Nope, not K-Pop or J-Pop, but they sure wish! Or maybe not…

[Video]
[4.77]

Anthony Easton: Writing about formally interesting, abstract works in terms of painting or dance is pretty easy — you can talk about colour or form or movement. I still feel too dumb to talk about abstractness in terms of electronic music, though I have been excited about it for years. I love this. I find it beautiful. I like how it fades out at the end. I like how it turns in on itself. I like how it refuses language, or even the form of songcraft. I like how, in that turning and that refusal, it is close and self-contained but not claustrophobic. I cannot explain what those likes mean musically.
[6]

Kat Stevens: If Joey Santiago had played a bunch of computer games instead of the guitar, then maybe this would be a bit shorter?
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: You’ve got my attention anytime a chiptune song aspires to be more than a lazy grab at 8-bit nostalgia, and Anamanaguchi shoot for a lot more on “Meow.” They give it a good build, which makes the finales that much more adrenaline pumping, less thinking about an old final boss battle and more like actually taking part in one. It’s a shame they went and took the title literally with the inclusion of a sound only a few turns away from Nyan Cat.
[6]

Iain Mew: I’ll admit that I know of Anamanaguchi through their chiptune soundtrack to Scott Pilgrim the video game. It was actually the most enjoyable part of that game, though the achievement wasn’t that difficult in that particular case. “Meow” tries to move away from soundtrack territory by using a squeaky vocal-like sample and by adopting a structure which is pretty much pop-punk, just with the vocals and guitar solos replaced with frenzied electronics. The latter works so well at delivering an energy rush that I wish they’d done away with the annoying squeaks as an unnecessary distinguishing feature.
[7]

Crystal Leww: Am I missing something here? Do I not “get” Anamanaguchi because I didn’t play video games? This pretty much just sounds like annoying pop music made with video game sounds to me.
[3]

Alfred Soto: If Congress investigated the influence of video games on “the culture,” imagine what the world’s greatest legislative body would make of this bleeps and power chord hybrid. In the right hands, though, this hybrid should replace Francis Scott Key’s anthem.
[4]

Rebecca A. Gowns: I don’t know, this is like, weird internet-people music. I don’t fetishize the internet, I don’t fetishize Japan, so I feel sort of fundamentally against this and anything it’s supposed to represent. (Wait… if I close my eyes it sort of sounds like a kid trying to replicate a Dan Deacon song. Better, but still not something I would listen to if I wasn’t humoring the kid.)
[1]

Will Adams: I was wondering when Nyan Cat would get its big break.
[4]

Ian Mathers: The melody is kind of catchy in an overcaffeinated kind of way, but you get the sense that it’s never occurred to them for even a second that the whole “chiptune” thing could be used in any setting or gear aside from this one. Which isn’t automatically a problem but is here, for some reason.
[4]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The cover art for “Meow” is a charmingly crude drawing of a Windows computer desktop, with the song title acting as background art and the band’s name stretching out across three separate monitor windows. It is all very Anamanaguchi and, by extension, a very chiptune thing to do: donating an identity to a scarily specific and dated technological era, then reconfiguring your identity through those narrow parameters. On top of the Second Life/avatar lifestyle, “Meow” throws cat samples on top, as though the band aims to combine nostalgia for technology of the past (16-bit riffs!) with our recent internet-influenced tweeness (cat memes). It is dizzyingly gimmicky but also excitingly experimental, as though chiptune is being used as a way for Anamanaguchi to comment on our relations to everyday technology beyond nostalgia and quick-buzz pleasantries. Can we call post-internet a genre yet?
[7]

Brad Shoup: If you pretend it’s a cat singing the verses to the Veronicas’ “Untouched” over an arcade racer, you might find it funny. I mean, not ha-ha funny, more like Rivers Cuomo funny.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: The chiptune palette is a fecund one and “Meow” pings with luminscent brilliance and propulsive drive. In fact, the song is cursed by its greatest strength: it sounds near enough to lo-fi synth-pop that its paucity of ideas is only underwhelming. Anamanaguchi would be interesting were its sound so remarkably experimental that it could survive on novelty alone, but it’s not, so the formlessness seems vacuous. Even a rainbow roadtrip would benefit from verse chorus verse.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Chiptunes, cats, Scott Pilgrim, ’90s remembrance and music beloved of the wrong sort of listeners (as defined by taste policers; here, it’s gaming forumites) all make for quick kneejerk dismissals if you want to do that. If you don’t… well, even then you’re either susceptible to this stuff or you aren’t. And even if you are, your reaction might still be something like “huh, this Pokemon track sure is metal.”
[6]