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.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
ALBUM OF THE DAY: Whiteberry “After School” EP
WHITEBERRY
After School (EP)
(Pot Artist/Sony Japan)
Available on CD, but now out of print
The roots of the band that gave us “Natsumatsuri”, “Tachiiri Kinshi”, and many other pop-punk classics. This was their first EP, issued in 1999 but already starting to drift inexplicably out of print by the time their first album was out. “Tsuugakuro” would later be slipped into the track sequence of their first album Hatsu, and “Akubi” would get a remake in the wake of “Natsumatsuri”‘s becoming a smash hit, but the rest of the EP would remain part of this EP for eternity.
This stream was removed on May 5th, 2011, pursuant to this website’s policy as stated here.
NEW MUSIC: DREAM MORNING MUSUME “SEXY BOY ?Soyokaze ni Yorisotte?”
Aaannnddd… we have a leak from the forthcoming Dream Morning Musume album Dorimusu 1 (dropping April 20th – no 4:20 jokes, or references to that Six Feet Under song, please!). It’s been awhile since most of these O.G. MoMusu participants (save primarily Hitomi Yoshizawa and Rika Ishikawa, who have kept busy with Hangry & Angry) were heard from in the studio, but they still have the skills that made them MoMusus in the first place. Definitely makes me look forward even more to Dorimusu 1, even if it is dominated by retakes of MoMusu classics.
Stream: Dream Morning Musume “SEXY BOY ?Soyokaze ni Yorisotte?”
‘Maji Desu Ka Ska!’ (a.k.a. Idol Music Is Serious Business)
Okay, so that title might be a little misleading. After all, there are very few occasions where you can legitimately use ‘serious’ and ‘idol music’ positively in the same sentence, especially as I’m talking about Morning Musume. However, considering the title of their new song, I thought it a good opportunity to make a bad joke at the expense of some of my favourite idols, and provide some comments on the song at the same time. This isn’t a review of the single as a whole, but does discuss the promotional video, so it’s a half-review if you like. I’m sure CJ will be providing a complete review once the single is officially released.
JAPAN EARTHQUAKE 3.11.11: Your Favorite Artists And Their Status
The following is a list of artists in Japan and their known condition since the earthquake. The list will be updated throughout the day.
Continue reading
REVIEW: KODA KUMI “Dejavu”
KODA KUMI
Dejavu
(Rhythm Zone/Avex)
Available on CD and CD+2DVD
Rating: 
Shouldn’t “déjà vu” be two words, not one? No matter. It’s the first quarter of the new year, and Koda Kumi wasn’t about to let it pass without a new album, and like a devoted fan I have to welcome it with open arms.
Unlike last year’s 8th AL Universe, Kuu-chin isn’t flirting with rock arrangements this time around – there’s no “Ningyao-hime” or “Can We Go Back” to throw the listener for a powerchord-driven loop; with only one glaring exception Dejavu focuses almost exclusively on pop and urban arrangements.
“POP DIVA”, the album’s advance single, sounds like Kuu-chin is either challenging or mocking Lady GaGa; considering that in the wake of the release of Kuu-chin’s single, GaGa dropped the “Express Yourself” clone “Born This Way”, had herself carried into the Grammy Awards in a large egg, and then accepted an award while wearing an almost Klingon-esque prosthetic forehead, one has to wonder if GaGa got whatever message Kuu-chin was sending. While it’s a catchy song, it’s not one of Kuu-chin’s better A-sides – producer Lil’shorty sees fit both on this song and the album’s opening prologue to unnecessarily mix Kumi’s vocals through AutoTune vocoder effects. It’s not as annoying on “POP DIVA” since it fits the heavily synthetic arrangement, but over the keyboard-triggered orchestral sounds of the album’s prologue, it’s pretty much surplus to requirements.
“Lollipop”, the opening cut to last summer’s Gossip Candy EP, follows. (The PV had my pal, up-and-coming shred guitarist Maxxxwell Carlisle, rather fascinated after I’d linked to it on Facebook awhile back.) Riding an almost sexy-sounding synth-bass line straight out of classic early-90’s R&B, Kumi (multitracking some rather tight and sultry vocal harmonies) delivers a somewhat blunt oral sex lyric. “Okay” follows, some of her introductory vocals getting more unnecessary AutoTune effects; the song’s musical arrangement recalls, of all things, some of Young Jeezy’s work on his The Inspiration album (a male backing vocalist chanting rather husky, Jeezy-esque “Aaaayyy”’s during the choruses doesn’t help matters – I almost expected the song to be mixed into Jeezy’s “Go Getta” at any second, and I had to double-check the album’s liner notes to make sure Jeezy’s usual producer Shawty Redd wasn’t behind this track.
