Again with the summer of '96.
So, there was a second hand record shop not far from where I was living at the time. It stocked lots of obscure curios amongst the usual dross you see everywhere else, and whenever I had a bit of cash burning a hole in my pocket (which wasn't very often), I'd chance a look and see what I could find.
Whilst I prefer the ease and convenience of digital downloads today, one of the things I miss about buying CDs back in the day is going into record shops and browsing as I found so many unexpected gems that way. Nothing beats the feeling of seeing an interesting looking item nestled amongst rows of neatly filed CDs in a record store, having absolutely no idea about the band or artist and just buying it on a whim. Sometimes you'd luck out and discover your favourite new album for a while, yet other times, you'd pick up a dud. It was the closest I ever got to gambling and I discovered my fair share of good and bad this way. As you can probably guess, in the case of this particular album, I got lucky.
The only thing I knew prior to buying this CD was that Gumdrops were Japanese, and probably an indie rock band of some sort. That was enough to pique my curiosity, so I took the CD home and gave it a listen, and it turns out that my suspicions were entirely correct.
So yes, in essence, what you have with this album is a Japanese take on US style lo-fi indie rock, nothing more, nothing less. It's charming (due in part to the very Engrish lyrics) and the tunes are solid. I played this a lot back then and it endeared itself to me in a big way. As a result, 'High Speed... OK?' has stayed with me ever since.
There's not much about this album online, but I did manage to find (ahem) this one video that someone uploaded to their YouTube channel, almost as if they read my mind(!).
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