MELODIES

An opening to the second stage of Yamashita’s solo career, driven by a heightened awareness of songwriting. The grand wall of sound and Beach Boys-style songs are a departure from the eclectic style of the preceding album. Compared with that record, this one is filled with an inner glow and density: its sound has a different depth and flavor. A3 has a dignified transparency, as if an aurora were falling through the sky. A5 gathers fragments from ordinary days; B3 sings love with a touching tenderness, and B5 became a J-pop standard. In B1, he paints people drifting in tears beneath a romantic sky, yet its funky drums make even that dreamlike beauty move. For all the album’s pop fantasy, a more direct and personal viewpoint has emerged—one that would have been hard to imagine when he entrusted his lyrics to Minako Yoshida.

After this, he pursued the tendency toward loops glimpsed here more fully and made the soundtrack BIG WAVE. As if finding a new musical identity from it, he turned toward digital technology. That too was a manifestation of singer-songwriter feeling and spirit, a way to seek freer expression. Eiichi Ohtaki, increasingly distant from new releases, may also have sensed that the oldies style once shared by city pop and Niagara was reaching its limits by the mid-1980s.