Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Flask Back 70s: Sugar Babe

Perhaps this has been too long of a hiatus. Anyway, I figure no matter how brief or incomplete this post will sound, some sign of life in this blog is better than nothing.

One of my favorite discoveries as of late has been a band active in the 70's called Sugar Babe. They only released one album, appropriately titled "Songs," but for them it was definitely quality over quantity: the album went on to be a big influence on the music scene at the time. Their single "Downtown," which I've been particularly enthralled with lately, can still be heard today being covered by a number of different artists. YMCK and De De Mouse do a cover of DownTown on the YMCK song book album(which also has a number of other cool covers). A neat 8-bit PV can also been seen here, although it's a cut version of the full song.

Down Town caused me a lot of heartache at first, though. I saw it once on a Japanese program about some of the most covered songs in the history of Japanese music. The only problem with the song was that I had heard it at least once before. The melody was so familiar but no matter how many times I tried to think where I had heard it I came up dry. I'm sure everyone knows how it feels when you just can't come up with an answer to that song they heard; it happens that I'm particularly bad with stuff like this.

After being tormented for a while I eventually forgot about it until recently, when a friend of mine shared the link to Down Town and other Sugar Babe tracks. After being haunted by the tune yet again I was determined to figure it out. After traveling the rounds at youtube I finally came upon a comment that brought it back to memory:



It had been the Opening theme for Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru(And the town moves). Although I havent finished the series, I enjoyed seeing the first episodes when it had its original run a year or two ago. So that closed the case. I've been listening to Sugar Babe's album ever since.

Thankfully a simple search on youtube can yield a bunch of the tracks from their album. Here is the infamous "Downtown" and "Suteki na Melody". I love how they don't sound very tinted with age!



You can find the 30th Anniversary release, complete with bonus tracks, for sale at CDJapan: Until next time,

~hideki~

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