Cymbals -- Gozen Hachi-ji no Dassou Keikaku（午前8時の脱走計画）

 

Well, I did say that I would take a look at Asako Toki's（土岐麻子）old band Cymbals but I don't think that any of us had expected that it would be right after providing her "Blue Moon", but here we are. 

After starting up "Kayo Kyoku Plus" nearly 10 years ago, I've been stumbling over a lot of genre names and some of them have appeared with the prefix "post-". For example, there is disco but there is also post-disco. Just from remembering what I've read (and admittedly, that's not much), post-disco is apparently disco in the early 1980s with additional synthesizers, and one band that has been included in this genre is Earth Wind & Fire, whether you agree or not.

Cymbals has been identified as either a Shibuya-kei or a post-Shibuya-kei band (according to the J-Wiki writeup) which had its time between 1997 and 2003. Perhaps the post tag might be for the fact that the band formed fairly late in the season, so to speak. In any case, along with Asako Toki as the vocalist and lyricist, there was guitarist and composer Reiji Okii（沖井礼二）, drummer Hiroyasu Yano（矢野博康）and keyboardist Chinami Nishino（にしのちなみ）who probably left early in the band's run just noticing from the above video.

Their second single and their first as a major act is "Gozen Hachi-ji no Dassou Keikaku" (The 8 am Escape Plan), released in June 1999 and with the additional subtitle of "This is what you want, but this is what you get", certainly has the alternately jangly and buzzy guitars and the jaunty melody by Okii to place the song as a happy-go-lucky Shibuya-kei tune. Toki was indeed the lyricist, and the whole song sounds like the theme for a 60s movie about a couple of teenage buddies to sneak away from the parents for a day of frolicking and fun in the sun.

Another revelation is Toki's vocals. This is the first time for me to hear Cymbals so before now, I've been accustomed to hearing Toki as a solo artist since around 2010, and she's had that velvety and whispery delivery. But listening to "Gozen Hachi-ji no Dassou Keikaku", I can definitely hear Toki but this time, she sounds very cute and chirpy.

Cymbals also released an English version and you can read the lyrics right here. One last piece of trivia is that their concept was described by presumably their record label at the time, Victor Entertainment, as being cute if a little mean but punkish. According to their J-Wiki profile, they were categorized as a band covering rock, guitar rock, electronica and Shibuya-kei.