Aibon, You Need To Change A Few Things…
Waking up to see any bad news is never what one wants to see first thing in the morning, especially on a weekend morning after sleeping in. But that’s precisely what happened when I picked up my Blackberry and read International Wota’s headline about her suicide attempt.
Putting the last two words of that last sentence in a paragraph with any entertainer is a sad thing to begin with, but when that name is attached to a Japanese singer associated with happier-sounding works, it’s even sadder.
Like everybody else that is processing this news and blogging or tweeting about it, I am wishing Aibon the best. Given that she was in Morning Musume when I first started to get into the band and also became a XXL fan of the side groups she was in at the time – hell, my Gmail address has been minimoniotaku since 2004! – this is only natural. Shit, she even inspired one of the characters in my almost-complete novel project (although I have no intention of giving her literary doppelgänger such a tragic ending)!
With reference to one of the first posts IW linked to, I don’t believe Aibon needs a permanent break from the entertainment industry. What she needs a permanent break from is the guy she’s been living with for the past couple of years. From what I can tell, he hasn’t been much of a help or a positive influence on her, and his much-reported associations with organized crime certainly don’t help.
Aibon, have a safe recovery, get the fuck away from that guy you’ve been involved with, get in touch with some friends (we all know you’ve been in contact with fellow ex-MiniMoni Mika Todd through Twitter), and by this time next year you should be ending the year on a high note, not a low one.
Stop! Kyary Time!
I’ve been rather ambivalent about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and her seemingly overnight success with her first single, the admittedly infectious “PONPONPON”, but I won’t lie: both of her singles, the aforementioned piece of ear candy and the recent follow-up “Jelly” are on my iPod and have been getting regular spins of late. And I’m looking forward to my digital pre-order from iTunes landing on my hard drive and in my iPad later tonight as I write this. Even more so when I discovered the following news item from last week, via the social music chart site Last.fm:
At #1 it’s J-Pop phenomenon (Kyary Pamyu Pamyu). The teenage singer has seen her audience climb by 1,127% in the last week, fueled by the success of single “PONPONPON”, as she gears up for the release of debut ‘mini’ album Moshi Moshi Harajuku later this month.
Now, I’m a twinge edgy about this because I have strongly believed for years that J-Pop has more than a good chance to be more than a cult favorite genre here in the Western world, and like a lot of my fellow serious fans of Japanese pop and rock music, I don’t want the mainstream media to lump the likes of Morning Musume, Dir en grey, SCANDAL, AKB48, etc. under the “LOL Japan” category after seeing someone like Kyary. That ad campaign involving a virtual idol digitally created from bits of various popular AKB48 members probably didn’t help matters. But the more I listen to Kyary’s two singles of late, the more I feel that even though artistically I can’t take her as completely seriously as I do Morning Musume or any other J-Pop artist that I’ve reviewed here at TGML, or at this blog’s predecessor, I can still concede that even Kyary, despite the too-obvious presence of AutoTune vocoder effects on her vocals (hey, it fits the arrangement of the songs, so why complain?), could eat someone of lesser-to-no-talent like Katy Perry alive and shit out Rebecca Black.
Since Kyary’s been gaining a good amount of worldwide visibility through a combination of both word of mouth and Warner Japan’s being foresighted enough to make her easily available to anyone in the world with an iTunes account, I can’t help but parallel her current visibility with that of pop-rap icons of the early 90′s like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Both artists left behind a couple of indelible marks on pop charts with a couple of ridiculously popular singles before basically becoming near-laughing-stock pop culture survivors of a sort that you still can’t help but tap your toes to, but in the process they made mainstream TV and radio, and the people who get most of their culture from those outlets, more open to the rest (and best) of what hip-hop had to offer. Despite the fact that both Hammer and Vanilla Ice are easy targets to anyone who takes their rap music seriously, everyone from N.W.A. to Wu-Tang Clan to Lil Wayne to Odd Future owes at least some thanks to Hammer and Vanilla Ice for kicking those doors down in the first place. By that same token, even though Kyary can be an easy target for mainstream media at their laziest (see “silly” Japanese phenomenom, do thirty-second fill-in piece with “LOL Japan” angle at tail-end of news broadcast), there’s still those that will get a good ear-whiff of “POMPOMPOM”, “Jelly”, or whatever else she drops, get hooked, and start to dig further on the premise of, “OK, this is cool… but I’m sure there’s even better stuff coming out of Japan that most people might not have heard of, and I’m going to look for it!” And if her success means that American record labels (for the most part, preferably the independent ones that prefer to work with career artists – I still don’t trust the major labels and their throw-it-against-the-wall mentality with what Japan has to offer) are going to take a chance on a Koda Kumi or a MoMusu, so be it.
