Orbital Reentry of Satellite Lovers
The all-powerful algorithm has delivered us another star, Satellite Lovers — an obscure mid-’90s Japanese band that recorded together for just two years. Their first EP, Sons of 1973, conjures a sunny beachside romance, exemplifying a bygone era while accentuating our own modern maladies.
One of the few remaining wonders of the internet — and there are but a handful — is its ability to suddenly and spontaneously deliver us something we might’ve otherwise missed.
It comes down to the algorithms, functions which function as a sort of ‘invisible hand’ of content prioritization. In cahoots with cookies, they might direct you to a product you’ve been mulling over, or suggest a film you might enjoy, or even serve you up eerily-pertinent job advertisements. They’re also liable to pull you into the Manosphere, toss you some reactionary right-wing content, or shepherd you into ever-escalating extremist circles… but still, at least as far as lines of mathematical procedure go, they can be momentarily charming. In recent months, YouTube has been chasing almost every watch with Mel Tormé’s 1990 rendition of Donald Fagen’s “The Goodbye Look,” which has charm in spades.
The YouTube algorithm recently decided that it would proliferate Sons of 1973, a 1996 album from Japanese trio Satellite Lovers, to millions of unsuspecting viewers. It’s hardly the first time this has happened — notably, the invisible hand turned indie rock troupe boy pablo into an omnipresent recommendation — but this was an especially welcome suggestion. A shimmering shibuya-kei record from the height of the genre’s short reign, Sons of 1973 shines a light on a largely forgotten group from an increasingly beloved scene.
In the early 1990s, Shibuya — one of Tokyo’s special wards — was the epicenter of Japanese nightlife and youth culture. Independent record stores and trendy fashion outlets drew in a new crowd of young sophisticates, benefiting from Japan’s mid-’80s economic boom. Western culture was folding into Japanese culture on the unstoppable wheels of global capital: in 1990, British music retailer HMV opened their flagship location in the heart of the district. Yasuharu Konishi, founding member of shibuya-kei stalwarts Pizzicato Five, put it thusly: “Shibuya in the '90s is just like Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. The young people there are always thinking about how to be cool.”
Tokyo duo Flippers Guitar are often credited as the originators of Shibuya-kei, and it’s not hard to see why. Disciples of British pop, their initial demo tape was named for a Haircut 100 song, their band name was influenced by an Orange Juice album cover, and their debut album was named for a song on that same record. The music was similarly grab-bag, incorporating elements of jangle pop, bossa nova, new wave and jazz into a vibrant kitschy blend. In the wake of their acrimonious break-up, Keigo Oyamada would go solo as Cornelius, releasing Shibuya-kei’s enduring masterpiece, Fantasma, in 1997.
That work, like the work of Flipper’s Guitar, would come to epitomize the genre’s many strong inspirations. A confluence of influences fed into the further development of Shibuya-kei, chief amongst them the work of artists like Serge Gainsbourg, Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach, and João and Astrud Gilberto. Though it was one of many strains of the exploding J-Pop scene in the mid-’90s, Shibuya-kei has stood the test of time, cultivating a fervent and increasingly widespread fanbase in the years since.
Satellite Lovers, though not beneficiaries of that fervor, burned bright. In the spirit of Flippers Guitar, they named themselves for a Western track, Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” They debuted with 1994’s Music, their sole LP, and quickly released three more EPs before disbanding in 1996. Sons of 1973 was their first, soon followed by Sons of 1997, a superficially related but radically different project that leaned into a hip-hop sound. Their final release, 1996’s BKLN, pushed even further into trip-hop and boom bap. They never found widespread success, and as such, all members have disappeared from the public eye in the decades since their dissolution.
In a sense, the group were never more in the public eye than on Sons of 1973. Though they’d been a five-piece on their debut, the group had whittled down to just three members following that release, all of whom are pictured in the album art. In the background stand guitarist Hiroyuki Suzuki and bassist Yutaka Nakano, dwarfed by lead singer Mica Ikeuchi. If the camera seems to love Mica, who adorned three of their four releases, that’s no surprise: Mica would later marry photographer Kyoji Takahashi, who she met during his time photographing Satellite Lovers. It’s a sweet little fact that plays into the overwhelming impression of the record: coincidental love, come-what-may romance that unfolds without intent or agenda.
