Gollbetty - Bettys Buggy 6 August 2008
The Japanese music scene boasts a number of great ska bands, and Gollbetty was one of them. I say ‘was’ because they disbanded in 2010. Their six year career began back in 2004—congratulations to me for doing basic math—in the Nagoya area. Nagoya is not as big of a music scene as Shibuya or Osaka, but it does have a strong punk rock pulse which over the years has produced bands like Kuroyume and Phobia. So it should come as no surprise that Gollbetty incorporates pop-punk into their overall ska sound.Gollbetty propelled into success partially because of their vocalist: g-yun. During the formative year of the seven-member band she was also working as a fashion model. It did not take long for someone—in this case Run Run Run Records—to find out g-yun was also the front-woman of a band. And so Gollbetty signed with a label faster than most indie bands. Personally, I think that is superficially unfair, the fact that Gollbetty was able to get a label faster than their peers simply because of their vocalist’s attractiveness. I say that as if the entire J-pop industry does not work that way. However, to her credit, g-yun was not just a pretty face; she packed the booming vocals and energetic stage presence that fit perfectly with Gollbetty. In six years they released four original albums; none of them were chart-topping commercial successes, but all were critically well-received.Now for a game of ‘Good News, Bad News’.Yesterday I said I would be uploading two albums today. I hope you interpret that as good news. But my reasons for doing so are the bad news: my copy of Betty’s Buggy has a scratch across the back and when I ripped the CD it screwed up the second track. I tried to fix this in multiple ways, but I could not get the track off the album without errors; and I couldn’t find the album anywhere else online or I would have just used that to replace the track. So to apologize for uploading an album with a damaged track I am uploading two albums today, this one and City Caravan by lecca, which you will find listed on my user page.Sorry about the damaged track, but I hope you enjoy the album anyways!