Art School

Art-School may lack the cinematic gloss required to penetrate the top layers of the Oricon charts, but their U2-based sound -- combining the rawness of alt-rock with an almost impeccable sense of melody and texture -- has resulted in some of the best music the Japanese rock scene has to offer in the 2000s. The band was started in 2000 by vocalist Riki Kinoshita after his two-year stab at a solo career, which produced the mini-album Teenage Last (1999), recorded with the help of support musicians Sakurai Yuichi (drums) and Hidekazu Hinata (bass), who became Art-School members a...