Kishidan -- One Night Carnival

 

I forgot that the rock band Kishidan（氣志團...The Knights） had already gotten some representation on KKP not too long ago when vocalist Sho Ayanokoji（綾小路翔）contributed a song to Masayuki Suzuki's（鈴木雅之）"ALL TIME ROCK 'N' ROLL". However, this time around, Kishidan is on board on its own.

To be honest, I had thought that Kishidan had been around a lot longer than its official 1997 debut, and I guess that might be because of the whole thing about Ayanokoji and his guys sporting the punkified high school uniforms and making like the toughest of bosozoku bikers. It was all kinda 80s going into the 90s for me. But actually despite the appearance and the rock n' roll music, Kishidan has been categorized as a comic rock band on Wikipedia, although on J-Wiki, they've gotten the labels of indies rock, pop rock and pop punk. I'd known about some of the comic bands of the 1950s and 1960s such as The Drifters（ザ・ドリフターズ）but Kishidan is my first comic rock band.

Kishidan had its indies period for a few years after its debut in the late 1990s which is when their first song "One Night Carnival" was released in June 2001. With words and music by Ayanokoji, who's been called the Mad Dog of the Boso Peninsula, it's an invitation and love letter for some gasoline-powered escape down the highways, away from the boring everyday and towards a dangerous but far more thrilling life. Reading the translation of the lyrics, though, I'm also wondering whether that one night carnival is a one-way road into the afterlife.

The 2001 single peaked at No. 20 on Oricon and sold an impressive 800,000 copies. That led to Kishidan getting under a major label, Toshiba EMI, to release "One Night Carnival" once more in May 2002 with the only major difference being a different voiceover by Ayanokoji. Results were even better for this version which went as high as No. 7. I think part of the not-so-serious part of the band comes in the music video above which has the choreography looking as if Kishidan took a detour through a para-para dance club for lessons.

"One Night Carnival" also appears as a track on the group's 2nd album "Boy's Color" released in March 2003 which soared up to No. 3 on the album charts. It also became the 57th-ranked album of the year. Kishidan also appeared on NHK's Kohaku Utagassen twice in 2004 and 2005 to perform this very song.