AKB48′s self-played performance of their forthcoming single “Give Me Five” under the assumed name/side project Baby Blossom is getting a lot of attention in the J-Pop blogosphere. Despite the raw playing and the questionable sound reinforcement (the result of either no proper soundcheck the day of the performance, or the soundman not taking into consideration how different the room was going to sound with an audience full of people as compared to when the only people in the building were AKB48 and their road crew), they still made quite an impression on me. As someone that has been playing a variety of instruments his whole life, I definitely want to critique and give some serious suggestions to the girls because there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For those that don’t know, I’m a trained musician. I play several different instruments (guitar is my main one, and I presently own five that are all named after J-Pop singers) and there’s a bunch more that I’ve tried but could never get a good enough handle on (trying to teach myself alto sax at age 19 resulted in way too many references to Horatio Hornblower and goat calling from my otherwise supportive parental units) and I’ve played in several different bands for over a decade after my graduation for high school – in fact, it ended up being my main income during the waning years of Reagan America when the only other place that was offering steady employment was the Armed Forces (who had already turned me off when they were relentlessly trying to recruit myself and my other classmates during my junior and senior years of high school and then for months afterward). It’s this musical background that has been a blessing to my activities as a writer and blogger, especially since, as essential brother Ray Mescallado said once, I “aspire to quality music writing” (one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten on my work – thanks again, man.)

Anyway, having watched and listened to the live performance of the song, here’s my notes:

The four girls playing horns were basically the weakest link in the chain. With only a few months of experience on their instruments, they sounded not much different than the brass players in your average junior high or high school marching band. That having been said, brass and woodwind instruments are not the easiest instruments to learn. I attempted to learn trumpet in 6th grade, as well as my aforementioned attempt to try alto sax almost a decade later, and only realized one thing – I didn’t have the lung power to get away with playing a horn properly.

The keyboardists and percussionists involved were a bit inaudible, but I blame the soundman for that, and in all fairness, I won’t critique them.

Yuki Kashwagi did a very impressive job behind the drum kit – I don’t think she even missed a beat. If she found herself in a working rock band after graduating AKB48, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Minami Takahashi did fine playing lead guitar, but her silence for the last few bars of the second chorus before the solo was typical of the beginner. There was a couple of obvious missed notes, but the only thing that grated on me with her playing was her rather bizarre and uncomfortable/unnatural-looking left hand fretting technique. Continued woodshedding and a bit of study with some good guitar instructional videos would help tremendously – they certainly did when I picked the guitar back up after a couple of years of hardly touching it!

Yuko Oshima fluctuated a couple of times on bass but she held her own very well, while Atsuko Maeda showed a lot of confidence playing rhythm guitar.

It’s being openly hoped by AKB48 fans that the AKB48 members involved will continue with this Baby Blossom side project in live performance and maybe even in the studio, and I share those hopes. Quite frankly, it would suck if they stopped playing after pulling off what they did the other night!

A little more than a year after she graduated from AKB48′s Team K, Erena Ono is apparently going to make a return to show business. Earlier this year she had opened a new blog and mentioned “It’s been too long… too long.” Somehow, her announcement back in July was a shade premature because her original “new blog” disappeared. But now she has a new blog (with only one entry so far, the one mentioning her return to show business) and she seems a bit serious this time around.

I’m all for it. And I hope it means she’ll be making music again as well – anyone who heard her solo vocal on the “Namida Surprise” B-side “FIRST LOVE” is well aware how pretty her singing voice is. I would definitely be first in line to pre-order an Erepyon solo album:

Given the amount of long playing albums – fourteen in total as of this writing, counting this release – that they’ve released in their short time as a group/project, it’s rather mindboggling to think that this is, for all intents and purposes, AKB48’s debut studio album. Last year’s second singles collection Kamikyokutachi did come off like a well-sequenced studio album, but given that pretty much 90% of that album was already released as A and B-sides of singles, its familiarity probably made listening to that album an enjoyable, if relatively surprise-free, listening experience (It’s still essential listening, given that it sums up the band’s career up to the spring of 2010.)

