This single by the Yellow Magic Orchestra kind of confused me. I thought that it had originally been bought because it was on translucent yellow vinyl - the nectar of the Gods for a vinyl junkie like me - but there was a whole bundle of other YMO singles and albums gathering dust in the Bluesbunny Vinyl Vault.
I do remember that at the start of the eighties, a lot of promotional effort was made by some of the big record companies in pushing Japanese acts like YMO. Looking at the sleeve now, you see a picture of three serious guys so perhaps the marketing department were thinking they had an oriental Kraftwerk on their books but the truth was that they were (at this time) purveyors of really quite annoying electro pop with sub disco influences. As a band, they were enormous in Japan and one of the their members, Riuichi Sakamoto, did turn out to be a maestro of the ambient music scene (try his solo effort from this year called B2 Unit for an object lesson on how to do such things right).
Going back to the songs, they are, well, annoying. "Nice Age" with lyrics by Chris Mosdell like "YMO ready to lay on you… nice age…" is the sort of thing that you would expect a recalcitrant computer to invent. On the flipside, there is a mad, fast paced instrumental called "Rydeen" just made for the soundtrack of mid eighties action movies and arcade video games populated as it was with noises like those of disco records of the time. Or maybe the disco records had noises like YMO in them.
I can't honestly remember if YMO had any commercial success over here but I suspect not and they may well be more of an influence to other bands. Certainly, they were miles ahead of the feeble electronic sounds coming out of London at the time. Even so, it has been a long time since I even thought of playing this single.