I was surfing YouTube refreshing my memory of Fall Out Boy songs in view of their upcoming concert in Singapore when I stumbled upon this video interview Fall Out Boy did with a Japanese rock band called ONE OK ROCK (pronounced one-ork-krock).

It was quite amusing how the guys in ONE OK ROCK were fanboying over Fall Out Boy so I decided to check them out since I spotted that they have an acoustic version of one of their songs. And I am a sucker for official acoustic versions.

The song agrees with my ears and naturally, I started clicking on their other videos to hear what else do they have.

After sampling a few songs, I must say that their genre is something I dig generally and hence it lead to a search in Google to find out who exactly these people are.

ONE OK ROCK is a 4 piece Japanese rock band form in 2005 with Toru (山下 亨 Yamashita Tōru) who is the leader and guitarist, Taka (森田 貴寬 Morita Takahiro) on lead vocals, Ryota (小浜 良太 Kohama Ryōta) on bass and Tomoya (神吉 智也 Kanki Tomoya) on drums. [referenced from wikipedia.]

Honestly, Japan is not a country I look to for pop/rock music. I’m sure they have rock bands in there but from my perspective (and my usual musical source of information), Japan outputs singers and artists who do fluffy pop stuff with a high-pitched anime character vibe to them (which I cannot really stand by the way).

So stumbling upon a very radio/commercial-friendly type of sound like ONE OK ROCK is a really nice surprise. The fact that they sing half the time in English and Japanese in their song is quite a bonus (for me) since I don’t need to hunt for translations. Then again, they have quite a strong melody/riff in their songs where I find that I can just listen to them and dig it without knowing what they’re going on about.

From my concert going experience, many rock bands sound a lot better live than on CD/video. I would be pretty curious to check ONE OK ROCK live if I ever get the chance to.

Check out some of their other songs:

So what do you guys think of ONE OK ROCK?