Two ballads, “Aitakute” and “Passing By”, follow. The former is presented with electric piano and live strings, the latter with acoustic piano, string synthesizer, and a male vocalist named B. Howard joining her on the chorus. Both give Kumi yet another change to shine vocally; there’s a reason why one of her early compilations was devoted to some of her ballad performances, and these two songs are pleasant reminders.
“AT THE WEEKEND” is a club banger, albeit one driven by some strong and attentive songwriting (i.e identifiable verses, choruses, and bridge) rather than falling for the 21st Century American pop pitfall of only having one strain of backing music with the “chorus” being simply a different vocal melody/pattern being sung over the same exact chord changes and leitmotifs as the song’s verse.
“Melting” merges a disco-like chorus with more poppy verses and pre-choruses, and the combination works to a tee. Then it’s back to more techno/EDM territory for “Hey Baby!”, followed by “Choi Tashi Life” which is delivered over a faster-paced variation of a house music rhythm, made airier-sounding by warm string-synth chords.
Another pair of ballads, “Anata Dake Ga” and “Suki de, Suki de, Suki de” (both of which featured on a three-track, all-ballad EP last year), follow. Kuu-chin’s vocals are at their most tender on the former track, while she gets the album’s only presence of predominantly live instrumentation (acoustic and clean electric guitars, bass, drums, and string section) on the latter.
“Bambi” is the album’s weakest song, a ridiculous rip-off of Shania Twain’s dated crossover pop-country hits. The only thing saving the song is the fact that Koda Kumi is a stronger singer than Shania ever was. Also fortunately, the closing track “I Don’t Love You!??” – a classic Kuu-chin urban-pop track that would have fit perfectly on either of her first two single anthologies – comes in to remove the questionable taste of the preceding track out of listeners’s brains.
Dejavu is typical Koda Kumi and save for the penultimate track, the album should satisfy both longtime fans and newcomers. Four and a half out of five stars.
An article I wish I’d written…
While I get the next blog post ready (hopefully by the end of tonight), here’s a little bonus reading material: an article from Alternative Press on the current financial struggles of most bands. Think before you do that illegal download or choose not to buy merch at a show, people…
Thanks to Christopher Fuentes-Woods for the link.
BEST ALBUMS OF 2010
This list took forever – for which I’m sorry.
I knew some of the sure fire candidates that were going to be on here – but had to think back to some of the others that had come out this year that I enjoyed. My rather slack blogging activity probably didn’t help matters, and this year I’m determined to review albums within days of their issue (JapanFiles’s sudden licensing split with UFW blew my usual trend of reviewing Morning Musume’s newest album before I had gotten my physical copy, and I never found a leak in time.) My marriage plus the holidays on top of that… you get the picture. And I wasn’t going to pull a stunt like I did in 2007 and do the entries in small installments either, at first, but since I’d rather move forward, this methodology will have to do this time around.
One caveat: the new albums from Morning Musume (Fantasy Juuichi) and Ayumi Hamasaki (Love Songs) that were just released this month are not going to be considered for this list for one simple reason: They’re too new. They’ll be eligible for the 2011 list as I’m sure I’ll be playing them a lot over the next twelve months. And with regard to Mike Watt’s hyphenated-man album, even though it came out in Japan in October, I’m holding off on both counting it for this list and reviewing it until the domestic release happens this spring.
So, here goes nothing…
10. ERODE AND DISAPPEAR – Scythian Lamb (self-released 12” EP/CD package; visit www.erodeanddisappear.com) This duo is actually 2/3 of the Philadelphia trio Northern Liberties, singer/percussionist Justin Duerr and bassist Kevin Riley, and the band/project’s name comes from NL’s first full length album of the same name. With NL’s drummer (and Justin’s brother) Mark having to semi-curtail his participation in the group in the wake of becoming a father, Justin and Kevin chose to occupy the idle time by continuing to make music solidly in the NL tradition, this time with Justin taking over the drum kit as well as singing. A long time in coming since the project started, Scythian Lamb makes for a more than adequate continuation/tideover of the NL sound until the trio’s next release (set for later this year).
9. GIRLS GENERATION – Hoot (SM Entertainment) – The unstoppable Korean nonet seems best taken in EP-length doses (Their second album Oh! and its companion “deluxe reissue” RunDevilRun seem to be very slow growers as far as listener appeal, despite many stellar tracks), and in the 007-vibed title track the group has its strongest song since “Genie”. How soon will SM fully target the US with these ladies, now that they’re making inways into Japan?
