Nagoya’s Blurred City Lights released their very good double-EP-slash-second album Utopia/Dystopia earlier this year but today I’m going back not just to last year’s debut 天使のいない街で , but to their second-ever single 「花束」 (aka “Flower”), which they dropped in December of 2022 accompanied by a simple animated video.

Why that song, and now? Well this morning the band unleashed what is essentially catnip for me, posting a couple of videos – one a detailed tour through guitarist Megumi’s pedalboard, and the second a playthrough of 「花束」even showing which pedals are engaged at which point in the song. Interestingly, he stacks different overdrives and distortions for slightly different tones in each chorus, while keeping a Vemuram Jan Ray (or clone thereof) as a base tone.

After a reverse reverb and pitch shifter comes the drive buffet, managed by a Boss ES-8 switcher; I appreciate the literal Big Muff stacking on the board. The YouTube auto-translate subtitles can’t quite keep up with the explanation of the routing after that, but sufficed to say there’s a lot going on here. There’s nothing outrageously unique about Megumi’s tone amongst his J-gaze peers, but it’s excellent in the BCL aesthetic and is clearly well-considered, and I love seeing how it’s constructed.

Further, they’re selling the score to the song for a reasonable 500 yen and have even posted all their pedal settings for the song. Someone really wants Blurred City Lights cover bands to be a thing!

Update: And now they’ve made an even more in depth guide to their gear. The inability to read Japanese becomes an issue at this point, but still interesting for the demos in settings.