melody. - Finding my Road, and Love Story

Late to the bandwagon as usual. I don't follow melody (I'm dropping the period after her name for posting) much, but I think she can be a fine singer ever since hearing Miss You. She established herself as more than capable of pulling off a casual, fast-talking style of performance.



Since then, I've only been interested in Believe Me, a more contemporary, laid-back work. As a general rule, her songs are upbeat but don't stand out. Indeed, Believe Me is only stand-out in the sense that it's not like her other songs. It's not a song I would usually seek out, as I could just switch on the radio and listen to something similar from Nelly Furtado's earlier stylistic period.

Finding my Road is not any faster than her other upbeat songs, nor is it necessarily carrying a better melody, no pun intended. What it has going for it is its ambient club feel, which automatically screams cosmopolitan to me. Still, the deal sealer is the video itself.

Comparing her moves to Tamaki Nami is a bit of a stretch, because when Tamaki Nami wants to dance, she can dance. However, melody doesn't appear to be a slouch in her own dance PV's. In Finding my Road, though, she's absolutely smoking in her silver outfit with what looks like CG'ed glow lights (as opposed to glowsticks) flying around.

If it wasn't evident by now, I'm not so much a fan of the music behind the video so much as the video itself.

Her newest single, Love Story, is currently charting on Oricon. It's a sparkly ballad that she executes well on, although she could have gone for a fuller voice in the chorus, where it counts. She's a bit too casual early on, choosing to go along with the music rather than drive it forward. Still, she finishes strong at the song's climax to the end.

More than her voice, the music sounds like it's been done before. All aspirations to epic-ness are for naught when you realize that so many others have done the same thing. She needs a better composer, someone who can give her a song approaching Believe for dance, or Final Distance for ballads. She needs to stop being safe and take some risks.