[maikaru]

Honestly I feel like what I'm about to say is just going to fall on deaf ears and will be dismissed, but eff it, I'm going to say it anyways.

I am not one bit surprised by this ranking because honestly this is her most lazy release yet. There was not ONE promotional activity for this album. Usually she'd have Yahoo Stream, or some other stuff, but this time there was absolutely zero coverage for this album. Maybe there was one 15 second news segment about her PV, but on the internet it just turned into a bash fest of her voice and how she looks.

For those of you who don't live in Japan, please don't take this the wrong way, but you don't actually know what's going on in Japan unless you see it for yourself. Ayu is 100% over, there is no one on the streets that will admit to liking her, and most of the time it is actually because they don't like her. Out of a nation of more than 100,000,000 people, filling a 17,000 seat arena is absolutely nothing to a pop star that once commanded Tokyo Dome. She used to be the one you skipped school for, you stayed up for, and waited at TV stations for her arrival. Now, very few people actually care because it looks like she doesn't care.

I am going to be 100% blunt and say her voice in this album absolutely sucks. It is nasally, not powerful at all, jacked up with auto-tune and reverb, and half the time she is yelling. Like her voice in Terminal is the hardest thing for me to listen to. Everyone is like "Her voice is so much deeper than before, that's why," But I challenge you to listen to Feel the Love or Merry-go-Round and then skip to a song to Rainbow, like close to you, and you can hear that her voice isn't deeper - she just sucks using her voice now.

I feel so absolutely frustrated because these songs could have been so much better, but they all sound like she decided super last minute that she wanted to make an album, did not prepare her voice for it, and just was like "HIDE IT WITH EVERY PLUG IN EVER!!!!" She is struggling in everything, and I dunno. The first time I heard the album in full, I'm just like "AKJHAKDJHSKJHASKJDAHSDSKJKHDSA" and I wanted to cry because this isn't the Ayu that I grew up listening to. I feel ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from this album.

I don't even know where this is going, but I'm so incredibly sad. It doesn't really matter that she is putting in effort for real, or whatever, the fact is that to most people she looks like she's fallen off the rails, she's a drunk, and she doesn't really care about music anymore, only marrying foreigners and living in LA. And it really sucks because there are long time fans who are now believing that she actually has turned into that person, and now for me, with Colours, I don't even know anymore. I'm so so so so so disappointed.