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.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
melody. - Finding my Road, and Love Story
Friday, June 8, 2007
Two-Mix eclipsed
(Originally 20 January 2007)
I've been trying to free up drive space to feed the anime monster. On the hit list is my archive of music that I've never listened to. I've already ditched Echoes by The Rapture. Up next is 150 BPM by TWO-MIX, which is pretty surprising to me as well.
A long time ago, probably late elementary school or early days in high school, I was in the basement, flipping through channels. I was bored out of my mind at the time, as I typically am now with the exception that I didn't have high-speed internet, a computer capable of running TFC or any other 3D FPS at playable framerates (let alone running any FPS later than maybe Quake at all), and didn't know anything about anime (as opposed to knowing a miniscule amount about my preferences now).
At the time, on YTV they were in between shows, and the announcer (probably one of the PJ's) was saying that up next was a pilot episode for a new series they were going to try out. I thought, that was kind of cool, sort of like history being made. Looking back, it was.
At any rate, I stuck around to see what would transpire, and the OP sequence hooked me from the opening bars. It was good, whatever it was. Heck, it was great, and it was in Japanese, and the animation had fighting robots. The series was Gundam Wing, and the OP was Just Communication from TWO-MIX.
I think it was the first time I had ever heard a Japanese song. I may have seen Escaflowne being butchered by Fox either before or after Gundam Wing — I can't really remember the air dates for either series — but Fox's Escaflowne definitely did not keep the original OP track.
It might have also been the first time I had ever heard electronic, or very nearly after I had my first taste of electronic, which was in a car ride in which Enigma and Robert Miles were played. Just Communication just whipped along. It was faster than almost anything on the radio, faster than the dream music of Robert Miles, and exponentially faster than Enigma on crack. It had a strong low range drive, decent melody (for the time), and thus, TWO-MIX was godly. Just Communication followed with Rhythm Emotion, White Reflection, all Gundam Wing related tracks, all received via the awesomeness of a 33.6 kbps modem on a good day, 28.8 kbps on any other.
150 BPM is an old TWO-MIX album, featuring other old favourites such as Rhythm Generation, Just Meeting on the Planet, and Love Revolution. Unfortunately these are also the stand-out tracks among a host of lesser imitations. I might be inclined to keep these, and toss the rest.
Among the contenders for TWO-MIX's place in my archive are KOTOKO and to a lesser extent, Tamaki Nami. KOTOKO doesn't need any further elaboration, but Tamaki Nami's Believe made more of an impression on me than Just Communication, if that's even possible. Since then, I feel that she's been unable to reach that bar, although she's come close in Heroine, Daitani Ikimashou, Destiny, and Final Memory.
In an earlier incarnation of this article I essentially wrote TWO-MIX off. If they'd actually release more stuff, I'd certainly reconsider. I'm trying to get a hold of Delta Two -Universe- to ascertain whether they've updated their style.
