OUGD504 - Brief 4 - Band Analysis

OUGD504: Brief 4: SONY music / ONLY studio Brief

Band Analysis 

I have chosen to create a campaign website for THE JAPANESE HOUSE to support the release of their latest album 'CLEAN'. 

Nineteen-year-old Londoner Amber Bain is behind The Japanese House producing her debut album with help from  George Daniel and Matthew Healy of the 1975. There aren’t many details floating around regarding The Japanese House however this works to their advantage creating a sense of mystery. Michelle Geslani for http://consequenceofsound.net says  all we know is that it’s the new solo project of one 19-year-old Londoner named Amber Bain. While this kind of alluring mysteriousness is certainly not unusual for up-and-coming artists (especially on this thing called the World Wide Web), it suits The Japanese House’s surreal brand of alt pop to a T.  I fell I could work with this sense of mystery to create an engaging and exciting concept for a digital campaign. 

The style of the band is often compared to that of Wolf Alice and acoustic singer-songwriter Marika Hackman As well as the 1975 and the XX. This places them as part of the trans pop genre, a recent sub-genre of the indie genre, more experimental with the use of soundscapes and easy listening acoustics to its counterpart of indie rock. The 405 talks about a recent release saying  "Bain makes the song her own with warm, dream-pop sounds that wash over the listener like you're standing in the ocean getting taken over by the waves." The band's sound has been described as  a display of both careful restraint and free-flowing creativity. Bain experiments with seemingly incongruent tapestries of sound — the earthy and the metal, the muted pastels and radiant neons, the futuristic and the familiar — to create something that’s neither purely cerebral nor of the heart. - Michelle Geslani

From this research it can be seen the bands fits in with quite an indie sound that is creative and experimental. Still finding their feet within the industry allows them to be as creative and alternative as they like still building a solid base of fans and finding their unique sound. I can take the experimental creativity through to my designs, finding it difficult to sum up the band as a single entity I created a list of the bands characteristics to help inspire me throughout the design process;

• creative
• experimental
• muted pastels
• soft 
• gentil 
• dream-pop
• wash over waves

These adjectives are very visual and create connotations that can portray the bands style and sound, I can use these adjectives within my design process to open up the creative possibilities for this digital campaign.