After all that time – extended even further thanks to manufacturing delays related to this past spring’s earthquake and tsunami – we finally get AKB48’s first real studio album (everything else, save for Kamikyokutachi and the band’s first best-of album Set List ~Greatest Songs 2006-2008~ (DefSTAR/Sony Japan), was “original cast albums” of the separate team’s stage shows). Although not indicated as such, the album appears to have been sequenced into separate sections by the band’s producer/lyricist Yasushi Akimoto.

The first part of the album gets off to a good start with the mixed-team opener “Shoujotachi yo” and three separate Team tracks, “Overtake” (Team A), “Boku ni Dekiru Koto” (Team K) and “Renai Circus” (Team B) – none of which would have sounded out of place on an AKB48 single or one of the separate team’s stage albums. So far, so good.

The next section of the album gets devoted to random groupings of the various group members. “Kake no Yukue” isn’t far removed from the kind of material that ends up somewhere in the middle of the various Team’s stage shows, and it’s ballad-like pacing is a balm after the opening four-song salvo. “Wagamama Collection” is basically an attack of cuteness dominated by some of the group’s younger members, while the following “Ningyo no Vacances” and “Kimi to Boko no Kankei” sound like outtakes from the first Berryz Koubou album. “Iikagen no Susume” appears to shift the album’s gears with an arrangement that recalls AKB’s classic DefSTAR singles, then things get turned backwards with the Team Kenkyuusei feature “High School Days” – which, for whatever reason, sees that team’s participants sound more assured (despite their young ages) than the Berryz-sounding cuts from their elder bandmates.

“Team B Oshi” is the album’s weakest track – like the title implies, it’s another feature for Team B, and it sounds exactly like what it is – a stage album song that somehow ended up on the wrong (virtual) master reel. In other words, it sounds completely out of place here.

The remainder of the album is dominated by four of the band’s more recent singles. I have to admit, after 2009’s “RIVER”, much of the band’s singles output since then underwhelmed me, with “Beginner” and “Heavy Rotation” being the best of the bunch – “Ponytail to Chouchou” seems more memorable for its infamous locker room skin-tease video opening than for the song itself, while “Chance no Junban” lies right inbetween.

The title track, featuring the band and its three sister units SKE48, SDN48 and Osaka-based NMB48, closes out things. The song itself is a very pretty ballad featuring some great mass harmonies and ensemble singing from the four units. I’m just personally not a big fan of albums having slow songs for closing tracks.

Outside of the album’s weaker tracks, it is the album’s sequencing itself, concentrating on grouping songs according to a loose concept rather than the more logical song-by-song flow a studio album normally calls for, is a bit of an Achilles Heel. Yes, the sequencing itself is pretty much Akimoto’s choice, but the listener would be better served devoting future listens to the full album not in its original sequence but either in shuffle play, or in a sequencing of the listener’s own making. The performances and most of the songs are well done, but the way this album was originally sequenced doesn’t make this album the most perfect of listens for me, and after five years, plus a mother-nature-precipitated two month delay, one would think that AKB48 and their creative team would have delivered a more consistent package for what is essentially the band’s first studio album. At least the band’s sales will insure that a second studio collection will be inevitable in 2012, just like hitting shuffle would make Koto ni Ita Kito a more enjoyable listening experience.

Four out of five stars.

Feel free to make a comment/remark/joke/whatever about why this guy is wearing a bandana over his face.

I’m not making that up. That’s, spelled out, FIVE THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED COPIES. I have been buying CD’s since 1988 (there I go showing my age again) and I’m not sure I even own 5500 different CDs. I’ve bought multiple editions of some Morning Musume and AKB48 CDs in the past and will continue to do so (stupidly, I forgot to pre-order the new single – D’oh!), and when Mike Watt’s newest album came out I fully admit that I am responsible for the sales of four different copies (Japanese CD, download from Japanese iTunes because I couldn’t wait for said CD to arrive in the mail, domestic CD and domestic vinyl).

Let’s put this in mathematical terms: This nut bought 1,375 times as many copies of “Everyday Katyusha” as I did of hyphenated-man. At the time of this writing CDJapan is selling both retails versions of the single for 1524 yen, or $18.36 in US dollars. That’s 8,382,000 yen or $100,980. That’s more than myself, my wife, and Vee probably make in a year.

To this extreme AKBWota, I ask: default your credit cards much, dude?

