Yuzu - Yuzu no Ne 1997--2007 3 October 2007
Yuzu is the duo Iwasawa Kouji and Kitagawa Yujin. The two began building a fan-base and grabbing the attention of producers in the late 90’s with their street performances, similar to dorlis or the more well-known Do As Infinity. They played in Yokohama and at the time were going by the name “Lights.” The band has a bit of a rural background, which is reflected by some of their more folk-genre songs; the story is that Kitagawa—for whatever reason—thought “Lights” sounded too rural and decided to change the name to “Yuzu,” named after sherbet he was eating at the time. Under their new name the duo made their official debut in 1997.This two-disc album is a collection of thirty-one songs selected from their ten-year career at the time of release. However, it is not their first ‘Best-Of’ album. In 2005 they released Home, a greatest-hits album. Yuzu no Ne is notable for excluding every song from Home, which to my knowledge is a rare thing to do; I can think of plenty Japanese musicians with greatest-hits albums that have overlapping tracklists. Personally I think Yuzu no Ne is the better album of the two, and is unquestionably more comprehensive. So I feel like that makes it a great introductory album for Yuzu.Well that’s it from me for today, but I’m planning to rip more albums tomorrow and throughout the week. I have a list of requests that I will try to fulfill, and if anyone has any requests I will be happy to upload the albums if I own them. Unless it’s Abunja requesting Melting Holidays, because those albums of mine have apparently vanished into thin air…Enjoy everyone!