Sunny Day Service

The trio hits the stage with their brand of pop that stretches across eras from their beginnings in 1992 to now. The first song is slow paced and slightly melancholy, with Keiichi Sokabe’s clear, calm tenor spreading across the field of people in front of the stage. Takahashi’s bass takes a more harmonic role with only one guitar in the band, an interesting difference from your normal run of the mill pop bands that sees basses buried in the mix. Their second song is a more upbeat song but retains the slow pace, almost country music noodlings featuring on guitar. The Japanese lyrics across the set dealt mainly with love or its end, with the delivery simple and heartfelt.

The sets starts to perk up a little as the next song sees the band continue to gain even more energy, shaking off the soporific start with a bounding bass track and quick stepping drums. There are enough fans in the crowd for the fourth song to become a chorus sing along with the other highlight being a brief duel between guitar and bass. From here, there’s a brief sidetrack to rock and roll to the excitement of the fans. This gives way to a ballad called ‘Two Hearts’ that gets the crowd swaying along, which then morphs into the next song as the Maruyama Hirushige’s drums lead with a marching beat.

They save fan favorites for their last three songs, which sees the crowd become the most excited they’ve been all set and ends the concert on a happy high note. However, the band leaves the stage with no interaction with crowd at the end, which felt slightly weird to me. As this is their third time at Fuji Rock, surely they would have thanked the crowd or at least bowed? Despite this, the crowd leaves happily after optimistically trying for an encore, full of the calm pop and love lyrics of Sunny Day Service.