Quote:
Originally Posted by SunshineSlayer
Exactly. Most of Ayu's early career and what made her famous were not safe sounding, pedestrian, mid-tempo ballads. Duty, I Am, Rainbow, Loveappears....all of those albums are actually quite diverse. There was nothing safe about those albums IMO. So, I don't get how songs like Gift, Anything for You etc etc are a return to her roots.
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I will disagree with you over here....
Love~Destiny, To Be, Seasons, Far Way, Dearest, Voyage, No Way to Say, Hanabi, Moments, Carols, Heaven, Together When, Days
You Were
Take off Ayu's vocal delivery (that even if flawed, always had a very well done emotional work on them) and what you have on most of those tracks is some random anime ending song, some minnor Disney movie theme or something anyone could release.
Most of the time, her biggest hits were very safe, radiophonic, mainstream and overproduced. And and may be wrong here because I don't live in Japan, but (tracks like M, evolution or Surreal aside) those are the songs they play when she appears on TV, or some up-beat jpop by the numbers thing she released as a summer single, not the ones where she actually took some risk.
That being said, I agree that the album doesn't sound like "Classic Ayu" to me... I don't even find it all that similar with Love again or Love songs, because even if all of them are ballad heavy, they all differ on the aesthetic influences those ballads have. Love songs has a lot of orchestral elements going through them, Love again take a lot from the 90's jpop ballads, while A ONE is pretty much Ayu doing what people are doing with their ballads right now... It's a very... up to date album on this sense.