Awesome City Club -- Outsider（アウトサイダー）

I mentioned that I saw my good friends for dinner a few nights ago and we shared some information on the contemporary pop music scene in Japan since we share that aspect in common along with our love of food. He tipped me off about a group that he considered to be in the indie pop vein called Awesome City Club. I said that I hadn't heard about them so he gave me the link to their website and their videos on YouTube.

A few hours later, I had to go "Oops!". No, nothing to do with the toilet although the Mexican was wonderfully spicy. My acknowledgement of error was actually due to the fact that I actually wrote about an Awesome City Club song back in 2016 titled "Don't Think, Feel" but had forgotten about them. Apologies to ACC!

"Don't Think, Feel" was their second single so I've checked out their first one, "Outsider" from July 2015. Pretty slick and there is a bit of that retro-pop feeling that I've always liked. To specify, the retro-pop kinda takes me back to times such as the disco of the late 1970s and the early 2000s of poppy Japanese soul. Plus, the music video with all of the band members sporting some snazzy fashion also had me thinking into the past. In a way, the music seemed to connect me with Bruno Mars for some reason.

Bassist Takumi Matsuzaka（マツザカタクミ）and vocalist/guitarist atagi created "Outsider". I was intrigued by how the group came up with the name Awesome City Club so looking at the J-Wiki page for the band, I found out that they had wanted to come up with its own overarching theme of "a soundtrack for an awesome city" to bring the City Pop of the 2010s from Risokyo (which seems to be a merging of "ideal" and "capital city" to mean "utopia") to Tokyo. Matsuzaka had also felt that because all of the 5 members had come in from other bands, the group shouldn't be considered a band per se but a collaborative club of sorts. Then, in an interview on Cinra.com, the bassist also wanted to separate ACC from other bands by avoiding the use of the ordinary word "band" since groups seem to rely on "The" and "-s" to identify themselves.

Hmmm....perhaps Awesome City Club could get itself invited to the Opening Ceremonies in 2020? Anyways, now that my memories are back and the egg has been wiped off my face, I can also add one of this group's albums to my wish list.