Jon Chang Never Said Hayaino Daisuki Was Grind

No one from Hayaino Daisuki is actually in that photo you're looking at. Not vocalist Jon Chang or guitarist Takafumi Matsubara. Not anyone from the band. "We're always getting pressured to take band photos, so we took pictures of these girls instead," Chang told Noisecreep. "We figured that would be more entertaining." It's things like this, a light-hearted joke about all band imagery being of glittered and high-on-energy schoolgirls, that keep Hayaino Daisuki a million speeding miles away from their grindcore roots, yet many still expect the band to be churning out songs under a minute long.

Though known for his high-pitched scream in the legendary grind act Discordance Axis, when the band split in 2001, Chang wanted to do something new: something much faster and that captured the glam rock attitude he was now learning about in Japanese speed metal.

"One of the things that I didn't like about [Discordance Axis] was I didn't like to do the songs," Chang explained. "They were uncomfortable songs to play. They weren't happy subjects." But the style that Hayaino Daisuki seeks is one of Mötley Crüe-like lyrics with Slayer-like speed.

Fans of Chang's previous band, along with his other current band Gridlink, which Matsubara plays in as well, expected Hayaino Daisuki to be more unnerving grind. And on their 2008 debut EP, the faithful were very disappointed to find extreme speed metal with no 'core' to speak of. Chang recalls the reviews, saying, "A lot of people were calling it a grindcore record, and I thought it was really misleading because I know a lot of people picked it up expecting [Discordance Axis]. 'What the f---?!?'" he shouted with a laugh hiding. "Sorry, I never said it was a grindcore record."

The actual structure for the band started when Chang met Matsubara while he was in Mortalized. "I started writing to him in 2002 to just tell him, 'Hey, I really liked your band and you made a huge impact on me.' They were one of the only good acts I saw on that tour," Chang remembered. Soon the two began sending each other MP3s and CDs; it was in these trades that Chang really discovered the Japanese speed scene, and from that, Hayaino Daisuki took form. "We really wanted to do the really fast heavy metal thing more than we wanted to do the grind thing."

This week, Hayaino Daisuki see their second EP -- exhaustively titled 'Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell or Did You Mean Hawaii Daisuki?' -- released, and all the same elements that started the band are still there: glitter fun played at unreal speed glued together by multi-dimensional layers of hooks and melody. But just as with the previous EP, there are only four songs. "It takes a long time to write those songs," Chang admits. "Those four songs are about a year and a half of work."

And as for what Hayaino Daisuki means, well it does translate to 'I love speed,' but Chang revealed there is something more to it that just that. "That's literally what it means in a f--- up sort of Japanese grammar way. Hayaino is speed Daisuki is love, but it's love in a sort of way that a 16-year-old girl loves Brad Pitt." This is an obsessive love.