I’m sure at least 5,498 copies of the new AKB48 single will be turning up on eBay and Yahoo! Auctions soon, though. Take it away, Vee:

Somehow I thought that something major was going to happen in J-Pop during my two weeks of honeymoon, and just in time for the last day before I have to go back to my day job, it did.

Erena Ono, a member of AKB48′s Team K (Megumi Ohori was one of her bandmates before she was moved to SDN48) that has been on all of their major single A-sides and one of my favorite members of the group, is graduating from the band soon, reportedly to pursue first educational activities and then more entertainment work outside of the AKB universe. No date has been given for her final show, as far as I can tell.

To say that this is a major shockwave in AKB48 fandom is an understatement, given that the 4’11″, soon-to-be-17-year-old is one of the band’s most beloved veteran members. It also doesn’t seem completely surprising, since she isn’t one of the members selected to represent the group on the cover of the Kami Kyokutachi album. Given that she’s been a prominent member of the group on all of their major label A-sides, this is a damn shame.

Hopefully, Erepyon’s time out of the spotlight will be brief and we’ll still get to hear her lend her pretty voice to songs like “FIRST KISS” from the Namida Surprise EP. The OPV below, done by a fan earlier this year, should prove to be a fitting tribute to her.

I usually don’t like to do capsule reviews. In my view, they tend to be written by lazy hack writers who only seem to skim through the promotional copies of CDs they obtain for review before piling them up in a box somewhere for them to sell off at a used CD store somewhere – if they bother to listen to them in the first place. But since I’ve been doing a whole lot of listening but no blog-related writing over the past few months – thanks in part to all of the preparations I’ve been going through for my wedding this Saturday – this particular format will have to do. After the honeymoon and once I’ve gotten settled in, I’ll go back to my regular reviewing style. This’ll be part one. Part two I’ll be completing and posting after the honeymoon.

AKB48 – Kami Kyokutachi (You! Be Cool/King) – While there’s a whole pile of albums out there with the AKB48 name on them, they’ve all been, with the exception of the Set List – Greatest Songs 2006-2007 compilation, basically “original cast albums” of all of the separate teams’ shows – lots of good songs and good singing, but nothing that could cohesively be called a studio album. Fortunately, although billed as a “best-of album”, Kami Kyokutachi comes off as close to a coherent studio album as the group has ever come. All of the band’s King A-sides plus their interim digital-only indie single “Baby! Baby! Baby!” get supplemented with a few random B-sides (no Undergirls/Theatre Girls material or Erena Ono’s beautiful solo cut “First Kiss” though) and some new tracks and make for the most cohesive – and long overdue – long-playing experience to be released under the AKB48. Now if they could put out a single A-side that is a hell of a lot more exciting than the last couple of singles they’ve released since the year started…
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars Available on CD/DVD combo and on iTunes Japan.

DEVO – Something for Everybody (Warner Bros.) – When it was first announced that Devo had gotten back together full-time, resigned to their original American record label Warner Bros., and started working on a new album, I saw a couple of skeptical tweets from people who wondered why anyone would want a new Devo album in the first place. Well, not only have Devo debunked Thomas Wolfe’s old yarn about not being able to go home again by returning to Warner Bros., they’ve also followed in the tradition of the Stooges, New York Dolls, Mission of Burma and Ace Frehley and handed in an album that was worth both the multi-decade wait (two decades, in the case of our beloved spudboys), but they’ve made their finest album since 1983’s Oh No! It’s Devo. Simply put, they’ve redeemed themselves after the debacle of their Enigma Records period and made an album that stands up as tall as their classic back catalog (most of which has been very nicely remastered and reissued by Warner Bros.). (Also, in my opinion, Warner Bros. should surprise the hell out of casual listeners and service the ballad “No Place Like Home” to radio.)
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars Available on CD, LP, and in three different iTunes/Amazon MP3 editions; this review is based on the highly-recommended 16-track deluxe edition.

