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| Album cover of Darts' 2nd album "God Bless You!". Scanned by me. |
The sound of the band is close to that of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, but Darts' music is more city pop-like and has fewer electronic elements. From what I heard from their first and second albums, I would say that their first self-titled album, “Darts”, has more city pop content overall. However, I like the first track, "Fall City" from their second album the most.
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| The three members of the band. Scanned by me. |
From start to finish, the musicians used sound effects and synthesizers to create a kind of "spatial" feeling, which gives me an impression of being in the middle of a big city. To me, it sounds both futuristic and nostalgic at the same time.
The melody is where the city pop elements appear. It sounds rather sentimental and gives a lonely kind of feeling. When the instrumental part sets a place, the melody gives me the theme of the story. To me, the album cover is a perfect visual representation of this song: being lonely and standing somewhere in a future city.
If you subscribed to my channel, you would probably know that I uploaded an album named "Movin' Groovin'" by an artist named KAZZ some time ago. When I reviewed that album, I found the first track of that album "夏の扉" to be somehow similar to this song. After checking the song credits, I found that both of them have Keizo Nakamura involved. Nakamura arranged "夏の扉" with Tetsuji Hayashi and was in charge of composing "Fall City". So if you like this song, I highly recommend checking out "夏の扉" by KAZZ in the video below.
In 2013, the members of Darts got back together and revived the band. It looks like they only held a couple of live events, but did not release any new musical materials. The last Facebook post on the band's official account was in 2018, so I doubt they are still performing as a group.
If you like this band and want to hear more of their songs, the member Yasushi Matsunaga has a Youtube account and has uploaded the majority of Darts' musical works there. From his uploads, except for "Fall City", I recommend the song "Million Kiss" from Darts' first album, which is a city pop song with a strong Tetsuji Hayashi influence in its arrangement.
Associated links:
Darts - Darts: full album Youtube playlist
Darts - God Bless You!: full album Youtube playlist
Yasushi Matsunaga's Facebook account
Yasushi Matsunage's Youtube account
KAZZ - Movin' Groovin': full album Youtube upload
Morning, HRLE92! Indeed, "Natsu no Tobira" is fun! Yes, I remember Nakamura's name from that article for KAZZ. "Fall City" actually sounds like a Hayashi creation when he was contributing to Omega Tribe's discography back in the mid-1980s. The vocalist even sounds like a less-high-pitched version of Carlos Toshiki.
ReplyDeleteOf course, "Million Kiss" sounds even more like a Hayashi/Omega Tribe concoction...kinda like "Kimi wa 1000%". I'm not sure how successful Dart got during its brief run but perhaps its brevity may have been due to the timing of their emergence going into the 1990s as music was heading into another direction. I could have easily seen the two albums doing better during the Omega Tribe days.
Hi, thanks for reading! From what I know, Darts was not very successful, because not a lot of copies of their albums seems to exist. I think they would do great if their music was released earlier.
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