An electric organ sputters to life, a familiarly upbeat guitar quietly riffs, and a horn section blares an introduction. “Best Friend” alternates between Japanese and English lyrics, pairing those cheery phrases — “you're my best friend, you're my good lover” — with a peppy arrangement that could make even the most foreign words clear. The allure of a good non-English track, at least for English speakers, can be the shapeless evocation that the sounds provide, and on “Best Friend,” Mica’s sunny disposition is unmistakable. There’s a fierce harmonica solo, too. The double-time “夏の続き” revels in summer’s dying days, shimmering organ and peppy flute going back and forth in the cheery instrumental breaks.
There’s a sure clarity of vision to Sons of 1973, which at just 30 minutes, seems well-suited to explore that single sunny mode. The invocations of a beachside town, which appear throughout the project, anchor the carefree ruminations on dreams, loves, and the passage of time in an almost endless summer vacation. On “How Much I Love You, Baby,” woozy bass-anchored verses sketch strolls at dusk and starlit sleepouts. The chorus breaks into the abstract, the arrangement opening up like a vista as Mica moves to [?]: “touch me baby, and stand by me, I love you more and more, how much I love you, baby.”
The laidback “Sunnyday, Holiday” loosely details a trip to the beach, conjured by the surf-tinged guitar and simmering organ. The particulars are sketched out in Japanese, the grand romantic declarations delivered in English: “oh, baby baby baby, I’ve made up my mind to spend a life together.” There’s not much to it — and much of what’s there is the word “baby” — but there’s a charm to the sweet adolescence of it all.
“空へ（S.L Meets HV!),” on which the Lovers link with rock act Hicksville, seems to quote Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” only to laden that classic guitar with wordless ‘doo-doo’ melodies and half-spoken verses. “外はいい天気,” or “It’s Nice Weather Outside,” is more directly indebted, as it’s a cover of the 1973 original by pioneering Japanese folk group Happy End. The band run the Buffalo Springfield-inspired original through their eclectic prism, with spritely piano panned left and landline dial tones panned right, fractured vocal samples interjecting — “this is fun!”
If Sons of 1973 is anything, it’s fun. There’s a freewheeling soul to the beachside romance, apparent even in the interwoven bilingual telling, borne on the back of peppy pop pastiche. That kind of feel-good simplicity is evergreen, and Satellite Lovers’ resurgence seems at least partially indebted to their cheery attitude. Theirs is a simple sentiment from a simpler time, when the way that we engaged with the world — and with one another — was radically different.
I’m not peddling nostalgia here: things were similarly grim then, but the means by which we engaged with the world offered some sort of reprieve. There were no algorithms, we were not beholden to the pressures of instant communication, nobody was doomscrolling through live updates of attacks and atrocities. Sons of 1973, by virtue of its vintage, cuts through that ultra-modern noise, temporarily taking us to another state of mind.
It’s a pleasant feeling delivered to us by those same means. This album — imminently pre-internet — is just the sort of thing that runs the risk of being lost, a local treasure relegated to a handful of record stores, waiting to be pored over by some eagle-eyed collectors. In the internet age, one crate digger’s offhand find can elevate an album from relic to recommendation, often angling squarely at a very specific type of music fan.
Sons of 1973 conjures what we’ve lost while exemplifying the very best of what we’ve gained — the possibility for rediscovery, for revival, for reexamination. There are unflagging feelings, immortal impressions, at the heart of their music, but that relatability can leave me feeling as though the past is a foreign country. It could be that I’m just too embedded in our new-age structures, beholden to the ways that we relate, a victim to and beneficiary of these ever-changing schemes.
The modern information apparatus often leaves me feeling down, but sometimes you get a neat mid-’90s Japanese record out of it. You throw on your headphones, you take a walk. The sun is shining, the streets are busy, there are people reading in the park. Someone smiles at you. Anything is possible, even if only for a moment.