HANK WILLIAMS III – Rebel Within (Sidewalk/Curb) – This is the last album Hank III is doing for Curb Records, and once it was announced earlier this year that he had completed the album and handed it in to the label, people wondered how much of an effort he’d put into it, given his open disgust with how the label handled his music. Given his intentions to continue as an independent artist for all future albums onward, III could not certainly squander his hard-earned fan base for the sake of kissing off his soon-to-be-former-label. Thus, Hank hands in a set of mostly country material closer to Lonesome Broke and Driftin’ than his seminal Straight to Hell, but changes gears in a few places with the title track’s touches of Assjack-style hollering in the chorus, the eerie “Karmageddon” with its lyrical allusions to the plight of Native Americans, and – the true highlight of the album – a raucous country/punk/metal hybrid in “Tore Up and Loud”, where III’s “Hellbilly” style gets kicked up several notches with personal lyrics, power-metal double-kick drumming (done by III himself – like “Punch Fight Fuck” on Damn Right Rebel Proud, anytime you hear Slayer-style drums behind country guitars, III’s sitting behind the kit), and Pantera-esque electric guitar riffing, culminating in a blatant, obvious, and long-overdue Declaration of Independence capped with a “Fuck all y’all” to the Curb Records staff. Fuck Curb, indeed – and a big “fuck, yeah” for Shelton Hank Williams.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars Available on CD, LP with bonus CD, and on iTunes and AmazonMP3.

Again, part two comes after the honeymoon… see you then! Until then, one can follow our exploits via Twitter.

I almost forgot to post something today, but I have a good excuse: Today was also my fiancee’s bridal shower, and guess who had to schlep gifts back and forth in his car? Yep…

I should note that for the past few weeks I’ve been – on top of planning towards the wedding and subsequent move into mine and my wife-to-be’s new apartment – finishing up the novel (yeah, still… but then again if I didn’t have to hold a day job it would have been finished already), working on a screenplay for Script Frenzy, working on a couple of reviews for this blog (they’ll be up this week), and working on my guitar.

And last night, boy, did I work on my guitar… I got this thing (Epiphone Les Paul) a few months ago, but I never changed the strings until last night. Such was my Saturday night:

And to keep things J-pop related, here’s another part of what helped keep me sane, especially today:

Besides, I couldn’t figure how to equal or better the live MoMusu and Stooges clips from last year! But what I can do is (even though I didn’t get this finished until after midnight when the 11th became the 12th) update a list I posted two years ago on my second blogging anniversary at MotokoAoyama.com, which would make this “A List That Took Four Years To Make”:

