In mid-December of 1995, a little over a year after Mad graced us with their melodic punk magnum opus Park, they gave their audience a little Christmas teaser in the form of this CD single to Kami-Uta, the first single released for Park's fantastic followup 4 Plugs. Comparing just this song to anything on Park, the difference in Mad's sound is notable enough, but not as notable as it would be if either Crack or Walk! were the lead single instead.
One thing I never understood about this song though, and forgive me for my lack of knowledge with Japanese, but; is there any irony this song's seemingly gospel lyrics, or is this just an earnest hardcore punk tribute to (what I assume is the Shinto) God? Perhaps a Japanese reader will be able to clarify anything in the lyrics that could discern this song as one or the other, and please do, if you're reading this.
As for the packaging of this particular single, it's a bit of an odd man out in Mad's single discography with that regard in mind. While it is their first single to be packaged in a maxi case, which Americans and Europeans are more used to (Gichi / Marionette / Dirty Trick is an EP, not a single), the actual disc itself is the same 8cm CD that was usually packaged in snap-packs; hell, the single for Walk!, the second CD single made to promote 4 Plugs was both a mini-CD and in a snap-pack. Perhaps the inconsistency in packaging it like this was done intentionally to complement the maxi's inner artwork, as the above photo shows, but I honestly don't know.
Instead of having the lyrics inside the maxi artwork, it's on the back of the obi strip, oddly enough. Also note that Takeshi's name is accidentally unfinished in the band credits.
In addition to being one of the odder releases of Mad's entire discography, it's also by far the most disposable one. While the rest of their singles before and since have had some form of exclusive content, whether it be a b-side or a remix (although the Crash Pow and Creature singles are similarly disposable if you have the yellow European edition of Digidogheadlock), this single just has Kami-Uta in the exact same mix that appears on 4 Plugs and nothing else. It's the lack of exclusive content that kept me from having it shipped out from Buyee's warehouse until very early last week, even though it'd been sitting there since early October.
The only difference between the two is that the single version has two less seconds of silence at the end, but that's a very negligible difference.
Since this single was released on December 16th, 1995, there was only a little over a month between the release of this single and the release of 4 Plugs, so this single was doomed to a very short shelf life without anything extra to keep it desirable. Still, if either you, a friend or a relative are really into collecting everything Mad, and you can find this for less than five dollars USD before shipping fees, I would recommend picking it up purely to fill out the collection. At least the single's artwork is really nice, I'll give it that.
As a little bonus, even though you've likely seen this video already, here's the video for Kami-Uta again. I actually now have the Mad shirt that person that bookends the video is wearing, I should get to doing a piece on that soon.
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