Yellow Magic Orchestra - Naughty Boys & Instrumental

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Naughty Boys & Instrumental brings together material from YMO’s 1983 Naughty Boys era, including the instrumental reinterpretations that followed the original album. Naughty Boys was the group’s seventh studio album and became their final release to reach number one on Japan’s Oricon album chart, underlining just how successfully the trio had brought technopop into the Japanese mainstream.

The period produced Kimi Ni Mune Kyun, one of YMO’s major pop successes and at the time the highest-charting single by a technopop artist on the Oricon chart. Yet the music remained characteristically detailed beneath its accessible surface. Hosono, Sakamoto and Takahashi combined immaculate electronic arrangements, memorable melodies and precise programmed rhythms with an increasingly sophisticated pop sensibility.

Naughty Boys Instrumental, originally issued in July 1983, was much more than a simple vocal-free copy of the album. The pieces were resequenced, additional synthesizers were used to echo or replace vocal melodies, percussion was updated and several tracks received new embellishments and mixes. “Ongaku”, for example, gains an acoustic-piano solo, while the set also incorporates Chaos Panic and the full instrumental version of You’ve Got To Help Yourself. The result reveals the construction of YMO’s arrangements in unusually clear detail.

This Music On Vinyl edition is pressed on 180g black vinyl and includes a 4-page booklet. The supplied programme runs through twenty tracks, pairing the songs associated with Naughty Boys with their reworked instrumental counterparts and offering a substantial document of one of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s most commercially successful periods.