Fed MUSIC -- Koibito ga Santa Claus （恋人がサンタクロース）

 

Well, with the temperatures having been consistently above the 0-degree Celsius mark for the past week, the snow is all gone and it's pretty dreary out there. Hopefully, though, some of that Christmas snow will return in some form over the next few weeks.

To continue with this year's Xmas season on KKP, I just wanted to mention Scott's Xmas-themed podcasts through his "Holly Jolly X'masu". About a month ago, he featured a J-Xmas compilation album from 2010 titled "We Wish You a Happy" which had quite a few interesting entries that could also be found on YouTube.

One of those is a cover of Yumi Matsutoya's（松任谷由実）"Koibito ga Santa Claus" (My Lover is Santa Claus) which first came out in 1980 and was also covered by Seiko Matsuda（松田聖子）. I first provided my take on the classic J-Xmas tune almost a decade ago in the early days of the blog, so it's great that I can provide a follow-up here. And this cover is by the rock band Fed MUSIC which had its run between 2000 and 2012.

Just to give reference on the podcast, Fed MUSIC's cover comes in at about 10:46 with Scott giving his comments on the song and the band. My take on their version of "Koibito ga Santa Claus" is that there's a near-anthemic quality as if it had been meant for a movie scene of triumph involving a teenage couple. If it had been a Hollywood movie, I would have set it in Seattle in the early 1990s. Yup I think that there's some grunge in this version.

As I mentioned, Scott describes the band, but I'll also give one here. Fed MUSIC consisted of vocalist Riku Kudara（久楽陸）, bassist Atsushi Kikuchi（菊池篤）, drummer Yuusuke Akimoto（秋元雄介）, and guitarist Akihito Fukui（福井章人）. According to their J-Wiki article, they first started out being known as Zarigani 5 before the name change in 2007. The "Fed" part of their name stands for F as in Freedom, E as in Endless and D as in Deviously, and the fact that the word "fed" is also the past tense of "feed" was also not lost to them since their concept was to feed music to listeners. In fact, the band's first album in 2007 under the name of Fed MUSIC was "I fed music to you". Under both names, Kudara and company released 8 singles/EPs and 8 albums of varying lengths.

Although the band broke up in 2012, their website did mention a release of a new single in May 2020 under the original name of Zarigani 5, "Amazing".