What are your current favourites?

[sxesven]

Just curious what everyone is enjoying most at the moment.

I had long settled on my favourite albums and my listening was pretty much restricted to these for a long time - essentially, LOVEppears, Duty, I am..., Rainbow, Memorial Address and Secret. I had the odd favourite from elsewhere (Inspire off the otherwise underwhelming My Story, for example) but my interest had sort of tapered off with the streak of Guilty - Next Level etc, which had become progressively less interesting for me.

I recently found myself listening to WINTER BALLAD SELECTION on a whim and it spurred my interest to start exploring a bit what I had left unexplored. Funnily enough, the track that really reeled me in off this compilation was You were..., a track I must have heard while playing Next Level orginally but which clearly failed to leave an impression amidst the relatively mediocre material.

It got me to listen to and reconsider some albums I had not paid too much attention to initially. Strikingly, (miss)understood, which I have given plenty of abuse for its supposed mediocrity in the past (I'm sure you can find some of my posts denouncing it in my post history), has become a huge favourite that I've not been able to stop playing. While it certainly has its flaws, it also has some songs that have become some of my absolute Ayu favs now. I am absolutely in love with is this LOVE?, Criminal, fairyland and rainy day, but most other tracks are also at least excellent (with perhaps the exception of the plodding Beautiful Day).

I've also begun to revisit other material I had not revisited forever and have been finding little gems everywhere, not new typically for me but certainly entirely reappreciated. All tracks mentioned explicitly above, but I keep finding more and more here and there, left and right, as I'm (re)advancing through Ayu's discography (whenever I can lay off the (miss)understood, haha).

The recent singles I have also enjoyed (though not (yet?) to the extent of what I'd consider 'classic era' material, c. 2000-2009). Albums I am on the fence with, I gave Colours a spin and it has some material of interest though it also is a far cry from 'classic era'.

Oh, and yeah, how amazing is Ayu at those big ballads, huh? Damn, she should do more of them.