Agnes Chan -- Tasogare Monogatari（黄昏物語）

 

When it comes to the Agnes Chan（アグネス・チャン）file on KKP, I've only written about her 1970s aidoru songs so it was a revelation coming across this particular song.

The album is "Ai ga Mitsukarisou ~ CITY ROMANCE"（愛が見つかりそう CITY ROMANCE...On the Verge of Love） which is a 1985 release by Chan, and it's safe to say that this is no longer the aidoru Agnes behind the mike here. Just from viewing the cover, the Hong Kong-born singer was going for a more mature approach. I had always envisioned her in a frilly white dress but she went for very stylish black, and the lettering for the title gave off a big sign of urban contemporary.

"CITY ROMANCE" has as its first track "Tasogare Monogatari" (Sunset Story), a love ballad that brings together an arrangement reminiscent of some of that West Coast pop feeling. I've heard similar things with 80s aidoru such as Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）and Naoko Kawai（河合奈保子）when they were pushing the envelope, so to speak, at around the same time. Written by Machiko Ryu（竜真知子） and composed by Akira Okamoto（岡本朗）, who had once gone by the moniker Issei Okamoto（岡本一生）, I actually wrestled in my first few listenings to "Tasogare Monogatari" whether this actually fell into the City Pop realm instead of it being purely pop. There may be some disagreement with my final decision, but I think what finally got me to go for both genres (plus AOR) in Labels is the last half when the romantic saxophone joined those keyboards; there was simply something about the ballad that struck me as being rather "City Hunter" via a drive in a taxi in Shinjuku.

When I went a bit deeper into "CITY ROMANCE" and listened to some of the subsequent tracks, I could still hear that voice of Chan that I heard back from her early days as an aidoru. However with "Tasogare Monogatari", if I hadn't seen that cover and not been told who it was, I wouldn't have recognized the singer as Agnes Chan. For the lack of a better word, her vocals seemed to have taken on some more gravitas.