No one could heal your sensible heart
Angels above watching over you
I will be here just to see you heal
With your own will
Tokyo’s Sex Virgin Killer have spent their existence treating genre boundaries with roughly the same respect a speeding motorcycle gives a painted line in the road. Punk, Visual-Kei, metal, darkwave: all of it has gone into the engine at one point or another, sometimes colliding violently, sometimes locking together with the ridiculous precision of machinery that probably should have exploded three exits ago. On Lissajous (Shinobu Narita Remix), that long history suddenly opens into something almost impossibly sweet.
Narita, a frequent collaborator whose résumé reaches back to Japanese new wave and techno-pop group Urban Dance and forward through production work with Boris, understands exactly where the song’s bloodstream runs. He takes the original Lissajous and draws its electronic architecture into sharper relief, bringing the melody forward until the track feels enormous without becoming bloated. Synth lines rise with the clean romantic rush of Erasure, while the clipped electronic contours recall early Depeche Mode before stadium dimensions entered the equation.
There is something wonderfully reckless about placing lyrics this bruised inside music this euphoric. The song concerns survival after emotional damage, where scars remain legible even after the body has learned to move again. Broken wings grow back. The moon becomes a guide across distance. Two people separated by whatever catastrophe preceded the song may cross paths again, and connection becomes less a promise than an act of faith repeated until somebody believes it. Sex Virgin Killer understand that recovery can carry its own strange exhilaration; once you have spent enough time staring into the abyss, simply realizing you can still move feels almost indecently luxurious.
Narita exploits that tension beautifully: his electronics give the chorus a soaring physical quality, and the sweetness never turns syrupy because the words beneath it carry too much accumulated damage. There is real pop intelligence at work here, the kind that knows heartbreak becomes more devastating when the synthesizer seems convinced heaven remains within reach.
Narita has taken a beautiful song about learning to fly again and given it considerably more sky.
Coming after Sex Virgin Killer’s sold-out Finnish tour and their latest album, ANGEL, the remix also feels like another marker in a career built around motion. Twenty years into their evolution, they remain willing to push their music toward different rooms without abandoning the personality that got them there.
The KiTalbum edition wisely includes both original versions of Lissajous from the international and Japanese editions of ANGEL, allowing the remix to sit beside its earlier forms. The international album appeared through Germany’s Young & Cold Records on vinyl and digipak CD, while the Japanese edition arrived through the band’s own lilii sound loom on cassette and CD.
Listen to Lissajous (Shinobu Narita Remix) below and order the single here.
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