Today marks one year to the day that CORE OF SOUL broke up.
I’m still working on that discography. The trip to Quebec last summer delayed my acquisition plans a bit, and then there was that whole surgery thing. Of their albums, I’m still missing Natural Beauty and RAINBOW; as far as their singles go, I still need “Make Me a Woman”, “Purple Sky”, and “AGEHA”. Then there’s the DVD, of course.
And when I get there
How did I manage to stumble across this group which enjoyed only a moderate success in their home country? An mp3 rotation, of course. “FULL MOON PRAYER” and another song—likely “Angel” or “Natural Beauty”— had been offered up for download. For whatever reason, I resisted listening to them for a while—possibly, I’d had other things to do, but when I finally did, I couldn’t help but think, Why did I wait so long?
Volume 上げて歌うよ
It’s hard, even for me, to understand why COS affected me the way they did. Their music would not have been extraordinary by any music critic’s standards. It was a safe, mainstream alternative pop-rock style. I happen to be a fan of that style of music, but there were a ton of other bands that had a similar kind of thing going: Do As Infinity, F.I.R., maybe even Garnet Crow.
夜の月光と共にあなたの窓に届け
None of those groups, though, had Fukiko Nakamura on lead vocals. Her voice encapsulates youth, energy, and joie de vivre more perfectly than any other singer I can think of. From what I’ve read, the girl has a real stage presence (and I believe it!) Even though I don’t understand the songs the first time through (or the second, or the third, for that matter), she sings with such intensity that I’m compelled to translate them.
過去の罪をお許し下さい
Those lyrics have nearly always drawn me in. I’ve often found that the lyrics of the song I’m translating echo sentiments of my life at the time, so that in effect COS songs could make up the soundtrack of my life. Yes, I probably need to listen to more music, but there you go.
私から声を取らないで命を持って行かないで
There’s hope for me yet, though. Fukiko is starting a solo career under the name “LOVE”, and she’s due to release a digital single soon (or has already released it; there seems to be disagreement on a forum about this, probably since none of us are fluent in Japanese)—there’s even a preview of it up on her official site.