Review by Pelle Johnson for Kokumaromilk - 少女娼婦 (2008)

A very weird Japanese power metal album. That band name is pretty interesting, some sort of Japanese wordplay like "Seikima-II". So, "Kokumaromilk"... it's two words, "kokumaro" and "milk", the former being a kind of curry dish and the latter is some kind of white shit that comes from cow tit or something, idk never heard of it. So the wordplay is that those two don't really go together and the album name is like that too. "少女娼婦" or in English "girl prostitute" but the effect is more like "virgin prostitute" which not only is contradictory but also a pretty sad and terrifying concept. This band really likes their contrasting concepts and blending two things that shouldn't be to create a strange and psychotic atmosphere.

Even the beginning of this album is some straight up weirdness. It's some seemingly pretty normal power metal albeit symphonic in a really off-kilter way. Honestly, i'm having a pretty hard time trying to relate the strangeness of it. One aspect that can be easily pointed out, though, is the vocals. This is where that concept of contradictions comes back in. Take the second track, for example, where she comes in all cutesy and child-like and she progresses into sounding very manic and panicking. At two minutes in or so, she does this spoken word part where she totally freaks out, screaming and panicking. In terms of the vocals, this is definitely the craziest point. I suppose the approach is like she's playing different characters with her vocals which brings up that psychotic atmosphere I was talking about earlier. As if this album couldn't get any stranger, there's the fourth track which is this ten minute long noise section with even more spoken word parts all throughout the song, narrating whatever lyrical concept this band has. I'm not Japanese and there aren't any written lyrics online so that makes it a mystery for now. The song kind of sounds like a post-metal thing with the sirens and just the general bleakness of it which is an interesting midpoint for this album, considering what it sounded like prior to this. It does have a progression to it, though, and at the end, the singing finally comes back but this time, heavily filtered and sort of washed out. That's also exactly where this record decides to flip the table with the next track which is this upbeat, jazzy pop song. Reminds me a lot of vocaloid and give me another metal album where that description is appropriate. I reckon it'd be pretty difficult to do that.

I've kind of just summarized certain tracks here but you can't really describe something like this as one whole. It's kind of like the Mr. Bungle way of avant-garde metal where you do some crazy cross genre shenanigans and generally just making it as weird as possible. For sure some of the weirdest, most batshit power metal you'll ever listen to and it's kind of a shame that this band isn't as well remembered as i'd like them to be. They're definitely in the upper leagues of Japanese weirdness with bands like Sigh and Gonin-Ish.