8. DEVO – Something for Everyone (Warner Bros.) – A fine comeback from the influential quintet. Sadly, Warners dropped the ball after their initial support for the group’s comeback, failing to release the uncharacteristic ballad “No Place Like Home” as a follow-up single as well as failing to continue their remastered back catalog program (Oh! No It’s Devo and Shout still await the deluxe treatment afforded the band’s first four albums).
7. RICK ROSS – Teflon Don (Maybach Music/Def Jam) – Although materialistic rap in general may be fading (witness the relative sales and critical failure of Lloyd Banks’ “comeback” album after making such a strong impression saleswise with his first post-Interscope single “Beamer Benz and Bentley”), Ross has a strong, booming voice and an unlimited supply of clever punchlines going for him, and when he has stellar production behind him (see: first single “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)”, “Maybach Music III” with its live orchestral[!] backing), the songs work. When of his guest vocalists can hold their own next to the big man (see: Cee-Lo Brown on “Tears of Joy”, Jay-Z and John Legend on “Free Mason”, Drake on “Astin Martin Music”, Kanye West – who also produced – on “Live Fast Die Young”), it’s icing on the cake. When the production isn’t all there or the guest features are just lame (Gucci Mane’s terrible vocals bring down “MC Hammer” drastically), it weakens the album – but fortunately those moments are rare.
6. BUONO! – We Are Buono! (Pony Canyon) – Still unstoppable even after three albums. Does one even have to be reminded why? Now if only Miyabi, Airi and Momoko would actually pick up instruments…
5. SCANDAL – Temptation Box (Epic/Sony) – And speaking of unstoppable, the Osaka Four’s second full-length outing finds our heroines progressing nicely without losing the edge that brought them to the dance in the first place. (The companion cover versions EP R-Girls Rock!, issued a few months later, also helps ground the young ladies by reminding them of how they got to the dance in the first place.)
4. KODA KUMI – 8th AL Universe (Rhythm Zone/Avex) – Kuu-chin goes organic for the first half of the album, then goes back to her more urban/electronic side for the second half, and it all works.
3. AYUMI HAMASAKI – Rock n Roll Circus (Avex) – While not as entirely rock-influenced as the album title suggests, Ayu reached high, made up for the somewhat weak Next Level, and handed in one of her strongest albums in years (and kept going strong, what with the late-December release of yet another studio album, Love Songs).
2. NICKI MINAJ – Pink Friday (Young Money/Universal); KANYE WEST – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Rockafella/Def Jam) – 
Two artists, one a rookie and one a veteran, both with something to prove, and both succeeding both artistically and at the cash register. And both did it with high levels of creativity and without resorting to gangsteresque/materialistic bullshit. The fact that these albums outsold G-Unit flunkie Lloyd Banks’ would-be “comeback” album several times over – apiece – says, along with Nicki’s labelmate Drake and mentor Lil’ Wayne – more good things about the direction of hip-hop rap than had been said at least a year or so before.
1. MORNING MUSUME – 10 My Me (Zetima) – MoMusu at their most experimental, closing out their “emo” period with finality and looking forward to the future – and this would be just part one of their current story. The December 2010 release of the equally strong (and less experimental) Fantasy Juuichi and the addition of the 9th Generation members are merely the beginning of another chapter. They’ll keep going and going and going, and music will be better for it.
JapanFiles Drops The Ball
JapanFiles.com sent a newsletter notice this morning to their customers, stating that they were “suspend[ing] digital sales of some of the major label artists in our digital store” after September 30. The list of those major label artists the entire Up-Front Works roster (Morning Musume, Hangry and Angry, Berryz Koubou, ?C-ute, S/Mileage) as well as J-Rock artists like Giguramesh and LM.C.
Surely, Western fans of Japanese music have to be looking at JapanFiles like this right about now:
JapanFiles had been distributing much of the Up-Front Works catalog both digitally and as select physical CD releases since November of 2008, starting with the debut EP of ex-MoMusu members Hitomi Yoshizawa and Rika Ishikawa’s J-Rock/goth/electropop duo Hangry and Angry. Morning Musume got three releases – their past two studio albums Platinum 9 Disc and 10 MY ME and their summer 2009 single “Shouganai Yume Oibito” – the single release tying in their their overdue debut American performance promoted by Anime Expo in Los Angeles – out of the deal, and a few other select artists were getting physical CDs pressed in the US as well.