Two webhosts (only one of which I recommend, Bluehost)
Four laptops (Don’t get me started…)
Two iPods (and I’m planning on finally upgrading soon… I have more music on my hard drive than can fit on my present 60GB model!)
Morning Musume and AKB48 both making their American concert debuts (come back here, both, er, ALL of you!!)
Thirteen Morning Musume singles
Eight personnel changes in Morning Musume
Two personnel changes in C-ute
No personnel changes in Berryz Koubou
More personnel changes in AKB48 than anyone can keep up with… (and don’t even get any serious AKB fan started on those team reassignments!)
Six and a half Morning Musume albums (the “half album” being the 7.5 Fuyu Fuyu EP)
Twelve Berryz Koubou singles (double the amount from two years ago!)
Three and a half Berryz Koubou studio albums (the “half album” being their misnumbered (3) Natsu Natsu Mini Berryz)
Eleven C-ute singles (all of their major-label releases)
Four and a half C-ute albums (I still consider ? mini ~Ikiru to Iu Chikara~ to be an EP)
Four Koda Kumi studio albums (I lost track of compilations and singles!)
Two Ayumi Hamasaki albums (Go ahead and yell at me, Vee…)
One and a half Maki Goto albums (That first one for Avex is pretty much an EP…)
One and a half SCANDAL albums (Again, the half-album is an EP…)
Three post-Whiteberry EPs from bands led by Yuki Maeda (One Yukki, two The Husky)
Seven Stooges albums (two of those being the remastered editions of their Elektra albums, another being a 180-gram pressing of Raw Power, and counting the forthcoming deluxe reissue of the original Bowie mix of Raw Power)
The entire Koharu Kusumi solo discography
The entire Buono! discography to date
The entire AKB48 singles discography to date
Five New York Dolls albums (three of those being vinyl editions of all three studio albums)
Seven Puffy AmiYumi albums
Five Mission of Burma albums (three of them being the new vinyl reissues on Matador)
Two Panic! At The Disco albums
Two Meat Puppets albums
Four Hank III albums (counting the Assjack album and his forthcoming The Rebel Within, of course)
Two copies of Flyleaf’s first album (one autographed)
Three autographed Sick Puppies CDs
One guitar autographed by Iggy Pop and the Asheton Brothers
One Asheton brother being transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band (I’m sure Ron is trading Mike Watt stories with D. Boon!)
James Williamson rejoining the Stooges
The Stooges finally making the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Next targets: The New York Dolls, Black Flag, and The Minutemen… and that’s a fucking vow and a promise from me!)
Lux Interior being transferred from the Cramps to Rock N’ Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band
A Sex Pistols reunion
A Public Image Ltd. reunion
Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols “mis-manager” dying of cancer… followed by Johnny Rotten NOT singing “Celebration” or “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” (good on ya, Johnny…)
Seven books autographed by Henry Rollins
One book autographed by Sen. Arlen Specter
Three e-mails from Henry Rollins
Two e-mails from Jello Biafra
Three day trips to New York where I spent over $700 combined in one store (Virgin Megastore) alone
Four visits to Apple Stores where I spent $0 (and wish I had been able to spend several times what I spent at Virgin)
Five day trips to Philadelphia
Two day trips to Syracuse, NY
One Stooges concert
One Bon Jovi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
Two Flyleaf concerts
Two Evanescence concerts
Two Sick Puppies concerts
Two 3 Doors Down concerts (Which makes four times I’ve seen my fiancee’s favorite band, versus zero times I’ve seen my favorite band… that’s gotta be corrected quick-fast)
Two opening sets prior to 3DD by Hinder (Most boring band not named Nickelback or Daughtry, by a long shot)
Two Breaking Benjamin concerts (and unfortunately, although they played well as always, the sound at the second sucked! What was up with that, Ben?)
One missed Puffy AmiYumi concert (goddamn motherfucking fuck!)
One missed Morning Musume concert (yes, that concert!!)
One missed Mike Watt & The Secondmen concert (sorry, Mike… still!!!)
Four 100-count spindles of CD-R’s
Two Palm Treo 680 smartphones
Three Blackberry smartphones (no, I’m not getting an iPhone)
Four SD cards
Three phonograph needles
Morning Musume CDs finally being released in the United States (the flipside… well, I’ll get to that soon enough…)
Nine WordPress themes
Seven domain names (on top of the previously mentioned ones, there’s TGML’s URL, the one for the Meetan blog, and a second one for the Reina blog)
Two different Reina Tanaka/Robert Fripp header graphics at MotokoAoyama.com (Vee improved on the original)
Ai Kago finally making a comeback
One W album that’s gone the way of the original version of SMiLE
One Guns N’ Roses album finally being finished, handed in, and released!
Ace Frehley beating his ex-bandmates to record stores with new material… and not having to sell out to Wal-Mart to do it!
Six Mike Watt-related albums recorded during this blog’s and its predecessor’s lifetime waiting mixdown or release
Two animes with Reina Tanaka doing voice work
Two knocked-up MoMusus
Two instances where I bitched about Nozomi Tsuji getting knocked up
Three instances where I remarked about what a lucky bastard Taiyo Sugiura is
Three snarky remarks made by me about Avril Lavgine
One snarky remark made by “Reina” about Jamie Lynn Spears
One snarky remark made by me to “Reina” about Beyonce Knowles
Countless snarky remarks about American Idle
More American Idle contestants losing their recording contracts
Five Reina Tanaka photobooks
One tire
Two illnesses
Two back-to-back NaNoWriMo wins
Three book projects (two simultaneous, one on hold)
One published short story (”The Man In The Hummer” in Deliver Us From Evil, available from Jaded Silence Press)
All four versions of American Wota
One nomination at the IntlWota Awards
Two jokes stolen from Jeff Dunham
One joke stolen from Nothing Nice To Say
Three times I got under the skin of Tony Brummel at Victory Records… that I know of. (Might as well make it four: How does it feel to lose Silverstein AND Bayside on top of Hawthorne Heights and Atreyu, baldy? I hear Aiden’s next…)
Five times my partner at My Sweet Meetan, Chris (CK) went to Japan
Reina Tanaka’s 18th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 19th birthday
Reina Tanaka’s 20th birthday
My 40th birthday… I stopped counting after that.
Mike Watt’s 50th birthday… and counting
Iggy Pop’s 60th birthday… and counting – face it, he’s one unstoppable motherfucker, for which we should all be grateful.
Several boxes of CD sleeves
Countless mouse and camera batteries
Countless VitaminWaters
Countless instances where I took to heart David Peel’s adage that “fuck” is not a dirty word
A year and a half of lost blog archives (Don’t trust your webhosting to anyone who stage-names himself “Vikki Stixx”… or for that matter your real estate matters)
Not enough trips to Starbucks or Sonic (yeah, N.E. PA got one of those last summer!)
More money spent at CDJapan than at Gallery of Sound
Not as much money spent on vinyl since 2008, at least I don’t think so… but then again I’ve still taken that option whenever offered)
Virgin Megastore going out of business in 2009
Three Record Store Days (counting the forthcoming one this Saturday, which I’ll be honoring)
And one girlfriend, since upgraded to fiancée and soon to be upgraded to wife on 6.26.10

