TSUBOKURA YUIKO – Always in Love (1986)
(1) HAIR METAL! Vox we’ll call ‘strident’ for now. Gorgonzola synth and THWACK snare. Where’s my MR2, dammit–solo– MV 4/5 HNT 5/13 (2) Plinkplonk like ‘Mermaid’ MV 4/5 HNT 6/13. Proper chorus…Oh shit, Scandi-synth. Lovely production. (3) Night time at the docks, remeniscing the good times and the bad times in an end-of-season clip-show way. Girls should get more scenes like this. God, the reverb on the snare drum! [You know what’s needed now? A song for going home after work… (4) Ugh. John Farnham came to dump all over it, unless the chorus gets good. What a shame. We’ll chalk it up as filler. (5) Ah! Life returns!! Gal got Pipes. Like Akina filler but nice wobbly solo in the middle (WHAT IS THAT SYNTH? MUST LEARN.) HNT 1/13 MV 1/5. OH MAN, solo or what? This one’s the stadium stomper. Got it. (6) AhA and aha! THIS is what we came for. Whitest funk ever, and therefore great if not to be taken seriously. Rhymes ‘memory’ with ‘odori’. MV 3/5 HNT 5/13. Pretty much my absolute archetype of ‘what 1985 sounded like, even though nothing actually actually sounded like that (except, this, obviously) (7). We’re preparing for the stake-out now MV 4/5, HNT 6/13. Cure bass. Who’d have thought. Hmm. Probably less ‘preparing for the stakeout’, more’after dark’. (8) More-of-the-same, not like that’s BAD, you know? OBSERVATION. maybe this is most definitive not-great-but-consistent City Pop album I’ve come to so far — this song has bits of ‘The Moon and New York City’ in it, but only bits. MV 2/5 HNT 6/13 (9) Swell-synths. The slow one. Perfect ending,