Smilerenjya “My Sweet Songs EP” Review

January 26, 2007
by Brad Hall & Joseph Ward

Some time ago I'd heard rumor that Apple started listing J-Pop on its infamous iTunes Music Store. Naturally, I felt compelled to research this phenomena. A few days ago I acquired a $15 iTMS card and dove headfirst into the world of J-Pop, iTunes style.
After navigating around and buying a few English language songs by M.O.V.E I decided to dig a little deeper and see what iTunes had to offer.
Within minutes, I found a song called “Let's Dancing” by J-Pop group Smilerenjya. I downloaded the tune and listened to it several times. After the fifth replay I realized that I enjoyed this song enough to warrant downloading more of Smilerenjya's songs. I ended up downloading all five of their songs from iTMS. Each one was great, though in my opinion the best songs were “Let's Dancing” and “Tokimeki Sunset.”
When I decided to review their music for this website, I found it difficult to find pages in English about this band. I eventually found that their name is basically a maligned form of “Smile Ranger.”
Smile Ranger is a Japanese rock band consisting of Yu Doumoto (vocal), Fujimo (guitar), Hi!Kato (bass), and Nobu (drums). All four of them formed the group in 2001, and they progressed their plans in Kansai. They made their first performanace in 2003 at Livehouse Himeji Beta in Himeji. Later that year, they got signed on with Raiser Records, an independent Beta Music label, when they released their first full album "Hatachi no Kimochi." They then went on to do a nation-wide tour.
Later on, they released another single and two mini-albums, including "My Sweet Songs," (see video here) and have done other tours. Their most recent release is "Ai no motto" (Love's motto) in January 2006.