If the end result of that means that a year from now, I can go buy Morning Musume’s and SCANDAL’s 2012 album releases in my local indy record store or at Best Buy, rather than having to just pre-order them from CDJapan, then I’m all for it.
REVIEW: SHONEN KNIFE “Osaka Ramones”
SHONEN KNIFE
Osaka Ramones: Tribute to The Ramones
(Good Charamel)
Available on CD, iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic
Rating: 
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: This review was originally intended for what I have referred to at TGML's Facebook page as "The Secret Project", but since there's going to be an unavoidable delay in that project's debut, I've moved it here because I didn't want it to sit any longer. Shonen Knife deserves it.]
Naoko Yamano, Shonen Knife’s front woman, guitarist, chief songwriter, and only consistent member of the veteran Japanese trio (as well as a MILF to both the punk rock and J-pop fan bases), learned how to play guitar by listening to the Ramones. In that aspect, she already has one thing in common with millions of people around the world, this writer included. On top of the obvious Ramones influences that have been part and parcel of Shonen Knife’s music from the beginning of their storied career, the band has also been known to encore with Ramones songs and even do occasional gigs consisting of all Ramones covers under an assumed name, and their 2008 album Fun Fun Fun also contains a tribute song, “Ramones Forever”, that includes autobiographic details on how Naoko first heard the band and how Shonen Knife got to open for the Ramones on their last tour of Japan.
With their own 30th anniversary occurring this year, Naoko and her bandmates decided commemorate the occasion by cutting a full album of Ramones covers, using the name of their occasional Ramones tribute act side project, Osaka Ramones, as the album’s title. About half the album was recorded in their hometown, while the other half was recorded in America with Good Charamel founder (and GooGoo Dolls member) Robby Takac co-producing.
Outside of transposing the key signatures of some of the songs to make them more friendly to their normal female vocal ranges, Shonen Knife remained otherwise faithful to the original recordings, even trying to reproduce as accurately as possible the production styles of the original Ramones recordings (save for “Blitzkrieg Bop”, where the band and Takac wisely avoid emulating the extreme Meet the Beatles-style panning of the guitar and bass tracks in favor of a more contemporary mix). Also remaining unchanged are the gender viewpoints of the original songs, giving some of the covers an unintended faux-lesbian subtext.
The song selection isn’t as completely predictable. A few obvious choices – “Rock n’ Roll High School”, the aforementioned “Blitzkrieg Bop”, “Sheenah Is a Punk Rocker”, “Psycho Therapy” (thankfully, no “I Wanna Be Sedated”, which every bar band in America tends to play very badly) also share space with a couple of not-so-obvious choices, particularly “Scattergun” from the final Ramones studio album Adios Amigos! and “Chinese Rock” from End of the Century.
Given that Shonen Knife’s original songs often cover more kawaii (Japanese for “cute”) topics – food (“BBQ Party”, “I Wanna Eat Chocobars”, “Ice Cream City”), animals (“I Am A Cat”, “Deer Biscuits”), rock and roll (“Golden Years of Rock n’ Roll”, “Rock Society”, “Your Guitar”), campy sci-fi (“Riding on the Rocket”, “Giant Kitty”), with the rare weighty topic (“S*P*A*M”, “Economic Crisis”) – it is quite the shock to hear Naoko and the others (bassist Ritsuko Taneda and new drummer Emi Morimoto sing one song apiece) take on some of the Ramones’s darker lyrical moments, particularly with “Chinese Rocks”, “We’re A Happy Family”, and “Psychotherapy”. This doesn’t distract from or lower the quality of the album, just makes it stand out from the rest of the Shonen Knife catalog.