Unfortunately, JapanFiles did a lot of ball-dropping and other mucked plays in their otherwise sincere efforts to make J-music more easily available. Distribution – a big key in that availability – was the biggest factor. Not counting the label’s own site, JapanFiles’s physical CD releases were available only at Hot Topic here in the States. No other retail store in the country – unless they made a few special orders right through the website – carried the releases in store, and none of the other online retailers one would go through to buy a CD had any of JapanFiles’s licensed titles in stock.
Some of the same titles were also coming up as downloads on the US iTunes store, but JapanFiles in general was basically claiming that their own website was the exclusive, go-to place for getting their digital releases.
Which brings up the big kvetch: The artists and their fans deserve better service than that.
Devoted fans might know to go direct to someone like JapanFiles for their downloads, just like they know they could order just about any Japanese CD release from CDJapan, YesAsia, or the Japanese sites of Amazon and HMV – but when it comes to expanding that audience, JapanFiles didn’t even seem to bother. JapanFiles basically suffered from a strain of the same tunnel-vision-like affliction that proved fatal to Tofu Records, who had gone through the whole rigmarole of boasting easier availability of Japanese recordings – Puffy AmiYumi being the biggest act on their roster – but had idiotically focused distribution and product placement (no one outside of the anime department at Suncoast Video seemed to carry Tofu titles; Puffy’s only release through Tofu, Splurge, was nowhere to be found when this writer was at Virgin Mega’s Times Square store in 2006, although their previous Bar-None and Epic releases and the import edition of Splurge were.)
I’ve said this before in past columns, and this bears repeating. “Making Japanese releases more available in the US and elsewhere” is not supposed to mean “Let’s just press a small bunch of CDs and only sell them where the nerds will find them.” Here’s where it really should mean, using the Up-Front roster as examples:
Step One: Get Morning Musume and their stablemates signed to a REAL label – preferably a large independent label like Merge or Matador, or a major label devoted to making career artists, like Octone or Wind-Up. Labels like these will have the promotional clout and the distribution reach that acts like Morning Musume deserve, and they won’t just throw them against the wall like most major labels seem to do in the hope that they’ll stick. They’ll also have a bigger target audience than the JapanFiles/Tofu “let’s target the wota” approach. Someone that already listens to Morning Musume doesn’t listen to most Top 40 pop artists (save for acts like Lady Gaga) – more than likely, they’re listening to alternative and indie rock acts like… well, what a coincidence, the ones signed to labels like (surprise, motherfuckers!) Merge, Matador, Octone, and Wind-Up.
Remember how I said a few paragraphs ago that the artists and fans that JapanFiles seems to be kicking to the curb deserve better? That “better” means making the releases widely available. Widely available means record stores everywhere – chains like FYE, independent record stores (they’re still around) like my beloved Gallery of Sound, big-box stores like Best Buy and Target, online shops like Amazon and CD Universe. Widely available also means digital downloads available in all of the major outlets we know of – not just iTunes but AmazonMP3 (which seems to be seeing iTunes’s taillights at this point insofar as competitive pricing and selection), Rhapsody, eMusic, Napster, and so forth.
Just ask Dir en grey. After a good, yet short-lived, association with Warcon here in the States, they found a more receptive American label home with The End Records, a label devoted to the kind of hard rock DEG writes and records that is well aware that their general target audience already has a large slew of fans who were buying their imports (and the Warcon US rereleases) as well as fans who might have heard of them and wanted to know what the fuss was about – and they’ve been on a serious roll ever since.
Just ask Shonen Knife, who has the most devoted American label in their career – seemingly, EVER – with GooGoo Dolls bassist Robby Takac’s indie label Good Charamel Records, who have already released their three most recent albums here in the States and has regularly brought the band on tour here twice in the space of two years.
Music fans are a somewhat peculiar bunch. We tend to like options. A lot of options. And not just CD, mp3 or vinyl, but where we can get those.
Music fans also like to browse. A devoted Morning Musume fan already knows when they’re going to put records out, and where to get them. A more casual music fan that likes to roam the racks of their favorite store or stalk the appropriate areas of their iTunes Store app for something different to jam to isn’t going to know Morning Musume can be easily had (without breaking copyright laws) unless they have a friend or relative that is already a devoted fan.
Labels like JapanFiles and Tofu are always going to shoot themselves in the foot – or elsewhere – if they keep operating in such a manner.
Too Soon For My Tastes, But… Ganbatte, Erepyon!
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.
