“Can you picture the armada of Hello Kitty spaceships?” -Gen. Marsupial Takahashi
Someday, Japan is going to send people to Mars. It’s true. I’m pretty sure Gemini Revolution will provide the soundtrack while the astronauts will kick it during their long journey through space.
The Other Side of Yesterday EP is hacky sack music for Asian hipsters. It reeks of patchouli and mirin equally. This is the weird Asian record the Doors would have made had they lasted long enough. It’s kinda jammy, pretty psychedelic, and superbly spacey.
Gemini Revolution takes the Taj-Mahal Travelers playbook, cut out the boring extreme avant-garde randomness, and pop it up a bit. The slow building, eventually lush arrangements feature a mostly free-form rhythm section that provides enough randomness to contrast the layered cheap keyboards. The reverb-maxed vocals come and go sparingly, adding a textural component to music that is clearly focused on the other instrumentation.
The stand out of this EP is the title track “Other Side of Yesterday." Reminiscent of Modest Mouse, the song goes through many variations of stripping down and being built back up. It also utilizes the vocals the best of any song in this batch, with a pleasant back and forth during the choruses. Mix in the melodic bass work, the Kenny G-esque saxophone keyboard doodling, and the random percussion introduced throughout, and you’re left with a song that tows the ADHD line, yet ends up accessible and groovy overall.
Some might say this sound is dated, but Gemini Revolution has a very specific thing they are going for. It is refreshing to hear a group of musicians just doing their thing, regardless of what is dictated by the musical trends around them.
-Zach Hodson
| Zach is a lifetime Kansas City resident who plays multiple instruments and sings in Dolls on Fire, as well as contributing to many other Kansas City music, art, and comedy projects. He is very fond of edamame, treats his cat Wiley better than he treats himself, and doesn’t want to see pictures of your newborn child (seriously, it looks like a potato). |
Editor’s note: Gemini Revolution released the follow-up EP to Other Side of Yesterday on June 14, entitled Sizuka. We’ll have a review of this album to you very soon!