Beyond that, Osaka Ramones does exactly what Shonen Knife intended the album to do – pay tribute to their heroes and commemorate their own milestone anniversary, one made possible one way or another by the Ramones themselves. Fans of both the Ramones and Shonen Knife will love this, and if one is a fan of one band but not the other, hopefully the album will inspire explorations into the other’s back catalog.
YouTube Crosses The Line
The news is already spreading about how Lady Gaga’s official YouTube account was suspended after a media watchdog group in Japan representing Fuji TV filed a copyright complaint against the provocative singer/songwriter. Gaga and her team had uploaded her appearance on SNAP’s variety show SMAP x SMAP, something that would have been of great interest to fans of both artists outside of Japan.
The frequent scissoring of copyrights from YouTube has been quite ridiculous to begin with, but when the official YouTube account of the biggest pop artist on the planet is getting suspended for posting a clip featuring herself on her own official account, which has gotten over 950 million views, something is wrong.
Musical artists have every right to monitor use of their content on YouTube, but more than that, they have the right to post any clips they themselves appear in. There is a clause in the USA’s copyright law that covers fair use of anything, and Gaga’s posting of her own TV appearance is indeed fair use. The song performed in the clip was hers. There is the likelihood that Gaga had obtained permission from the show’s producers to post the clip, something that the media watchdog that called foul to YouTube/Google about may not have been aware of. In that case, it would have been one of the biggest instances of one hand not telling the other what it was doing in human history.
My hope is that this causes enough of a furor that it brings about a quick and painless end to knee-jerk alleged copyright violation complaints at the world’s largest video streaming site. YouTube is pretty much an endless historical library of any video clip you could imagine, and there isn’t any entity that doesn’t benefit from that – to argue that uses of material in the manner in which Lady Gaga used one of her own Japanese TV appearances is a detriment is to waste one’s breath.
We Have A Confirmation!
For a couple of years, I had openly wondered if Lady Gaga had been influenced in any way, or been a closet fan of, Koda Kumi, especially after recognizing bits of Kuuchin’s past PVs – or at least heavy influences from them – in some of Gaga’s work.
Well…
From the looks of the above picture, it appears that Gaga was just as excited to meet Kumi as the other way around!
A Hot Mix and a Cool Beverage
Summer is my favorite season of the year, and a lot of things remind me of that season: Nice hot weather (which has made me a bit of a masochist in the past decade and a half, because of how easily I get heat prostration as I get older), air conditioning (which I used to leave on 24/7 all summer when I lived at home; now my wife draws the line at that), ice cream (which doesn’t agree with me anymore – I’m seriously lactose intolerant to the point where I should just say fuck it and turn vegan)… and maybe I should stop there because this is starting to sound like a rant on how much it sucks to get older, except I left out one favorite thing about summer… mixtapes! (I know, another remark where I reveal that I’m twenty years younger than Iggy Pop. Sorry!)
OK, I know that nobody outside of the hip-hop world calls them mixtapes anymore considering that the primary sound carriers of these things are either CD-Rs or iTunes/iPod playlists, but the concept is still the same. You make a mix that you’ll be playing on the regular when you’re driving to the beach, lying on the beach, driving home from the beach, going on vacation… you get idea. The kind of tape where, if immaculately mixed and sequenced, will stay in your car all summer – maybe even during the fall and winter, too – until it either gets lost, borrowed, or left on the dashboard absentmindedly (where it’ll get fried by the sun).
And there is an art to making good mixes. You don’t just throw together eighty minutes worth of songs and call it a mix. You make the sequence as perfect as possible. You try not to be clever by putting ten-minute track from your brother’s favorite Yes album, or hip by slipping some American pop tartlet like Katy Perry inbetween tracks by Anthrax and Bright Eyes.
