microstar -- She got the blues

Following talking about the charms of microstar's jazzy "Yuugure Girl"（夕暮れガール）and the disco "Tiny Spark", I decided to get the duo's 4th album "She got the blues" from July 2016. I couldn't quite believe that this was released some 20 years after their debut "birth of microstar" in December 1996. Anyways, I got "She got the blues" in the same CD Japan package as "Retroactive" by Blue Peppers（ブルー・ペパーズ）, another new band for me.

Seiki Sato and Yuko Iizumi（佐藤清喜・飯泉裕子）, who wrote and composed all of the tracks, get to work with "Chocolate Baby", a bouncy soulful number that had me thinking of some of those pop stylings of years past in the United States, and even the energy displayed by Japanese singers like Keizo Nakanishi（中西圭三）and Senri Oe（大江千里）. From the lyrics, it sounds like they are about a woman who was going to give some chocolate to a guy she likes but cancelled the project at the last minute with some disappointment.

Another wonderful track on "She got the blues" is "Yakan Hiko"（夜間飛行....Night Flight）. With a hint of technopop beats, the melody does sound like going on a trip from Haneda or Narita Airport into the heavens. But there is still a grounding in that old-fashioned music of yesteryear. Not sure if the designer of the photo meant it to be so, but whenever I see the lady above, I keep thinking that's an Engineering officer on the USS Enterprise looking out a porthole.

My final song here is the title track itself. It's here that I get these lovely feelings of some of the output of Swingout Sister, Burt Bacharach and Motown balladry, all reasons that I also thought that there is something rather Shibuya-kei as well. The lyrics tell of someone shutting out the sounds of the everyday while listening and waltzing to something romantic over the earphones on the way home. It's a lovely scene to be true, but let us be careful not to get carried away and end up getting hit by another pedestrian or a car. Public service announcement aside, it is a glorious track that I thought could have been placed as the final song on the album instead of being the 8th out of 10 tracks.

Perhaps it's titled "She got the blues" but I certainly don't with this album. Moreover, it makes for a nice comparison with Blue Peppers' "Retroactive". Whereas the latter release has more of the sunny Sunday AOR flavour, the former is also quite weekend-y but with more of that downtown City Pop taste. Both are good purchases for me.

April 22 2023: We're wrapping up the rest of the album here.