PIZZICATO FIVE
The Fifth Album From Matador (Matador) 
Rating: 4 out of 7
By Ken Micallef

   Japanese impresario Yasuharu Konishi is the brains behind Pizzicato Five and its stylistic roller coaster that runs from contemporary Tokyo to 1960s Rome and back. The Fifth Album From Matador is pure kitsch, incorporating cheesy lounge fare with Ventures-styled punk, baroque string snippets, Cornelius-worthy rock send-ups, fake mambos. and the bubblegum Japanese vocals of model-turned-singer Maki Nomiya. 
   That P5 cares nothing about the U.S. market is clear not only from the throwaway album title, but in the Japanese-centric nature of the album. Not that they must address U.S. pop audiences, but Fifth Album... is entirely American in style and scope, a nostalgic Shindig party that blasts out of the stereo with such saccharine silliness and adrenalized fever that you either want to dance or run and hide.
   "Perfect World" is a go-go-boot-wearing, Nancy Sinatra-on-speed track; "Room Service" a sappy Latin jazz ripoff; and "20th Century Girl" an experiment in watusi dance fever. At album's end, P5 mumbles some indecipherable English as a kind of last laugh, but the joke is really on Yasuharu Konishi and his fixation with the cartoon side of life.

All recordings courtesy of Matador Records. All songs written by Y. Konishi; courtesy of Columbia Music Publishing, Inc. (JASRA)/Doorman Music (BMI), administered by Bug.