Kroi -- Atami（熱海）

 

Back in June, I wrote about Shinichiro Hakozaki's（箱崎晋一郎）"Atami no Yoru"（熱海の夜）, a 1969 Mood Kayo specializing in the tourist city of Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture. Regrettably, I never got to stay there, but though I bypassed the area by train, I did stay in the more southerly and smaller city of Ito. One comment that I got from Brian Mitchell was an inquiring one about how many other Mood Kayo there were on Atami.

I answered that there were probably quite a few because Atami was such a nationally well-known city with a lot of tourist facilities including drinking establishments. What I hadn't figured though was that there could be just plain J-Pop songs involving the region.

And sure enough, the relatively new band Kroi (since 2018) came up with the song known simply as "Atami", a digital download single that was released a couple of months ago in July and a track on the band's most recent album "telegraph" which also came out in July. Kroi focuses on pop, soul, funk, hip-hop and rock, and "Atami" is an upbeat light funk-pop tune whose music can describe a happy drive to Atami itself for a weekend of onsen and noshing on the good food. The above video is of the song itself while the one below is a "making-of" documentary.

Guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Reo Uchida（内田怜央）and guitarist Yuuki Hasebe（長谷部悠生）were classmates in junior high school when they got into music, and later when they hit university, they met up with bassist/leader Masanori Seki（関将典）and drummer Hidetomo Masuda（益田英知）. They were officially formed as Kroi in February 2018 and almost a couple of years later, keyboardist and arranger Daiki Chiba（千葉大樹）joined the band.

As for how they came up with the name Kroi, the members all sought to incorporate a lot of different colours through the genres into their overall sound, and on realizing that mixing in paint colours all led to black, they decided to call themselves that way with the name being stylized from the romaji for the Japanese word for "black", kuroi（黒い）. Kroi has released a number of singles, EPs and albums over the past four years and has been very busy being on the road.

How I managed to find out about Kroi actually happened about two weeks ago. A fellow by the name of kinuzure and I had a nice little chat through the Contact Form, and he has his own year-old website titled "Tamaranaku, AOR Kayo"（たまらなく、AOR歌謡...Irresistably, AOR Kayo）. If you have Japanese-reading ability or would like to practice that nascent ability of yours, you can check out his site which has a few more bells and whistles than I do here at KKP. He has playlists on some of the Neo-City Pop and AOR artists, along with some articles, and album reviews.