Magical

Junko Ohashi's "Magical" comes from the fat center of Japanese city pop, and it moves with the confidence of session players who could do this in their sleep and choose not to. The production is glossy in the way only late-seventies and early-eighties Tokyo studios managed — a bass line that walks with real funk intent, clavinet and electric piano stabbing on the offbeat, horns arranged tight enough to cut, everything mixed with an airiness that makes the whole thing feel like it's happening on a balcony. Ohashi's voice is the reason to stay. She had a genuine soul instrument, more powerful and less girlish than most of her contemporaries, and she rides the groove with a relaxed authority that suggests she's the coolest person in whatever room this is. The lyric traffics in enchantment — a night that shimmers, a feeling that can't quite be named without dispelling it — which is city pop's eternal subject: urban abundance touched with unreality. Context matters here: this music was made for a Japan flush with money and possibility, soundtracking cars and coastal drives and a middle class that believed the good times were structural. The internet later rediscovered it as an artifact of a future that never arrived. Play it in the afternoon with the windows down.