The other day, I went to the bookstore and looked over the music magazines. The latest issue of Switch is…entirely devoted to Suchmos? Like, save for a little bit of fashion news in the back, every page was looking at the group from every single angle. Call it a potential endpoint for the whole “city pop revival” era in domestic Japanese music — I don’t see Suchmos as villains or even all that terrible as a group (they are hit or miss, but dorkly earnest in a way that makes most of their songs far more intriguing than the hip-cafe BGM of Never Young Beach or Yogee New Waves) but time has proven them as the representative group of whatever this movement of vaguely jazz-influenced rock was. That’s when the page can be finished off.
This is all a longwinded way of saying…Pictured Resort deserves way more love. Their Osaka origins and focus on easy-breezy guitar melodies get them tagged as indie-pop…but twist, guess what community in Japan was channeling the vibe of ’80s Japan first? “Daylight Moonlight” drifts forward, no tension present and only the slightest gusts of melancholy coming in. Yet it has some snap to it too, far from floor filler but letting funk sneak in. It’s far closer to city pop (in spirit) than most of the stuff getting the nod, and a great one to just get swooped up into. Listen above.