Quote:
Originally Posted by orbitalaspect
My only gripe with Ayu that I don't have with Utada is that Utada sounds like she's trying to do something memorable. With A ONE, Colours, LOVE again, and Party Queen, Ayu sounds like she's just written more songs, nothing particularly special or significant. I don't loathe any of those albums, but I hear an artist that's going through the motions rather than investing her passion into the record. Maybe that's just me. But when I listen to Secret or (miss)understood, I hear an artist who wanted those albums in her discography. When I listen to Colours, I hear an artist that just wanted to get that year's album done and out.
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(My final ayu comment over here, I swear xD I only mentioned her first to point out the trend Hikki was following
)
Impressions are a funny, I don't like how Secret was executed at all... To me it sounds like a collection of seasonal singles without any real though put behind on how they would work together... Actually, IMO, she felt exausted and dried out during Secret and Guilty, forced an attempt of something new on Next Level by following the trends of the moment, did try some new sounds on RnRC with variable level of success and was able to deliver a work that had a really strong artistic merit on both Love songs and Party Queen, being Love songs as an artistic yet poppish record filled with potential hits and Party Queen a far more artistic than poppish experience where every piece don't work that much alone but have far more depth than the ordinary pop record when every thing is tied together. Love Again works more as a concept than as a record IMO, and it felt like she going back to a safer place after going too far from the pop aesthetic during Party Queen... It seens like it would have worked if it wasn't for the Maro scandal. Colours and A One still plays it safe, the first one by sticking to the trends, even if she never went into that trend before, and A One by basically playing it safe on every level. Now, I found A One to be really bland once it was released, but I notice I go back to it more than I did to Colours or Love Again... It has really beautiful melodies and it's VERY easy to listen.
And it's really easier to notice when Hikki goes to a different direction because she doesn't release a new album every year... Unlike Ayu, who will have some experiemental stuff side by side with stuff that sound like whatever she did just last year (something that may mean 2 albums ago
), Hikki has more time to mature herself as a musician between releases. Even so, she failed to deliver anything remotely coherent from an aesthetic point of view until Heart Station, her albums before that being basically collections of AMAZING songs that had pretty much nothing to do with each other... She also never had a main concept that unified any of her whole albums, all of them just feeling like they were named after the song she liked the most on it.
This time it seens like the album will be a package as a whole, not only by sounding as a unity like Heart Station, but being centered around an aesthetic and a theme... And this is something completely new for her as an artist, so I'm excited!
Quote:
Originally Posted by bluegie
Ah she was getting less enthusiastic on stages as time moved on. I remember when she sang BLUE in Wild Life, she was practically walking around the stage, looking down the floor while singing that song (and she couldn't hit those high notes). That was the moment that made me think, "was she bored?". She wasn't really like that when she did Hikaru no 5.
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Yeap... I believe I only watched Wild Life entirely once! Even if she never really looked confortable, she at least seemed to be having fun during Budokan and United, and this made the whole shows far better to watch. And I LOVE Hikki live when she is on a good day, so this is really sad to me.