It’s been said by some aficionados of mixtape culture that mixtapes are going the way of the Edsel, thanks to the presence of iPods. Given that there are still plenty of participants on sites like Zen Running Order and Art of the Mix, that isn’t true. In my case, iPod/iTunes playlists have served to be the perfect test lab for making mixes. Ever since I first started using the program in 2004, I’ve used iTunes to do multiple drafts of mixes, playing the sequences on either my iPod or right on my laptop, fine-tuning the tracks until I have a sequence that a) flows well, and b) fits within the limitations of an 80-minute CD-R. That last parameter is of utmost importance – I’ve lost track of how many cassette mixes I’ve done back in the day where the tape ran out just as my carefully-chosen closing track was prematurely ended by the sudden appearance of the cassette’s plastic leader. Of course, if one could still find blank cassettes and the machines to record and playback with, one could pre-master their sequences on CD-R’s and then transfer those to cassettes – but unless one was being a retro hipster, why would you? (Hmmm… maybe I should do an eBay search for a good stereo reel-to-reel recorder and some blank reels… that would really be retro!)
Anyway, since this is the IntlWota Summer Refreshment Program we’re dealing with here, I’m contractually obligated to display both the refreshment that this program funded for me (in this case, a can from case of Arizona Green Tea – about the only goddamn thing I drink regularly thanks to being both straight-edge and lactose intolerant) and the tools that helped put this article together – my loyal laptop and one of my two iPods. Wait a minute, you’re asking: Two iPods? Yeah. They’d both be in the shot, but I had to use the other one just to take the picture.
I should explain about the two iPods – the one in the picture is a 160GB iPod Classic; a 64GB iPod Touch that is basically used like a miniature iPad/phoneless iPhone is what I took the picture with, and it’s been a rather handy device. I was on a first-anniversary weekend trip with my wonderful wife Tara and was using the hotel’s free WiFi to catch up on e-mail with the iPod Touch, when I got the go-ahead from International Wota to do this. I immediately started putting together the initial sequence right in the iPad Touch, sequenced it, and even gave it an initial spin via a very useful and very fun DJ app – wherein I discovered that my original track sequence was over 90 minutes long. Barely OK for a cassette mix – but we’re dealing with CD limits, so at least ten minutes of music had to eventually be chopped.
Summer, itself, was the basis for picking out the tracks. If it came out in summer, had a summer memory attached to it, or just reminded me of or even sounded like summer in some way to me, it went in. And, befitting this blog’s general ethos – that ethos basically being putting J-Pop and Western music on equal footing – I didn’t restrict my choices to just J-Pop material.
Once I was back home, I got myself the aforementioned fresh case of tea (I’m already halfway through it as I write this – it’s been one of those fucking hot weeks up here in Pennsylvania), sat down with the laptop, and got to editing and resequencing. Below is the final result: My soundtrack for the rest of the Summer of 2011.
1. WHITEBERRY “Natsu Matsuri” – A no-brainer of a logical choice to kick off this mix. When I started to get more seriously into Japanese music, it was Whiteberry that led me on my current path. I owe them a great deal of gratitude for that. I’ve long since heard the Jitterin’ Jinn original and I must say, Whiteberry’s version has the upper hand. Yuki Madea’s voice reminds me of J Mascis as far as her somewhat raw delivery goes; her post-Whiteberry recordings, first with the band Yukki and currently with The Husky have seen her get better with age.
2. REINA TANAKA “Manatsu No Kousen” – Yep, the idol who drives my wotahood (to paraphrase something Ray said at American Wota a few years back). It’s probably no surprise that all of her recently released solo singles are on my hard drive (thank you, US iTunes!) – the surprise is how well she pulls off her solo rendition of the early MoMusu summer classic.
3. HUSKER DU “Celebrated Summer” – Another no-brainer of a selection and the first representation of Western music in general and classic punk/indie in particular on this track list. It was probably my reading Bob Mould’s recent autobiography See A Little Light as well as a book about the Huskers from earlier this year that spurred me to include this choice a lot quicker than I otherwise would have. But then again, I miss the Huskers big time and wish they’d never split up in 1988.
4. BUZZCOCKS “What Do I Get?” – Yes, this is one of those tracks that reminds me of summer – specifically, one time back in the summer of 1994 when I found a copy of their box set in a used CD store in Bloomsburg, bought it on sight, and listened to it in the car on the way home. Plus, I’m starting to make some serious plans for getting a new band together – first time for me since 1997, first time back on guitar since my first band split up in 1984, and first time ever singing lead vocals full-time – and this is one of a long list of candidates that are going to be on the prospective band’s set list.
