SPANK HAPPY -- Haikei, Miss International（拝啓ミス・インターナショナル）

 

Several months ago, I featured the band SPANK HAPPY which had its beginnings in the early 1990s as a pop/rock outfit starring saxophonist Naruyoshi Kikuchi（菊地成孔）and vocalist Midori Hara（原みどり）. I ended up writing about a couple of their songs from their first of three phases, "Boku wa Gakki"（僕は楽器）and "Hashiri Naku Otome"（走り泣く乙女）. I'd say that their music also pushed a bit into either the psychedelic or avant-pop zone.

By the end of the late 1990s though, there were some major lineups which ended up with Kikuchi being on his own. However, the arrival of new vocalist Hitomi Iwasawa（岩澤瞳）in 1998 welcomed the second phase of SPANK HAPPY's career which supposedly took on more of a club music feeling or even Shibuya-kei. 

A first maxi-single was released in 2001 and then another one titled "Angelic" the following year. One track from that one is "Haikei, Miss International" (Dear Miss International) which sounds neither club nor Shibuya-kei. As mentioned in the first article for the band, J-Wiki had listed a number of other genres for them: technopop, dance pop, disco, electronica, House and electroclash, and I think "Haikei, Miss International" is more associated with any of these genres. In fact, I find the song to be more reminiscent of early 1980s synthpop, something that Tomoko Kawase's（川瀬智子）Tommy february6 was also doing at the same time. Nice to hear the bubbly, shiny and chrome stuff again. But then, a little over halfway through it, the melody suddenly veers into Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）and Ryuichi Sakamoto's（坂本龍一）collaborative technopop of the early 1980s.