The lyrical subject of AKB48’s debut A-side is… graduating?

In a way, it makes sense: The group had already been giving shows at their eponymous theatre in Akihabara for several months before Yasushi Akimoto decided to shepherd his new protégés – at the time consisting of what became “Team A” (no Meetan or Erepyon in sight) – into a recording studio for their first single – and this one, self-released, to boot. And a ballad! I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of the early regulars at the AKB48 Theatre were picking up the group’s first single, recognizing the song as being one of the band’s slower numbers, and running to their online message boards to post their discontent: The nerve! A slow song for a new all-girl pop group’s first single? And one with lyrics about moving on, yet? What is that schmuck AkiP thinking?

Consider that, for one thing, Akimoto and AKB48 were pretty much going the DIY route for this first single. They hadn’t courted, or been courted by, any of the major labels yet. No doubt many of the early fans of AKB’s live shows were clamoring for a CD of some sort. Judging from the packaging, however – a four-panel 2×2 insert briefly describing the band’s concept, lineup, and theatre, plus a randomly inserted collector’s card of one of the then-current members – Akimoto’s intention was, in part, to attract more attention to his new musical venture.

A slow song doesn’t necessarily mean a sad song – “Sakura no…” is very upbeat (in spite of its slow tempo), very innocent, and very major key. There’s no line division – the twenty-girl lineup sings the entire song in unison. And the lyric was appropriate because AKB48 was going from just being a live unit with an indefinite residence in its own performance venue to being recording artists. And given that school graduations were on the horizon in Japan at the time this single was released, AkiP’s and the group’s timing was close to impeccable. The song peaked at #10 on the Oricon singles chart, so the strategy worked.

The B-side of “Sakura no…” is practically the A-side’s direct opposite. Rather than an innocent and upbeat ballad about looking ahead to the future, “Dear my teacher” finds the girls singing (over an underground disco beat) from the point of view of a female student who wants to cross the line with her male instructor (at least I’m assuming the object of the song narrator’s affections is male). Some of the lyrics are pretty blunt, judging from the translation at Stage48: “Do it, BABY! / Do it, BABY! / Won’t you teach me a lesson? / I secretly want special extra credit / … If you lock the door / I’ll be a good girl.”

Meanwhile, a few weeks after AKB’s debut single, Morning Musume were all business as usual with “SEXY BOY”. There is a slight techno influence on the A-side, and I say slight because most of the techno I’ve heard didn’t have upfront harmony lead guitar breaks breaking up the otherwise keyboard-dominated landscape. There are some para-para moments in the chanted backing vocals in the chorus, but not as much as your average Eurobeat tune – Tsunku kept things less specialized and more mainstream as far as the basic musical arrangement went. It was and is a catchy and memorable song.

The B-side finds the band mining some big band/jazz influence again. This wouldn’t be the first time (“Mr. Moonlight –Koi no Big Band-“, of course) or the last (MoMusu’s last B-side of 2006 would also mine similar musical territory, but that’s another column). While it’s a good song, and the girls’ vocals are up to standard, in retrospect it’s one of their weaker B-sides, although I’m sure it served the purpose of being both B-side as well – given the band’s usual concert protocol – as part of the band’s Spring 2006 tour set list.

For their next singles, both groups would shift gears – but that’s a story for the next column.

However… they both make great recordings. And that is where this series – in planning since last November – comes in.