5. MORNING MUSUME “Souda! We’re Alive!” – Throwing one of my favorite songs by my favorite band of all time into the mix, specifically one from a classic lineup of the group. Gotta love those big powerchords in the intro/chorus/outro.
6. ROKY ERICKSON “Bermuda” – I threw this classic in – specifically this superior version from the Don’t Slander Me album – to add a bit of travel-related paranoia to the proceedings. Yes, this is another selection from my soon-to-be band’s list, too.
7. SAN NIN MATSURI “Chu! Natsu Party” – I had to throw in at least one of the Hello! Project Shuffle Units, and this classic collaboration between Ai Kago, Rika Ishikawa and Aya Matsuura was begging to be heard.
8. BORIS “Hope” – Attention Please and Heavy Rocks 2011 – both reviewed a month or so ago here at TGML – came out just as summer was unofficially starting. With lead guitarist Wata singing in a fragile manner over her own driving Jesus And Mary Chain guitar riffing, the song is a perfect fit.
9. SCANDAL “Koi Moyo” – That opening chord sequence sounds very summery, even beachy. I find myself playing it on guitar a lot when I’m warming up.
10. 11WATER “BE ALL RIGHT!” – the second representation of the H!P Shuffle Groups in this mix. Eleven H!P members take on some Bosstones-esque ska punk. Love this one even though I’m a little more used to MiniMoni’s version from their second album.
11. THE BEATLES “All You Need Is Love” – This one is here for a very personal reason: The day Capitol Records put this 45 out on the racks is also the day I was born.
12. THE MINUTEMEN “Search” – When I got into my first semi-pro band after graduating high school – this was the Summer of 1985 – one of the tapes I frequently carried was the My First Bells compilation tape of all of the Minutemen’s releases prior to Double Nickels on the Dime. I find myself associating that tape with summer weather and car travel a lot.
13. SCANDAL “Secret Base” – The Osaka Four covering the Zone classic. Sometimes I think the basic story line as seen in the Zone PV reminds me of a summer romance that never got off the ground any more come September. The keyboards, however – no matter whether it’s the original or SCANDAL’s retake – remind me of early King Crimson. And I got my first King Crimson records in the summer of ’81, too, if that counts for extra credit…
14. JUNIOR MURVIN “Police and Thieves”
15. MAX ROMEO – “War in a Babylon”
I’ve been in a serious reggae mood lately – the recent Peter Tosh reissues are partly to blame – and so, rather than slip 7nin Matsuri’s “Summer Reggae Rainbow” into the set list, which would have been a little too obvious, and even though I love the song, I opted for putting some more authentic classic reggae in instead. And one can’t get more authentic and classic with reggae without gravitating towards the Bob Marley canon, than by culling from the work of the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. Both tracks sourced from the great box set Arkology – do yourself a favor and find a copy.
16. AKB48 “Heavy Rotation” - One of the best things AKB48 did last summer, if not, all of last year.
17. BUONO “My Boy” - This single might have come out a month early for the Summer of 2009, but by the time the last weekend of May rolled around, it was a perfect fit and stayed that way for the whole season and then some, making it one of Buono’s best ever singles to date.
18. BERRYZ KOUBOU “Waracchaou yo BOYFRIEND” – Likewise, this came out while there was still one month of summer left in 2006, but the 50’s style musical arrangement never fails to evoke summer nights, car hops, crusing, and the like… even if, at the time the song was recorded, most of the girls weren’t even old enough to get learner’s permits.
19. THE SEX PISTOLS “God Save The Queen” – Another deliberately personal summer memory creeping in here, this time of more recent vintage: When Tara and I were finalizing our first-dance and bridal-party song selections with the DJ we hired for our wedding reception last year, he told us to feel free to e-mail him if there were any specific songs we wanted him to play that night. Tara didn’t think of anything, but I asked for this song – admittedly, my favorite song of all time, period point blank – and got it, and got Tara to dance with me to it near the end of the night. Afterwards, our wedding photographer came up to us and said, “I never thought I’d ever hear the Sex Pistols at a wedding reception – that was fucking awesome!!”
