Citypop Lullaby -- Keitarou Takanami mad FPU Lovers Rock Remix

 

This song was also a track on "City Music Tokyo: Junction", the 2022 compilation album curated by Cunimondo Takiguchi（クニモンド瀧口）that I had covered in part back at the beginning of this month. I did say that I would check out some of the other tracks that I hadn't noted in the original article, so here is one right now. Usually the byline for a post would start with the name of the band or singer followed by the title. However, this time around, I really didn't want to "break up the band", so to speak, and therefore I put up the title in the way that the song has been introduced to the masses: "Citypop Lullaby -- Keitarou Takanami mad FPU Lovers Rock Remix". 

Now, if Keitarou Takanami（高浪慶太郎）is a name that rings a bell, well, you may be a Pizzicato Five going all the way back. Yep, he was one of the founding members of that band in the mid-1980s when they came out as Pizzicato V with "The Audrey Hepburn Complex", years before they became known as Shibuya-kei darlings. He left the band in 1994 but kept busy throughout the 1990s and 2000s by providing songs for other artists and starting up a new band called playtime rock with singer Mina Ichiba（市場美奈）in 2013.

In this case, though, Takanami collaborated with electronic pop group am8, which started up in 2020, and arranger mad FPU, to create "Citypop Lullaby". It was originally part of the June 2021 am8 single "am8 killed by mad FPU" with the group handling words and lyrics. Despite the title, I'd say that the gently jaunty number was less City Pop and more light technopop with a reggae beat. It's something nice to hear while nursing a drink...probably something with a lot of rum in it. Just to be a little more detailed, I also like how Takanami purrs out "city popssss" with the dreamy crystalline synth and the background chorus. As well, that cover of the single is pretty darn cool, too.