Sawa Katsuragi with Pedro & Capricious -- Sunset Close

A nice and leisurely City Pop/J-AOR song for a Friday night, "Sunset Close" is performed by Sawa Katsuragi（桂木佐和）with the longtime band Pedro & Capricious（ペドロ＆カプリシャス）. Try as I might, I couldn't find much information at all on Katsuragi including a confirmation on the proper way to pronounce her family name since according to jisho.org, there are a number of readings. However, I'm going to go with Katsuragi for now since it's the one that I'm most familiar with until I'm corrected. Aside from that, I could only find out that after doing this duet with Pedro & Capricious, she became the 4th official vocalist for the group for just one album "Sun Patio" in 1983.

Written by Mayumi Shinozuka（篠塚満由美）and composed by Jun Nanbara（なんばら・じゅん）, Katsuragi doesn't quite have as much of the mahogany richness in her voice that the 2nd vocalist, Mariko Takahashi（高橋真梨子）, had during her time with Pedro & Capricious. However, she does have that wonderful balance of timbre and lightness when delivering "Sunset Close", and the song itself really does have that feeling of sunset. Plus the back vocals rather remind me of The Bee Gees. This is another nice example of how the group jumped into the sea of urban contemporary going into the 1980s when compared to their folk roots of the 1970s.