Swinging Popsicle -- Joy of Living

 

Toronto has earned a lot of nicknames over the decades, one of which is the City of Festivals. Especially during what relatively little we have of a summer, there are festivals happening weekly including ones celebrating the many nationalities that are represented here.

Just over the past weekend, we even had the semi-annual late summer version of Fan Expo with all of the fans and personages representing sports, movies, TV and anime rushing right into the downtown convention centre. I even saw a couple of "Bocchi the Rock" cosplayers being interviewed on television. Not sure if the reporter even knew what "Bocchi the Rock" really was.

Anyways, commenter Robert B told me about this band Swinging Popsicle which has been around for almost two decades. With a slightly bigger Wikipedia article than a J-Wiki one, I found out that the band consists of vocalist Mineko Fujishima (藤島 美音子), guitarist Osamu Shimada (嶋田 修) and bassist Hironobu Hirata (平田 博信) . The three of them had met through a newspaper ad seeking to start a band in 1995 and since then, they've been categorized as an indies pop/rock group, although on J-Wiki, they've also been given the shoegazer and Shibuya-kei labels.

Their first single "Joy of Living" was released in July 1997. Fujishima's got a nice sweet and raw voice (she was also responsible for lyrics...and strangely enough, she looks a bit like Maki Goto from Morning Musume on the cover above) while the melody by Shimada has got a smoothly thrumming 70s soul rhythm while the horns seem to take things from the Shibuya-kei department; at the same time, there is also the feeling of rock permeating everything. 

The single itself didn't show up on the Oricon chart but Swinging Popsicle's first full self-titled album from June 1998 did reach No. 73. In any case, all that preamble ramble above is to reflect all that joy of living from meeting like-minded people in a setting whether it be a park or a convention centre.