Champon, Otoboke Beaver gets back at all the men that have wronged them in the past by releasing some of the most brutal, uncompromising punk rock music to come out of Japan. Songs like “S’il vous plait” and “I checked your cellphone” are a testament to just how intense their music can get; pounding drum beats, endless guitar shreds, heavy bass lines, and zany screamed vocals lay the foundation to their sound. It’s the kind of pent-up anger that’s previously planted the seeds for the riot grrrl genre but here they take the ferocity up 10 notches. To add salt to the wound, for their 2024 North American tour cycle, Otoboke Beaver made the clever choice to not only pummel the crowd with tracks from ITEKOMA HITS and Super Champon, but also to only feature female-fronted punk and metal bands as their opening acts.
The first to take on the task was the local support for tonight’s show, Auxiliö. Despite the all-black leather, fishnet-laced fits that all the members had clad on, Auxiliö’s demeanor initially seemed suspiciously gentle. Because of it, my predictions of what their music would sound like couldn’t have been more wrong. A Latina-led metal band, Auxiliö’s songs were vicious and boiling in fury. Their main vocalist gurgled cursed chants as the rest of the band unloaded their barrage of driving guitar riffs and off-kilter drum beats. The only respite the audience could find in their aggressive punk offerings was the frequent switches they’d make between English and Spanish lyrics, which the crowd of fellow LA natives warmly welcomed.
As Auxiliö continued to pummel the audience with their endless tirade of brutal metal tunes, I noticed a mosh pit form in the corner of my eye. As the older folk in the audience started to exchange spots with the moshing crowd, the younger audiences naturally began to huddle towards the site, shoving each other around and swinging their heads to the beat. This was all particularly remarkable because, despite the limited interactions that they had with the audience, Auxiliö was still able to successfully get the crowd riled up, rightfully living up to the standards that Otoboke Beaver had originally set up. Besides, it wouldn’t be on brand for Otoboke Beaver to invite performers that can’t get the room moving.
The next act of the night was Korea’s own Drinking Boys and Girls Choir. Unlike Auxiliö, DBGC’s brand of punk rock leaned more towards happy-go-lucky power pop. On their opening song “I’m a Fucking McDonalds,” the main vocalist and bassist Meena and the drummer MJ would frequently pass on vocal duties to each other atop the bed of fuzzy electric guitar licks and bouncy bass lines, shouting at each other in an almost call-and-response manner. Maybe it’s because of this sort of engagement that DBGC was also particularly enthusiastic about getting along with the audience.
During “Oh my California,” Meena got the crowd of Californians to throw their fists into the air every time she would shout “CALIFORNIA!” In another instance, Meena had commented that tonight was MJ’s birthday, prompting the audience to sing her a happy birthday song. Towards the end, DBGC became more involved in these audience interactions, as if they needed to consume the audience’s energy one last time before passing off the baton to Otoboke Beaver. At one point, Meena had departed from the stage and entered the pit. She looped around the outskirts of the pit, wavered around her bass guitar to the audience, and successfully fueled everyone’s excitement just in time for Otoboke Beaver.
Otoboke Beaver started off their set with the lighthearted “YAKITORI” off of Super Champon. Otoboke Beaver’s guitarist Yoyoyoshie explained that the term “champon” means to mix a group of disparate objects together and that they hoped that their music can do just that. I’m happy to report that their set was a fruitful undertaking of that mission.
Despite their often goofy song titles (“You’re no hero shut up f*ck you man-whore” is a personal favorite of mine), their music is actually quite technical and lends itself to unorthodox variety as Yoyoyoshie had advertised. Off-beats, rhythmic switch ups, and pulsating guitars dominate their brand of punk rock. Otoboke Beaver’s songs have a habit of starting off with classic rock aesthetics and then randomly blowing up into a mad frenzy of math rock and noise punk. But throughout it all, all of the members’ chemistry remains steadfast. Their vocalist Accorinrin leads most of the vocal efforts, commanding the members to play carefree under her uncompromising performances. Yoyoyoshie, when not busy hyping up the audience, builds the foundations to their melodies as she shreds and picks onto each string. Their bassist Hirochan is quiet most of the time, instead focusing more on methodical, calculated playing rather than spontaneous mania. Meanwhile, their drummer Kahokiss is simply just one of the coolest performers I’ve ever seen, effortlessly going from 0 to 100 like nothing.
Otoboke Beaver’s music isn’t explicitly feminist nor does it really aim for political correctness; actually, a lot of their music talks about the simpler joys of life, ones that society always seems to have a problem with (god forbid women have hobbies). On “I am not maternal,” the band claims that they just don’t have it in them to become mothers. Eventually, they jauntily reveal that all they want to do is just raise dogs, almost taunting the people that are forcing them to nurture children in the future. This sort of resentment reached a peak on the explosive “Don’t Light My Fire.” Accorinrin’s “GO TO HELL”s during the song were contagious, the whole crowd yelling back at her with their own chants of “GO TO HELL” and “DESTROY.”
An ignorant bystander could watch all this and rudely comment that they asked for it. After all, if they’re throwing so many dares at all the people that have wronged them in the past, surely they’re bound to be judged for it, right? But the truth is that observation is not only dumb, but it doesn’t fundamentally understand why they make the music that they do. If tonight’s crowd of talkative men and unruly teenage boys proves anything, it’s that women were never the problem; the problem is that no one’s interested in listening. Otoboke Beaver’s retaliation against this indifference is loud because they’ve got no other choice; they gotta get all ears on them somehow. Luckily for us, Otoboke Beaver has proven to be auteurs of disrupting the room. With the music that they’ve got to offer, you can’t help but tune in.
