Quote:
Originally Posted by js_surrealism
^ The whole LS album sounded cheap. All of TK's compositions (apart from the title track) sounded like cheap globe rejects.
And uh, hate to break it to you bud, but every single frigging one of Ayu's songs is about Love so that's not really saying anything.
Aural cohesiveness is kind of irrelevant when it comes to Ayu. Regardless of what record she puts out, there will be an upbeat track, a ballad, a rockish track, a more cutesy one. It's a formula that's worked for her since My Story (seriously).
No doubt some records have more of a 'concept' than others (Party Queen, Colours, I'd say RAINBOW as well) but for the most part, I find it more productive to evaluate her albums in terms of "did I enjoy listening to the whole thing or not"
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Her albums were not loaded down with love shit before Ls. RnRC, for example, had a shit ton of self-reflective (Microphone, count down, Last Links, RED LINE, Don't look back) party, fashion-forward songs (Lady Dynamite, Sexy little things, Sunrise). 8 of the 15 tracks had nothing to do with intimate relationships. Everything from RnRC back to A Song for XX is a variety of stuff, from isolation to anxiety to freedom to music to personal stuff. Ls, however, was her first album all about relationships with another person or her dog or her fans.
Even Colours is drenched with love crap. From Ftl to Wifl to Pray, Angel, Mgr, N&4E. Over half of that record is about love.
I think the album formula has been pretty solid with her since Duty. Duty had upbeats like (vogue and AUDIENCE), ballads (SEASONS and SCAR), rock (End of the World), and a cutesy track (girlish).
And I'd love to agree with you on the "did I enjoy listening to it or not" if it wasn't honestly 100% subjective and affected by everything from mood to life circumstances to whether you're in need of food, medication, or something else. There are some good albums out there I don't enjoy listening to. There are also some bad albums I actually enjoy.
I do not like Namie Amuro's FEEL or Uncontrolled, but both were very well received by fans. I also absolutely love Secret though I don't know another Ayu fan who thinks it was a good record. So, I tend to lean on more concrete, popular opinion/review/sales-based information rather than say "Oh, I didn't enjoy this album so it's bad." But I will let numbers speak for themselves. Numbers usually speak for a lot. And a consistent 40% drop in sales from album to album, from PQ to La to Colours, tells me fans didn't want another record like Ls, and definitely didn't want THREE more consecutively.
It's also interesting to look at her drops over the years.
04-06 From MS to (m): ~30% drop.
06 to S: ~34% drop.
08 to G: ~15% drop.
09 to NL: ~33% drop.
10 to RnRC: ~16% drop.
10 to Ls: ~15% drop.
12 to PQ: ~47% drop.
13 to La: ~40% drop.
14 to C: ~40% drop.
Like, we are all well aware of how she kind of peaked at A BEST and very slowly descended from there, but she had a sudden huge drop with singles starting at forgiveness in 03 and with albums at Memorial Address / MY STORY in 03-04.
It's even more crazy to think she tallied 25 consecutive #1 singles after her peak, in the middle of these huge drops in sales, in the middle of the announcement about her hearing, in the middle of her pulling back on being a "product" for avex.
Anyway, I don't think the numbers for A ONE will be amazing, but I hope for a reasonable drop this time at least. Like, I'm shooting for a 20-30% drop at max, that 35,000-40,000 range in sales. If she somehow manages to sell closer to Colours, I'll be shocked. I think FW will be somewhere around 25-30k. But still. I seriously want to see Koda's numbers. But I am going to have my own little mini heart attack if Koda's first week is shockingly abysmal... like, imagine how crazy it would feel to see Koda do less than 20k in the first week?? It would just feel weird.
Yeah. Numbers. NUMBAHS. I love 'em. But I still support Ayu and Koda anywho. I just want A ONE to feel more complete than any of these records over the last few years. I get PQ having its place, and La was good because I beat it into my own head that it could be a good record (though two years later it really, honestly, unfortunately just
is not). And I know everyone hated XOXO, and I danced my butt off to it because it was really different from anything Ayu has done, but Colours was really just a sloppy album... I mean, very sloppy. Like they did all the decision-making after Ayu had her wisdom teeth pulled and before the drugs wore off. But I'd like see A ONE be a decent record for Ayu's sake... because one day she's going to have to look back at her career from 2010-2015, and
you know she's going to notice how bad the fonts on her covers are, and she's going to wonder where the fuck her arm disappeared to on the cover of PQ, or why she was rubbing a shoe on her face in another cover of PQ, or how many xanax bars she was on to be too damn lazy to come up with a name other than LOVE again for an album that included all the tracks from two mini-albums titled LOVE and again, one of which wasn't even technically a mini-album. That's going to hurt. So I hope A ONE is where Ayu said, "You know, I'm drawing the line at everything before here." And then we can say that CDL 14-15 was her last trashy thing from this era.