| Delirium-Zer0 |
2nd December 2014 06:58 PM |
Honestly if I were ayu I wouldn't touch "Movin' on without you" so soon after Ayaka kicked so much ass at it. Ayaka's cover is REALLY killer, one of the best tracks on her cover album.
Now, I MOSTLY understand the choice - I wanted Ayu to pick a song that she related to, that she'd actually FEEL when she sang. One look at the lyrics to this track in the context of Ayu's discography, and this is clearly a song that she relates to. The princess/glass slipper metaphor is one she's used before. The topic of getting over being neglected/rejected/friendzoned is a topic Ayu has written about. She can sing the song from a personal point of view rather than singing it as a Hikki cover. So those are pluses.
As far as whether the song's SOUND suits Ayu, I find that has little bearing on the way a cover version ever sounds, at least most of the time. You have no idea what an artist is gonna do with it. On this album already, I've heard the few clips available, and the tracks made available bear LITTLE resemblance to the original songs - Yosui Inoue's beach/island pop/rock version of "Sakura Drops" is a very creative take on the song, and Shiina Ringo's jazzy version of "Letters" sounds like it was always her song to begin with. Sometimes the artist doing a cover hears a quality in the song that we never noticed before - a mournful tone, a bit of melody that was amazing but not emphasized enough, an optimistic mood hidden in the depths of a sad ballad. Things like that. A good cover version can really bring those qualities out, you know? Those covers make you hear the original song differently when you listen again later.
Ayu's covers, though... for awhile now they've just been her taking a song & giving it the "ayu sound" when Ayu herself seems to have a somewhat feeble grasp lately on what exactly "ayu sound" means. Back in the day, before Ayu's discography was quite so sprawling, pinpointing "make it sound like Ayu" was probably much easier - She & her producers really did something creative & cool with "Someday My Prince Will Come." Her live version of "haru yo, koi" is absolutely beautiful and IMHO more emotionally effective than Yuming's original. But her covers lately have felt very flat & dated. Rather than bringing older songs into the present, it's more like she tried to awkwardly escort them into the present only for them to fall down spectacularly. Try as she might to drag those songs kicking & screaming into the "ayu sound," they're unsure of which direction to go and the result is a track that makes as much of a contribution to the music world as a fanmade MIDI file with her vocals on top of it.
The SONG is not the problem here - Ayaka's cover of "Movin' on without you" does show that the song can sound fresh while still being the same exact song in every way that matters, I don't see Ayu being able to accomplish that without just sounding really, really dorky.
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