NSP -- Blue kara Nigerarenai Asa（ブルーから逃げられない朝）

 

Before I met up with KKP contributor Larry on Thursday, I'd been walking around downtown for the first time in a few years, including alongside Lake Ontario as you can see above. It was good exercise that I needed but boy, were my legs sore yesterday!😖

Well, how would I describe that photo? New Saturday Pier? Nice Serene Port?

Ah, yes. This is indeed an NSP article today to start this first Saturday in July. As I mentioned back in their first article for "Kyonen no Natsu"（去年の夏）, the band led by the late Shigeru Amano（天野滋）had a running gag with the letters for their name after they had decided to ditch the inaugural moniker of New Sadistic Pink in the early 1970s when he and the other members, Takayuki Nakamura（中村貴之）and Kazuto Hiraga（平賀和人）opted for the folk route instead of rock. They wanted the fans to come up with words to satisfy those letters.

Well, if I were to judge one of their later songs, I could say that NSP stood for Not Satisfying Period. Not that "Blue kara Nigerarenai Asa" (The Morning that I Couldn't Shoo Away the Blues) is a bad song by any means. In fact, it is a truly beautifully arranged dreamy number created by vocalist Amano, but his lyrics send the message about a man who is most likely suffering from depression as he schlumps his way into the corporate grinder as he has every day.

For "Kyonen no Natsu", I likened NSP to another more famous folk band that transitioned to a more pop and AOR sound, Off-Course（オフコース）. Well, in the case of "Blue kara Nigerarenai Asa", the feeling engendered here makes me think much more of AOR-playing Bread & Butter（ブレッド＆バッター）, another group which also took a light and mellow turn away from their folk roots, right down to that Perrier-friendly keyboard riff which was part and parcel of the genre at that time. And speaking of that time, the song led off the group's June 1982 13th album "Meguriai wa Subete wo Koete"（めぐり逢いはすべてを越えて...A Chance Encounter Goes Beyond Anything）. The cover of that album (which peaked at No. 63 on Oricon) also seems to fit the mood of that lead track.