Listening to Matt's recommended track from "Breeze", "Simpatia" is indeed a dreamy tropical mood maker of a number, complete with waves crashing into the shore. It's all-so-very comfortable with the Latin beat and the soft tones of the female vocalist, and on a couple of sites, this track and the album itself have been referred to as being Balearic in arrangement. I had to actually look up what Balearic was all about, and according to Wikipedia, it is "...an eclectic blend of DJ-led dance music that emerged in the mid-1980s..." and was "...named for its popularity among European nightclub and beach rave patrons on the Balearic island of Ibiza...", a Spanish island. One description of the song at one of the sites basically called "Simpatia" a love letter of sorts from Tokyo to Ibiza itself.
If memory serves, I did hear of this genre before when I was reading about a couple of Kazuhiro Nishimatsu's（西松一博）albums: "Aragon" and "Bouekifu Monogatari"（貿易風物語）. I've got very little knowledge about Balearic but listening to the selections in the above video for Balearic House, I'm not quite sure whether Atlas' "Simpatia" actually does fall into this genre of dance music. I can clearly hear synths in the song but I don't think that it really pushes "Simpatia" into dance music territory. If anything, it's the opposite; listeners would probably want to walk over to a lounge chair or a hammock and sip on a pineapple cocktail instead. Maybe Balearic AOR is more the thing here.
Yet, when I hear the song, I do think of futuristic resorts for some reason. Considering that Namba has also been a sci-fi writer, maybe a smile would come to his face if he ever read this.
