Magokoro Brothers -- Endless Summer Nude

 

Hope your summer is getting off to a good start. We in most of North America are in that temporal corridor between Canada Day and the Fourth of July which possibly translates into cross-border tourism. I don't know about weather in other places but things are actually a little cool here in Toronto which will gain a lot of envy from the folks in Japan who are now sweltering slightly earlier than usual.

"Uta Con"（うたコン）was back on as scheduled and the theme this time around was songs used in the semi-annual Koshien High School Baseball Championships since the summer version will be coming up within the next number of weeks. However, after all that was done, some of the remaining guests appeared to do some of their old favourites and new songs.

One act was the rock and soul duo Magokoro Brothers（真心ブラザーズ）. Several years ago, I covered their 12th single from April 1995, "Summer Nude"（サマーヌード）, which was a tune that I accepted right off the bat because of its cool funkiness and a sound that reminded me of Original Love and, though I didn't mention them in that article, Flying Kids, too. Well, Hidetoshi Sakurai（桜井秀俊）and Yoichi "YO-KING" Kuramochi（倉持陽一）were on the show to do what has become their "Summer Nude" 2.0, so to speak. 

Apparently, a couple of years later following the release of the original single, the two of them realized that as wonderful as the original "Summer Nude" was, perhaps it had been rushed out a little too quickly and that it needed some further proper polish. So, they brought in songwriter and arranger CHOKKAKU and what everyone got was an even more oomphed-up version now known as "Endless Summer Nude" as their 17th single in July 1997. And man, does it have even more brassiness! Time to twist on the sands there. It hit significantly higher on Oricon than its ancestor by coming in at No. 41 and it's a track on Magokoro Brothers' 7th album "I Will Survive" from April 1998 which ranked in at No. 7.

Sounds like "Endless Summer Nude" was so infectious that it got its remix covers with one being by Tomita Lab（冨田ラボ）which he provided as the first track on "Magokoro Covers"（真心COVERS）, a tribute album of their songs done by other artists. That was released in September 2004 with a No. 25 ranking. The Tomita Lab sound goes quite well with this particular song especially. In fact, it's quite amazing when I look at the long line of cover versions on J-Wiki.