Despite having been a fan of BUCK-TICK for years, I fell in love with this song very recently. A friend of mine went to Japan and brought me a CD of Kurutta Taiyou (holy shit! thanks!) so i've been relistening to the album. And this is what i find really cool about BUCK-TICK: they always evolved, so much so that they have periods i adore and periods i have very few favourite songs from. The period with nearly every song being a direct hit for me is early stuff, from HURRY UP MODE until TABOO. Kurutta Taiyou was their moment of shift from romantic naive punkish fantasies to somewhat grim industrial and even occult rock, which then gave way to their "cyber" era. Hence i always dismissed the album relatively to the stuff i know and love, with track 9 "MAD" being an exception. I heard "Machine" while shuffling through my endless playlist the other day, liked it, but was doing something, so didn't pay attention to the name. Next day i wanted to relisten and spent a good 30 minutes searching for it across the B-T subfolder, filled with joy that it really is that awesome when i finally found it. Afterwards, i took a liking to almost all other songs from the album. It's impressive how B-T is so variative that over years i keep finding new songs to fall in love with despite knowing the band's discography somewhat well. They evolved so rapidly and constantly that there are moments you can only guess it's BUCK-TICK because of the all-too-familiar voice of Atsushi Sakurai.

Speaking of Atsushi's voice.. if you heard any other BUCK-TICK stuff of the period, you probably noticed something's off. This is what gave me the initial spark with this song - he's not singing in his usual manner here. Atsushi sings in a lower register - it's not his usual voice, but a deeper, more desperate-sounding variant. To me, the song is about being sinfully sure of oneself, afraid of it and enjoying it at the same time (lyrics), and the way he sings about it fits the motive. But the motive is not all there is to it, because... by some accounts, B-T were falling behind the timelines with the album production, Kurutta Taiyou being their most complex work at the time, and so they had to drag the poor Sakurai to the studio deep in the night. Allegedly, he says he remembers nothing about that session. Which would also explain the unusual way of singing. It's a bit less romantic than linking it to the lyrics and music, but it's funny.

When one thinks of punk and rock history, they usually think of the USA/UK timeline. But in other places they took a completely different evolutionary route. I myself am from one such place where local punk and rock scenes took their own twists and turns, resulting in something that sounds familiar to the so-called "classics" (so, USA/UK), but also is completely different. Same thing is applicable to Japan's visual kei and rock scene to an even bigger degree. B-T were a very unique blend of rock and punk in 80s and early 90s, and "Machine" is very appealing in how it pretends to be your usual punk-rock song, but the more you relisten, the more you feel it as its own thing. The vocals are soaked in a mixture of hope, dread and mania, the guitar leads are airy and romantic, and the song is full of weird electronic noises and unexpected turns. The tonality the intro chords set the song into is instantly broken and modulated somewhere else, the chorus is followed by an unprompted atonal sinister breakdown. The song is built on familiar punk-rock movements, but it reconstructs them into something that the heart tracks completely differently. "What I believe in isn’t God, It’s just the smell of my boiling blood"