Lamp @ Mission Ballroom

Twenty-five years after their formation, the Japanese city pop/shibuya-kei/bossa nova band Lamp graced Denver’s Mission Ballroom for the first time. One of their most viral songs, ゆめうつつ (“Yume Utsusu”), translates to “half-asleep.” That’s pretty accurate: I was half-asleep during this show. But what was my other half doing?

Dancing. Maisie turns around and asks me “Am I blocking you?” Oops, she doesn’t know my eyes are closed the whole time. I open them, smile, and shake my head. I’m sleeping and dancing.

In his corner, the percussionist with long hair, round glasses, and a narrow face takes out a strange instrument that looks like an oversized bushel of grapes. He shakes them, and they don’t sound like grapes.

It’s Kaori Sakakibara’s birthday tomorrow, they tell us, so we sing her Happy Birthday. She smiles, her eyes crinkling under her thick, black bangs. She’ll turn 46 years old on our drive back to campus. In 27 years, I will be (hopefully) alive and 46 years old and singing to a half dancing, half asleep teenager.

Being Korean and American and Korean American and therefore not Japanese and therefore without the imminent opportunity to become fluent in the Japanese language, I have only just begun to pore over the translations of Lamp’s discography. After some browsing, reading, and thinking, time, nostalgia, and love emerge. With pieces like “From the Window” and “二十歳の恋” (“Hatachi no Koi”), the imagery of a breeze carrying flower petals gives way to a simultaneously hazy and vivid memory. Each song is a story wrapped up in the natural world so we get a sense of the human mind and body coexisting with the sounds, shadows, and colors of nature. I love and hate that it is hidden (for me) within foreign language. Its potency is subterranean.