Bleach03 - Biography
Hailing from Okinawa, Japan, Bleach03—also known as just Bleach and Bleachmobile—was a spastic all-girl thrashcore band that performed together from 1998-2009. Combining bratty, frenetic stage performances with punk bombast and a loud noise rock template, Bleach03 was comprised of a talented crew of practiced musicians—Kanna (vox/guitar), Miya (bass/vox) and Sayuri (drums/vocals)—with plenty of chops, an aesthetic that teetered on madness. One reviewer of a live show said it was like watching an epileptic fit by three teenage girls, and beyond that their sound was unique enough as to defy true classification. In the decade that Bleach03 was together, they put out six full-length albums and several EPs, toured Japan and North America, and cultivated a strong loyal following on those places. With a unique mercurial jazz-like thrash, the diminutive girls in Bleach03 made a big sound, often singing in an oil-meets-water madrigal that found harmony at the other end of its connotation.
Having grown up and lived in the mellow town of Okinawa their whole lives, the members of Bleach came together in juxtaposition to the scene there. In a green room interview with Amoeba Music after their performance there in May of 2007, the ladies of Bleach03 said that they weren’t sure how a disquieted band such as theirs emerged from a lazy oceanic place—but did say that being dark and introverted might have something to do with it. Having performed in other bands beforehand, the trio began writing songs together as a collective in 1998, and were soon playing clubs in Japan, using heavy electric guitar and intersecting bird-chirp Japanese vocals. They recorded their debut full-length Kibaku-Zai (Triggering Device) in 2000 which helped earn them a fan base in Japan, and followed that up the next year with three EPs—including the memorable, Hadaka No Jo (Naked Queen). That same year, in 2001, they traveled to America for the first time for a tour and showcase gigs at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Upon the release of their 2003 EP Canary Teikoku No Gyakushu (Canary Empire Strikes Back), the band was still operating largely under the simple name of Bleach as it released Three Girls from Okinawa, which was a compilation made up of the Naked Queen EP and three tracks from Triggering Device. A Tennessee-based Christian band also going by the name Bleach forced the Japanese girls to change their name to Bleach03 while playing in the United States, the appended 03 signifying the year of the switch. That same year they played the Rising Sun Rock Festival in Japan and won over a new fan base.
An self-titled 11-track album was released in 2005, Bleach03 (Australian Cattle God), and the band returned to the United States in 2007 in support of their next long player, The Head that Controls Both Right and Left Sides Eats Meats and Slobbers Even Today (Australian Cattle). The album trumped earlier efforts in aggression and structure, as the 15 tracks smoothed out some of the screaming, thorny rawness the band had in defining their sound. The most vital elements of—disparate, clashing almost atonal riffs and interchanging lyrical deposits into danceable choruses—were still very much in place, and Bleach03 had a buzz on two continents. The album garnered college radio play and the band was received rabidly in collegiate markets like Boston.
After recording their next album, the sixth and final full-length Bleach Stone (2009), Bleach03 announced that they’d be disbanding as of June 2009, citing artistic differences. The album would come out a month later.