Release Date: 22 August 2025 (recorded 30 July 1976)
Song Count: 9
Rating: 4.3/10
Description:
Now, as you're looking through the tags of this post to see the general information about Jittoku 76, you may be wondering to yourself: why did the author add two years as the dates for this album? And that is because this album, along with almost Les Rallizes Dénudés' entire discography, was never actually released during the band's existence in the late '60s up until the late '80s and briefly in the mid-90s, but rather way after it had already long disbanded, remaining archived yet unreleased until they were rediscovered. The band's releases from 2021 onwards under the record label Temporal Drift are the first outright official ones since the band's disbansion, with Jittoku 76 being the most recent one of these - prior to this, most released works from it between the band's existence and the Temporal Drift remasters were bootlegs.
As representatives of the niche genre of Noise Rock, the tracks are composed of riffs and chords of distorted guitars, dissonant and bone-chilling noises and sound effects, and self-repeating instrumental percussion - though not always present, such as in the opening track. Every instrument and sound within the songs is coated in thick layers of distortion, weight and unbridled noise, giving them a defining noisy and chaotic sound. The way the actual instruments are played don't strike the listener as particularly impressive, professional or qualitative, with sprinkles of incorrectly tuned notes and sounds or percussioning not fully on-beat throughout the songs - this is in turn combatted by a bigger weight and emphasis put on the emotional atmosphere the songs invoke rather than sheer technical or musical prowess. Atop this arrangement lay the equally distorted and faraway Japanese vocals during some intervals within the songs, giving a quality to it all that can only be fully described as akin to a tragic nightmare or an otherwise unreal and bittersweet experience.
The album is generally both quite repetitive in its nature and also very long in duration, with every singular song aside from "White Awakening" exceeding well over 6 minutes, with several even going far over 10 minutes - and while song longevity is far from a downside on its own when applied correctly, here it does lead to a more sluggish feel of progression, making one mentally yearn for the end of a song and for a new bassline to be introduced again only repeat for another several minutes. It inforces a cycle that leads to a lesser amount of enjoyment in listening and acts as a detriment to the album.
While some individuals are very passionately into this particular style of underground noise music, and there are most definitely gems and outstanding tracks to be recognised within such genres, this type of music overall doesn't quite fall within my personal range of taste, and Jittoku 76, while not necessarily a bad listen, ultimately didn't succeed in bringing anything novel to the table that was worthy for me to stick around and listen again. Still, this was an interesting dive into the scene of noise rock, and if you're interested in taking in the sound for yourself and making your own judgement of it, Jittoku 76 may not be such a bad place to start that journey.