Rei featuring Ginger Root -- Love is Beautiful

 

Welcome to another round of Urban Contemporary Fridays on "Kayo Kyoku Plus" and hopefully all of you down in the United States have been able to digest most or all of your turkey dinner in the past 24 hours. I gather then that we are about to enter the Yuletide season. Officially on the blog, we'll be doing that from tomorrow on November 25th so stay tuned for some Xmas songs for the next few weeks leading up to Christmas Day.

A few days ago late at night, I pulled off what I call the equivalent of skipping a stone on the pond at least a few times across to the other bank when I discovered a succession of interesting tunes. Let's say that I didn't get to bed until rather late because I had to peruse these new gems for some time past midnight.

The first one is actually a collaboration of a couple of people who already have representation on KKP: snazzy and twinkly 80s-loving Ginger Root finishing up his Kimiko Takeguchi arc last year and guitar princess Rei who I wrote about a few years ago with her "Lazy Loser". Rei's new mini-album, "VOICE", is due out next week on November 29th but her own YouTube channel has put out the first track's music video in the last couple of weeks.

"Love is Beautiful" is the first track with Ginger Root and Rei working together on the song and the result is a calm and groovy tune combining Rei's slightly husky vocals and strumming guitar with Ginger Root's quintessentially sparkly keyboards. The music video has Ginger ravenously searching music store after music store for that one rare album, something that I can relate to very well after my own occasional quests in the CD store-filled neighbourhood of Shibuya and beyond. I've gotten lucky from time to time. Hama Okamoto from OKAMOTO's is also helping out as well with the music and donuts.