timing 命! 2012.11.09 group_inou @ Nagoya Club Quattro

Nov 9, 2012: From Tokyo I took the shinkansen which brought me to Nagoya in less than two hours. group_inou were holding a one-man show to promote the release of their 3rd album "DAY."_inou doesn't have a strong following in Nagoya and in the past they've held their shows at the intimate and legendary venue Huck Finn (capacity~200). However, for this tour they took a gamble and upsized their choice of venue to the much larger Club Quattro (cap~500). Club Quattro is a chain of live houses located within and operated by the PARCO department stores in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Hiroshima. Yup, only in Japan do department stores come with their own music venue. In Nagoya, Club Quattro is found on the 8th and top floor of PARCO's east building. I arrived just shortly after doors opened at 6pm. Big thanks to group_inou and Urayama-san for putting me on the guestlist with a backstage pass. The show wasn't sold out but the crowd was decent. The ratio was definitely in favor of the fairer sex and Nagoya seems to have a lot of cute girls. *sukebe grin* There was still some time to kill before the show started so I chatted with _inou's manager (Urayama) who was helping out at the merch table. We talked of plans of bringing _inou to Canada again maybe in Oct 2013. He told me that the new PV for "Orientation" just came out 2 days ago and got the thumbs up from Kyary Pamyu on twitter.

Before the show started I managed to find a spot about 3 "rows" from the stage. The floor is standing only and the stage is ~4 ft high making sightlines excellent throughout the club.

group_inou kicked the show off with their new album's introductory track "KNOCK" I love this short little song... especially blasting it loud in my car on my way to work. But hearing it live caught me off guard with a whole 3 levels up in perceived level of awesomeness (13/10 on a scale of 1-10). So right off the bat I'm suckerpunched into cloud nine. Then they timeslip back to a supreme classic:

followed by another classic:

They performed all ten songs off "DAY" and eight older crowd favorites.

Setlist: 1. KNOCK 2. PR (u.u.o. mix) 3. RIP 4. THERAPY 5. MONKEY 6. 9 7. SHIP 8. JUDGE 9. CRISIS 10. KNIFE 11. QUEST 12. ORIENTATION 13. STORY 14. MYSTERY 15. KNUCKLE 16. MAYBE ---------------- encore: 17. COMING OUT 18. CURTAIN

My favorite song by them is "QUEST." It has such a brilliantly crafted instrumental that constantly switches up and cp beasts up big time overflowing with emotion and ferocity to complement the powerful, buttery beats. Although "QUEST' is my fave song, the highlight of every group_inou show is almost always when they play:

I have yet to see a crowd not lose complete control when this song is performed. Just the first two seconds of beats is enough to stimulate a Pavlovian response of anarchic frenzy from each member of the audience. Tonight was no different and for the last song of the set the crowd went buck f*cking wild!

The crowd clapped for an encore. imai returned to the stage followed by cp who was exhausted after such aN adrenaline overdrive rendition of "MAYBE" cp declared that it was so crazy he hoped they could just end the show with that. He then mentioned he was surprised that Bad Brains didn't stagedive into the crowd. He was referring to me since I wore a Bad Brains T-shirt a couple times on the NMFT tour and at their previous show. Also Bad Brains happens to be one of cp's favorite bands. And to explain to the crowd what they were talking about cp and imai introduced me to the audience and spent a good two minutes elaborating on the Canada tour and my role in it. It was nuts. After the show I had audience members requesting to be friends on Facebook.

Backstage I met up with cp and imai. I was all sweaty but cp gave me a bro-hug. We talked about our shared love of ramen. hahah. cp says his favorite bowl of ramen so far was in Tokushima at a spot called Todai. I almost want to travel to Tokushima just to check this place out. The bassplayer from Ogre You Asshole took our photo:

When I mentioned the bands I'm considering for NMFT5 cp stated that Mow Mow Lulu Gyaban would be an absolute sureshot and I should try my best to bring them. I would have loved to have hung out with _inou in Nagoya but I decided to catch one of the final trains heading back to Tokyo since I have a loooong night of shows to endure the next day.

coming up: sgt, Tokyo Boredom! and possibly fresh! and tricot (4 different shows in one night)