You’ve got to give the guy top marks for trying. After bolstering his reputation for quality jangle earlier this year with his fabulous summer release Retro Metro now Super 8 appears to want to be big in Japan. And why not? It worked pretty well for Cheap Trick. Super 8 Goes J-Pop is a tidy EP package of five songs, featuring covers of influential Japanese bands as well as a recent Super 8 single sung in Japanese.

Things kick off with the Super 8 original “Keep Doing It” from Metro Retro which sounds just as chipper and sunshine-y in Japanese as in English. But the bulk of the EP is focused on covers. The choice of Japanese band material dips into the 1970s and then skips ahead to new millennium. Happy End famously abandoned rock and roll’s then lingua franca English to sing in their native Japanese in the late 1960s, influencing a nation of bands to do the same. Their “Kaze Wo Atsumette” is a classic of the era, a deceptively simple-sounding (but in reality tightly-arranged) folk rock masterpiece in miniature. The exquisite organ work alone is worth the price of the single. When you compare their version to Super 8’s you can hear how he puts a bit more of an electric stamp on things while loosening the structure. Super 8 also includes an acoustic version of the song that is a spare folk treatment with a campfire intimacy. Then we shift to 2010 for a cover of the Tenniscoats single “Baibaba Bimba,” a song that stands a testament to extreme folk minimalism. Super 8 inserts an alluring sonic backdrop to the tune without altering its minimalist clarity and beauty. And then, just for fun, we get a Japanese-language version of The Beatles “I Need You.” This would have gone down a treat at the Budokan in July 1966 for sure.

Perhaps Super 8 Goes J-Pop will lead to a frenzied fan-base from the far east demanding tours and merch from our fave jangler. Whether that comes to pass or no, all I can say is that you don’t need to understand Japanese to dig what Super 8 is laying down here.