KOTOKO - Kirei na Senritsu single (B-Side)

Initially, my KnS and rush notes were going into the same entry, as would be expected, but it was as if the two songs couldn't be more different. Plus, I like rush much more.

I really enjoy listening to rush. We've seen KOTOKO rock out pretty hard before, with Hane and Uzu-Maki coming to mind as having some stand-out rock songs, but it seemed back then that whenever KOTOKO rocked out, it was almost a given that it was by order of the forces of darkness.

Not so with rush, and maybe the song title is a point in irony, because the music is contemporary easy listening. Were it not for KOTOKO's brand appeal (and the not-so-significant fact that it happens to appear beside the title track), I'd have never actively come across something like this, but I like it all the same.

There is motion, but it's laid back. There is dynamic contrast, with KOTOKO being almost drowned out by the backgrounds in the verse passages (that old mixer/balance problem?), but there is no drama. Like KnS, rush is uplifting, but does it from the ground up, not being all flighty. It is rustic with its sparse, strummed guitar accompaniment in the verse, and modern with strings in the chorus and elsewhere.

The first few times through the Winamp loop, I was enamoured by the outro. It was assertive, it had attitude. My only wish is that KOTOKO rock out more at the end. In the chorus she has wavering lines which she delivers with plodding detachedness, like a march. She should have cranked up that level of detachedness, giving her last lines a truly head-tossing (or biting) edge.

Instead of witnessing a marshaling of the hosts of despair, I see sun-kissed fields rolling by from the car windshield, or the train window. I could be walking the concrete jungle, or sitting in some terminal waiting for my flight. rush combines jet-setting anticipation with lazy summer days.