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Party Queen was lyrically and conceptually one of the best albums she's ever done, which makes the poor execution & engineering so frustrating and such a letdown. You'd think that with such a personal work Ayu would be pickier about instrumentation and mixing and stuff. Every decision made on the album seemed to be very deliberate - making "NaNaNa" sound like a globe song, using the showtune style for Eyes,Smoke,Magic and the lounge jazz style for the next LOVE, the times she quieted the songs down so you could focus on what she was saying because she was trying to hammer in a point, the track order... So many decisions were clearly Ayu saying "I wanna do this, and this, and this, and here's why..." to the musicians involved.
And yet the mixing is TERRIBLE. The levels are just WRONG. "reminds me" is probably closest to getting it right and yet the background vocals are still too loud, which is its only major issue... Timmy's voice in Return Road should have sounded more distant and echoed like in "BRILLANTE" and honestly the song would have been just about perfect. The sound effects in "Eyes,Smoke,Magic" are too loud and too numerous and very off-putting. "Shake it <3" turned out kind of messy. "NaNaNa" sounds like a demo and the darkness of the concept of the song doesn't come across well enough. "Party queen" had too little emphasis on the right elements - it just sounds cute, it doesn't sound like she's in denial over how self-destructive she's being.
Overall there's just so much of the album that doesn't sound finished and that really distracts from how emotive, personal, and frank the album is being.
Party Queen needs a new mix nearly the whole way through it, but otherwise it's an artistic triumph in my eyes.
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