Bo Ningen - Live Review

BO NINGEN / HARE & HOUNDS - KINGS HEATH, BRUM / 6TH OCT

The show on this night took us not only to a new venue, and a new part of Birmingham, but also to a completely new place musically! Enter- mind blown.

The supports for a few of the stops on this Bo Ningen tour are LUNCH MONEY LIFE. Referring to themselves as a communal experimental project, they’re unlike anything we’ve seen or heard before, and us having been on the music scene for some years now, that’s really saying something. Entertaining - without doubt, unique - completely, to everyone’s taste? no. But not everyone likes change. In a saturated market where everyone and anyone now has the ability (full of talent or devoid of it) to make and share their music, it is so difficult to truly stand up alone and find a new take on what we call a “band”, but these guys do it, and without taking themselves too seriously, or being too indulgent about it. A perfectly fun and friendly segway into experimental music, thank you LUNCH MONEY LIFE, for the education. 

Bo Ningen are just… something else. Truly special people who make outer space-like music that is beyond any rules and have a poignant presence beyond any cliche. Their set is an astonishing rush through a multiverse of genres and ideas as colourful, baffling and brilliant as deep space itself. 

Frontman Taigen Kawabe somehow manages to play spiderlike brilliant bass lines whilst singing at a total and magical counterpoint. The high vocals never quite settle into one place but somehow float ethereally in and out of the music, weaving through and above giving the whole explorative sound a pop trip that is quite easy to settle into. This is no self indulgent trip but a thrilling rock band at the top of its game, a game which no-one else is playing, no one even knows how to enter. 

Bo Ningen have invented their own world and their own sound and it’s a world so delicious that you want to live there for ever surrounded but their endless flowing hair and infinite flowing wild and beautiful ideas.