frasco -- Polaroid

 

Ahhh...that series of Polaroid commercials with Mariette Hartley and the late James Garner. The chemistry was said to have been so good between those two thespians that viewers thought that they were actually married. Incidentally, I never owned one of those foldable Polaroid cameras although I did have a relatively cheapo camera to take with me to Japan in 1981. It was always the thing to take the roll of film to have it developed at a place like Japan Camera (which was once a very popular film developing and camera store in Canada) and wait a few days before the photos were ready. Ancient technology, indeed.

Well, lo and behold, I've found this song "Polaroid" by the pop and Shibuya-kei band frasco from their November 1997 album "Missing Angel". I've highlighted this band a couple of times before with their mellow music through "Honno Sukoshi no Ai ga Areba"（ほんの少しの愛があれば）and "Kaze ni Notte ~breeze~" （風に乗って）, but they're not to be mistaken for another band, Frasco (with a capital F and a 2015 in Labels) that got their start in the mid-2010s and have one song on the blog, "Viewtiful".

Having listened to "Polaroid" a few times now, I'm not quite sure whether the song is really Shibuya-kei but it does have that summer jazz and AOR feeling thanks to the guitars and the keyboards that take on some of that Steely Dan horn sensation. According to JASRAC, lyrics were provided by Mika Morioka（森岡みか）and the music was by frasco drummer Makio Tada（多田牧男）. Of course, I have to remind folks that frasco also had the late guitarist Hiroshi Narumi（鳴海寛）of Tohoku Shinkansen fame.