@Surreal17
rollin' is my favorite song from the album, and I really loved your take on it! So, the technology savy youth talk (or sing) like robots? Troll Ayu <3
@waterballoon
Never had noticed that!
So, about NEXT LEVEL... I always found it odd that such an up-beat album had TVs as the main visual theme (I mean, even the color pallet for the album is based on the
color bars test, mainly because if I learned something from Ayu, is that everytime she uses TVs as a visual theme,
shit gets dark,
or weird, or both.
Not only she is posing with what may be the most recurrent symbol she links with bad stuff, those TVs are wrecked, they all have messed up colors and granuled images... Those messed-up-TV effects are repeated during the whole booklet, whose colors are getting darker until it's end with only static TVs. NEXT LEVEL was released right after GUILTY, a very dark album released during a very complicated time (end of relationship, death of friend, deafness, complicated career moment, harder challenges), and when we take a look at the NEXT LEVEL tracklist, even the songs are rather dark, aren't they? I mean... Sparkle, rollin', identity and Love'n'Hate are pretty dark songs sound-wise IMO, even if Rule is not as dark, it's far more agressive than what her releases tended to be at the time (the same applies to Sparkle) and GREEN and Days and Curtain call are all very bittersweet. So, even if it's her electropop colourful album, we end up with 2 happy songs... What is less than what we have in Secret, (miss)understood, MY STORY, RAINBOW, Love songs and Rock'n'Roll Circus, haha! I also find it interesting that Curtain call lyrics are basically she thanking her fandom for giving her strenght.
Noidea commented once she was posing with wrecked TVs like she was one of them, another wrecked entertaiment media... I though his take on it was pretty interesting.