Over several parts – each devoted to a single apiece from both bands – this author will be comparing the singles of Morning Musume and AKB48, strictly on musical grounds. Neither single covers nor PVs will be involved in the comparison. Sales numbers and chart rankings will have no relevance here, either, especially since neither has anything to do with the long-term impact of the music itself. (Consider how three of the most influential and beloved albums to be released in the mid-Eighties – the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, and Slayer’s Reign in Blood – have had far-reaching cultural impact in the twenty-some years since those records were first released, even though their initial sales were a fraction of what the major pop acts of the day were selling.)

How this works will be quite simple: Each Morning Musume single will be evaluated alongside its AKB48 counterpart – or vice versa, depending on which single came out first. The first installment, for example will pair MoMusu’s “Sexy Boy ~Soyokaze ni Yorisotte~” with AKB’s “Sakura no Hanabiratachi”. There will be no pre-determined outcome; there may not even be one. Yes, I refer to Morning Musume as my favorite band almost as regularly as I eat, shit, and breathe, but I am also a big AKB48 fan. If I had disliked AKB48, I would not even be writing this series, let alone be owning, hosting, and collaborating on a site dedicated to a favorite member of that group. This will simply be a somewhat scientific/scholarly look at where each act was when they released singles within weeks of each other.

In most cases, their release schedules for singles happened within weeks of each other, making the comparisons easy. In a couple of cases, AKB48 released singles within weeks of a previous single of theirs while Morning Musume had no brand new release to counter it; one single, the 2008 “re-release”/re-recording of “Sakura no Hanabiratachi”, will be left out of this comparison for reasons to be fully explained later, and their digital-only single “Baby-Baby-Baby” will also, most likely, be left out since there was no Morning Musume single to counterbalance – using the MoMusu side band High-King’s single “C/C (Cinderella Complex)”, released around the same time, would not be a very fair comparison, even if for many fans the single filled what has to be the longest gap between Morning Musume singles (April 2008’s “Resonant Blue” and September 2008’s “Pepper Keibu”) ever. “Boku No Taiyou” has also left me with a bit of a dilemma, given that it dropped seemingly within days of the release of “BINGO!” – I haven’t decided on whether or not it will be part of this survey. It might be, but pitting two AKB singles against one MoMusu single from the same time period will probably be pushing it. No matter. This is strictly for fun, not part of a contest to determine which band is better than another.

Oh yeah, there’s that little interruption.

Truth be told, I’m already planning ahead, and not just for that. I’ve already anticipated that there’s going to be a short break in blogging action around the last week of June and going on for at least another week. Which only means one thing: I intend to stay as busy as possible, trying to post as much as possible here and at So Hot She Shits Fire (and whenever I can at My Sweet Meetan), while also going into final preparations for the wedding, getting the last scenes folded into Here Is The Wonderland in the immediate weeks to come, thus finishing that long-in-the-making first draft before plunging into the second, which should only take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to complete the first draft. And also upping my guitar skills.

What?

Yeah, I got a new electric guitar over the Christmas holidays. I don’t think I will be discussing it much here – this blog is meant for serious music discussion, and personal ramblings about trying to re-master the pentatonic scale or getting a better handle on sweep picking don’t really belong here, so there may be a little place somewhere where I’ll let those out of my system. (Updates about my personal life don’t belong here either, of course. I might refer to them in vague here or in “conversation” at SHSSF, but that’s another story, and I already have places for that.)

This, in a nutshell, is as personal as I intend to get, and I’m keeping it in topic: 2010 is going to see a lot more activity here. Beyond that, I’m not hard to find, as the list of “personal” links that has always existed here and at this blog’s predecessor will attest. With one of the series that I hinted at back in November (the Best Albums of 2009 series) out of the way, the other one will be starting next week to formally kick off blogging activity here at TGML for 2010. For now, I’m going to spend the rest of the weekend decompressing from New Year’s Eve/Day.

Other than that (and my wedding), I don’t know what’s going to take place in 2010. Hell, I didn’t know when 2009 started that Morning Musume were getting ready to announce their American debut and that Ron Asheton was going to be transferred from the Stooges to Rock N’Roll Heaven’s Helluva Band either.

Stay tuned. Things are only going to get insane here. But in a good way, of course.