Oceanlane

The indie-rock duo wrestle with the question of whether their international flavor hurts or helps them

Courtesy of Howling Bull

Though they’re both just 25 years old, Hajime Takei and Kay Naoe, the singer-songwriters who form Oceanlane, have already warmed the stage for touring bands like the All American Rejects, Last Days Of April, the Stills and Jimmy Eat World. What makes them a favorite support act for young Western groups?

In addition to being signed to Howling Bull, which has a strong relationship with promoter Creativeman, Oceanlane have a culture-straddling appeal that make them a natural for Japanese fans of Western music. The child of a British father (who died when he was thirteen) and a Japanese mother, Kay grew up in Japan. This makes him, he professes bashfully in an interview at a noisy Roppongi cafe, “a regular Japanese boy.” Hajime, on the other hand, is fully Japanese, but as a kikokushijo (returnee) whose family relocated to Los Angeles for a decade of his formative years, seems more Westernized.

Friends since junior high school, Kay and Hajime didn’t get serious about music until 2001, when they reunited as college students in Tokyo. Influences from the classic rock they were hearing at home and previous experiences in an Oasis cover band would provide the background noise from which they formed Oceanlane.

Playing with hired guns on the bass and drums, Oceanlane have an indie-rock guitar-band thrust finished off with a pop gloss that makes them good company for many of the bands for whom they’ve opened.

But as they showed in a gig with Copeland last year at SuperDeluxe, their music works just as well in an acoustic setting. Hajime and Kay are both able singers and guitarists, with a complementary approach that matches the former’s directness with the latter’s sensitivity. “He’s quite strict about the music,” says Kay of his partner. “He lives for indie-rock music and is very focused. I go my own way more and am maybe more emotional.”

Oceanlane’s 2004 debut, On My Way Back Home from Handicraft Recordings, went to No. 1 on Japan’s indie charts. Hajime wrote most of the songs, whereas for last fall’s follow up Kiss & Kill, recorded in Okinawa and produced by Pelle Gunnerfeldt (The Hives, etc.), Kay took lead songwriting duties.

A slice of exhilarating pop-rock, the album documents the tentative steps of a teenager growing into adulthood.

“For the first album, I didn’t write many lyrics, so I wanted to express myself more on the second album, and describe some of the experiences I’d been through, like breaking up with my girlfriend,” explains Kay. “I wanted to write not only about the love but also the hate in human relationships. Also, friends were all graduating from college and looking for work, so there was a lot of confusion. I didn’t join the job hunt, which was a bit scary.”

Rather than follow the usual shushoku katsudo (post-college job hunt), Kay and Hajime banked it all on the band. Yet the touring has been a different form of on-the-job training. “They’re very professional,” Kay says of crisscrossing Japan with Jimmy Eat World. “They don’t get drunk after the gig, and they rehearse hard. We learned what it takes to be a professional touring band.”

Kay has no doubts about his ambitions, but wonders if they’re headed in the right direction. “To tell the truth, I really want to be famous, but we may have to do something new with our music,” he says. “People are getting to know us these days. But because we sing in English and Japanese, people don’t understand what we sing about, so I’ve found some problems singing in English. It sounds good to listeners of Western music, but to reach more people, we might have to sing in Japanese.”

Kay adds that despite the recent growth of the Japanese indie-rock market, most acts are still hitting a wall. “Mongol 800 opened up the scene, but they really only had one hit, and it was based on a tie-up with a commercial for a washing machine. Japanese music is quite advertising-oriented. If you can get a commercial tie-up, then you can become big.”

While Westerner-fronted, Japanese-singing acts like Monkey Majik and Def Tech have found surprising mainstream popularity in the last two years, it remains to be seen whether a Japanese-fronted, English-singing band can achieve a similar breakthrough. If anyone’s going to do it, though, Oceanlane would seem to have the right stuff.

Club Quattro, Nov 8. See concert listings (popular) for details.

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