Penthouse -- Yoru to Yume no Hazama de（夜と夢のはざまで）

 

A couple of days ago, I mentioned about vocal group The Gospellers'（ゴスペラーズ）cover of Daichi Miura's（三浦大知）debut single "Keep It Goin' On" and that they collaborated with another group called Penthouse.

Well, having never heard of Penthouse, I decided to satisfy my curiosity and so I was happy to discover that there is a J-Wiki article on this sextet and their own website. The group first formed from five men and one woman through a music circle at the University of Tokyo in 2018; while guitarist Shintaro Namioka（浪岡真太郎）, guitarist Shintaro Yano（矢野慎太郎）, bassist Takuma Ohara（大原拓真）, pianist Hayato "Cateen" Sumino（角野隼斗）and drummer Tatsunori Hirai（平井辰典）all hail from Todai, the lone female member, vocalist Maho Oshima（大島真帆）, attended Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. Penthouse centres around the two main singers of Namioka and Oshima.

According to that J-Wiki article, the band had wanted to explore the concept of stylish music as applied to everyday life and found that they wanted to express themselves through the catchiness of Japanese City Pop combined with the power of old soul music which thereby begat the description of Penthouse as a City Soul unit. What has also added further flavour to their music is that all of the members have musical backgrounds covering classical, R&B, pop and hard rock to name a few genres. Oshima, for example, was greatly inspired by Miwa Yoshida（吉田美和）of Dreams Come True.

My first taste of Penthouse through one of their own songs has come from their July 2019 second single as an indies band "Yoru to Yume no Hazama de" (Between the Night and Dreams), a quiet 70s soulful ballad beautifully sung by Oshima (reminds me of Miki Imai). Written and composed by Ohara and revolving around the emergence from a rough patch into a better tomorrow, this is the type of song that one would love to listen to while decompressing at home. The music video with Oshima walking through the nighttime streets of downtown Tokyo as she looks like she's actually illustrating the intent of the lyrics hits the mark.

As an indies group between 2019 and 2021, Penthouse released nine digital download singles. As of late 2021, they have gone major through a contract with Victor and have put out two singles and one EP.