Continuing the wonders of J Utah's videos from my last article, I was watching his Hong Kong drive as I listened to "Light Mellow ~ City", and there were quite a few interesting nuggets in there, too.
Singer-songwriter Satoshi Ikeda's（池田聡）"Itsuka" (Someday) has nothing to do with Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）"Itsuka", by the way. It's indeed an Ikeda creation that was originally a track on his October 1992 8th album "Shijou no Ai"（至上の愛...A Love Supreme）, and listening to it, I'm glad that City Pop was still on its merry way going into the final decade of the century.
I heard some fascinating elements in "Itsuka", the first of which was that although I have deemed it a City Pop song, there was something rather Shibuya-kei about it; maybe it was that certain get-together of guitar and synths. Sure enough, when I checked out the liner notes in "Light Mellow ~ City", it turned out that all of the songs on "Shijou no Ai" were produced by Yasuharu Konishi（小西康陽）, one-half of Pizzicato Five. Meanwhile, the background vocals were provided by the other half, vocalist Maki Nomiya（野宮真貴）.
There were also that drum riff in the intro and the resulting groove afterwards that reminded me of one of my favourite songs from the old days, Boz Scaggs' incredible "Lowdown" (1976). That was also borne out in the liner notes. I wouldn't mind having "Itsuka" in the car stereo at any time of the day or night in any major city.
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