20. THE BEACH BOYS “All Summer Long” – Yes, picking a Beach Boys track is pretty obvious for a summer mix, but I needed a good closer, and since this track closes out the American Graffiti soundtrack double-album (a favorite album since I was 7!) it was the perfect track to use. Also, there’s another summer memory attached to this song and the entire soundtrack album – the movie was available on an early pay-per-view hotel system when my family and I stayed at the Inn On The Park hotel in Toronto in 1974 (Around the same time Glenn Gould was using one of the other rooms in the building as a makeshift tape-editing studio for his recordings, I later found out), which is when I first saw the movie and heard most of the music from it. Ironically, while the movie takes place in 1962, this song didn’t come out until two years later. Go figure.
Have a good summer, everyone!
BONUS: Here’s a streaming version of the mix as I originally did it with the dJay app on my iPod Touch, before I discovered that I had to chop at least ten minutes off of the track sequence. Can you pick out the songs that didn’t make the final cut?
IW Summer Refreshment Test Mix 1 by TGML/IW Summer Refeshment
…And Gomaki’s Career Takes Another Odd Turn…
Maki Goto’s singing career has been on rather uneven footing since she abruptly announced her then-impending departure from her original agency Up-Front Works and the label that released her solo albums, Piccolo Town/King on the closing night of her tour behind her fourth solo album How To Use Sexy.
After a short period of inactivity, Maki reopened her blog and revealed that she was in Los Angeles, undergoing vocal and dance training. The mere fact that she was in L.A. had myself and others wondering how on the money I was about predicting that she had left UFW because she wanted to break out of just being a Japanese pop singer and go for an international market.
Six months after that, she signed to Avex Trax, and in her initial promo shots released in the wake of her signing announcement, it appeared that she would be sharing a music path (and a stylist) not dissimilar to Kumi Koda’s. A year later we finally got the first new music from Maki since her signing, the urban-oriented Sweet Black with Maki Goto mini-album. Her two EPs that I’ve heard since then, ONE and Gloria (she’s released a third, LOVE, very recently but I haven’t heard it yet) had her changing styles with every release. (And the way she was dressed and made up on the ONE cover? Don’t even get me started on how much she looked like an aging call girl…).
Now, this morning, Maki released a handwritten statement (translated here) announcing that she was taking a hiatus starting in January of next year. The whole statement seems somewhat vague – she does make a reference to her mother’s sudden death, which police have yet to publicly rule whether it was accidental or not. Is she just taking a hiatus, or is she quitting the business entirely?
Or… is she considering leaving Avex after finishing her current contractual obligations? She does mention a single coming out in July and a full-length album coming out later in the year. And in an interview to promote her current EP, she did mention that she had nothing but good things to say about her time with Up-Front Works, centering especially on working with Tsunku. I hate to speculate, but I’m sure I’m not the only one in the blogosphere thinking the same thing.
REVIEW: AKB48 “Koko ni Ita Koto”
AKB48
Koko ni Ita Koto
(You! Be Cool/King)
Available on CD, CD/DVD and on iTunes Japan
Rating: 
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.
I Like AKB48 But Wait A Minute…
My comrade in J-blogging, VeePinku, has a very succinct video-blog post (shared below because a lot of what she says I am in full agreement with – hope you don’t mind, VZA) about the fan in Japan who bought 5500 copies of AKB48′s new single.
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:
NEW MUSIC: MORNING MUSUME “Only You”
A full HQ copy of Morning Musume’s forthcoming single “Only You” (out 6/15) has already surfaced. The band is back to the mature sound of “Nanchatte Renai”, “Naichao Kamo” and “Onna ga Medatte Naze Ikenai” after kicking off 2011 and their 9th-generation period with this past spring’s much needed dose of sunshine known as “Maji Desu Ka Ska”. And Takitty and Reina, the two best vocalists in the band, are right up front as they very well should be. Loving it already… how could I not? How could you not? Summer’s already starting to sound good and it’s not even Memorial Day yet…
ETA 5.20.11: Sorry – I wasn’t aware that the original stream had been removed – here’s a replacement.
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