Omokage Lucky Hole: His Load Was Huge

Posted On May 28, 2012

While a fair amount of Omokage Lucky Hole songs tend to fall into either the categories of uncomfortably seedy comedy, dark biting satire, or both, a lot of their songs also tell pretty serious and dire stories about tumultuous relationships between men and women. OLH songs can paint pretty awful pictures of human beings, with characters often times acting selfish, weak, and animalistic. While Ano Otoko (Hito) wa Ryou ga Ookatta has a deliberately prurient title meant to stir people up, the actual song is rather bleak it its depiction of a deviant, abusive, and just down right shitty relationship.

Some of the time the instrumental backing in OLH songs sharply contrasts against the content of the lyrics. While I think that approach works for a lot of their songs, newcomers to the band might be taken aback by how upbeat a song about leaving your child to die in the car while playing pachinko can be. But Ano Otoko (Hito) wa Ryou ga Ookatta’s instrumental backing compliments its lyrics perfectly. Nothing about the song is very upbeat–it’s all very slow and wallows in the misery of its characters.

The song comes sneaking out of the darkness with quiet plucks away at the guitar, bringing to mind images one forcing their eyes open in an attempt to wake up after a long night, with the following crash of the cymbals representing them finally coming to. The song hits a lot of my musical soft spots, with its use of the organ, horns and electric guitar, all working together in order to create a somewhat oppressive melancholic atmosphere, while still being a smooth track.

What’s worth noting is that the song has two instrumental breaks, which is rare in OLH songs, as they generally stick to a pretty standard structure with only one instrumental break proceeding the second verse. The first is a kind of grimy sounding guitar solo that paints a nice veneer of bleakness to lead us into the second verse, and the track closes with an extended organ solo, allowing the images to linger in one’s mind as the song comes to a close, eventually rounding things off with the same plucks on the guitar that it started with.

As for the lyrics themselves, while I’m unclear on a few lines, I went ahead and threw together a bad translation of the song. It’s a pretty sordid tale, one that boils humans down to their very base and animalistic traits. However, what makes the song interesting is that it doesn’t focus on the actions, but instead focuses on the aftermath–the messy hair, the marks on the wrist, the “warmth” flowing from between the main character’s legs…

Verses are spent with the main character making very clear headed observations on their current state, and viewing it half with resignation, half with horror. But where the knife really begins to twist is in the chorus. After making the correct decision to break off with the person she’s been with, the main character falls back into their animalistic desires, and just can’t help but long for his… you know. Where the song pulls the knife out and lets you bleed out is in the climax, where the main character makes one final plea for sexual satisfaction.

At its core, Ano Otoko (Hito) wa Ryou ga Ookatta is a song that concerns itself with how people end up doing things that they realize are painful and bad for them for the sake of one brief moment of simple satisfaction. It highlights the inherent contradictions in people, creating a wonderfully cruel and biting image of the embarrassing and pathetic aspects of people that exist to some degree inside of all of us.

(Yes, I completely copped this style of entry from Mark over at Transraad. The difference is he can actually talk about music intelligently and I can’t.)