For over four decades now, Half Japanese have been one of indie rock's most reliable sources of positivity. Jad and David Fair started the band in the mid '70s as a giddy experiment in the limits of guitar pop songwriting. They didn't tune their instruments properly and they chose not to play chords, embracing the infinite possibilities that the electric guitar can offer if you approach it without regard for the patterns and scales most players find themselves locked into. Freed from the shackles of traditional pop songwriting, the Fair brothers embraced something a little shaggier, using their freedom as the basis for ebullient songs about love and monsters, as David once put it, each as unrepentantly gleeful as the gap-toothed grin of a young child. - All of that innocent abandon is still at the heart of the band on their sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar. Within the first 30 seconds of the album opener "Wherever We Are Led," over brillo-scoured guitar work, Jad begins wailing, "Refuse to bend, refuse to break, only good we will take."