OPCELL -- Kanashimi wa Honesty（哀しみはオネスティー）

 

"Y'know, J-Canuck...you could've looked at the album a little more closely..."

Yeah, that's me talking to myself and giving myself the Agent Gibbs smack upside the back of my head right now. When I posted the first article on 90s band OPCELL, I mentioned that leader and singer-songwriter Kantaro Yamamoto（山本寛太郎）had changed his name to the stage name of Ken Ranmiya （KEN 蘭宮）, although I also placed an asterisk on my observation since I hadn't been 100% sure about how true that was; the name sounded awfully awkward. Well, as it turned out, if I had looked at the album cover with a bit more of a lens, I would have noticed that there was the name Ken Lang and 「蘭宮」can be pronounced as "ran-gu" and romanized into Lang. So, mystery solved.

Well, yesterday I provided an article for Yamamoto's "Jumping High Way", so I have decided to post something from the later part of his career when he and his friends keyboardist Yasuyuki Honda（本田恭之）and engineer/sound designer Tsuyoshi Inoue（井上剛）got together to form OPCELL in 1995. I'd done pretty much the same thing after posting a Yamamoto song last year when I put up the first OPCELL song onto the blog, "Hikari kara no Travel"（光からのトラベル）from their self-titled album.

"Hikari kara no Travel" is quite the dreamy track, almost taking things into synthpop although I left it as simply pop but this track, "Kanashimi wa Honesty" (Sadness is Honesty), sounds like something from Yamamoto's old days in the late 1970s and early 1980s but given that 1990s arrangement in terms of the keyboards and percussion. It's quite the car-friendly bouncy tune but still with some of that dreamy haze that was also in "Hikara kara no Travel".