Back in 2012, I wrote about the 80s vocal group Sugar and their big hit "Wedding Bell" which I had known for its sweet melody but only found out many years later that the song hid a majorly jagged shiv within its lyrics. It was such that I now wonder how some of the audience at NHK Hall had felt when the young ladies of that trio sang those words at the Kohaku Utagassen. Mind you, I do remember from the 1982 broadcast that they did get a nice round of applause.
A track from Puffy's 11th album "Bring it!" from June 2009, Ami and Yumi's take on "Wedding Bell" has more of a slightly swinging 1960s feel, and the ladies try not to tax their vocal cords as the Sugar members did.
Plus, the intro sounds like it got a bit of that Disney treatment...all the better to hide the lyrical shiv. All in all, it's a nice update on the 1981 original song. "Wedding Bell" wasn't released as a single but "Bring it!" got as high as No. 17 on the Oricon weeklies. Speaking of Puffy updates on 80s tunes, Ami and Yumi did their take on another vocal group's classic.
Techno group 80kidz even did a remix of Puffy's cover.
Very nice! I've been looking into Puffy lately by way of Tamio Okuda and Inoue Yousui. I remember when they were being promoted in the US back in the early 2000s, but unforunately I wasn't paying too much attention to them at the time.
ReplyDeleteHello, RagnarXIV.
DeleteYes, I remember when Puffy hit it big at that Texas music festival all those years. They had the cartoon and everything, and this was about several years after their heyday in Japan.