Kyoko Furuya -- Memory（メモリー）

 

Last year in December, I wrote about this singer-songwriter Kyoko Furuya（古家杏子）who seems to incorporate a sliver of avant-gardism into her music...not too much to make it too weird but just enough to add an appealing twist to the usual pop song. I first found about her "Harumi Futou"（晴海埠頭）through the compilation album "Pacific Breeze 2" although the song was originally a track on her 1982 album "Tsumetai Mizu"（冷たい水...Cold Water）. "Harumi Futou" is cool and enigmatic as if describing a film noir plot in the titular Harumi Wharf by Tokyo Bay, and I wasn't able to place it into the New Wave or technopop categories.

From the same album is "Memory". It's a different animal from "Harumi Futou" and includes a mix of rock, synthpop and kayo but not in big dollops so that I could use any of those genre names to distinguish it. I put it down as pop...fairly unusual pop, but pop nonetheless. If anything, the main rhythm while Furuya is singing "Memory" sounds somewhat similar to some happy kayo from the 60s or 70s but then it's accompanied by some slightly atonal gloppy bass, an itchy electric guitar (a bit of Prince perhaps?) and bits of playful piano and organ. It's a fairly fractured "Memory".

It would be all so intimidating except for Furuya's lush and reassuring vocals which lead us through this amusement park of an arrangement. In fact, maybe I can finish up by saying that especially with that organ, I couldn't help feeling that "Memory" comes across as being a proto-song by later synthpop band PSY-S.