You Can Never Be Too Prepared Or Have Too Much Time On Your Hands
They're here. Those guides that you can't enough of. We here at Fuji Rock Express don't claim to know everything about the festival (well...that's not quite true, some of us do), but there are, indeed, other Japanese magazines and websites out there with English content aplenty. And where you find English content, you find no shortage of opinions, guides, and rhetoric (the blog you are currently reading being a prime example).
So for your research pleasure (or to alleviate your boredom), here are some other previews for this year's Fuji Rock, as well as some other Japanese music festivals you might like to check out this summer...(since we're "blogging" am I required to say - shudder! - "after the jump" here?)
The Japanzine writers like pretty much everything we've written about in their "Sounds of the Summer" article, plus writer John Wilks has an interview with songwriter Adriano Cintra from Brazilian hipsters Cansai de Ser Sexy (otherwise known as CSS, who release their sophomore album Donkey on July 22 in Japan). The cheeky wags at Idolator may not necessarily agree with WIlks' excitement.
Metropolis, the magazine for the ex-pat ADD generation, give you a typically curt "Heat and Noise" overview. They do, however (like us here at FRE), find enough column inches to encourage you to check out the small stages throughout the festival, and not just camp around the Green and White stages for the whole weekend.
The Japan Times writer Simon Bartz likes Kiyoshiro Imawano in his preview for the paper. The Times also has an interview with CSS (written in January, published late June so you may wanna read this interview first).
Also in The Japan Times, fellow Fuji Rocker Philip Brasor has a preview of the Tokyo Summer Music Festival that is currently happening in venues around the city.
Stephen Taylor at The Daily Yomiuri is a little more spartan in his approach to previewing the festival season, though he does give a good overview of some of the side gigs that many bands will be playing while passing through Japan (like The Fratellis, Albert Hammond Jr., Devo, Prodigy, Paul Weller, etc.).
Nobody actually buys newspapers anymore, do they?
Jeff
