Quote:
Originally Posted by Zeke.
This album really isn't all that people. The following songs from her last album are better than ALL the songs on this new piece of material:
LOVE FANTASTIC
LUCKY*STAR
CHUxCHU
Mawari Mawaru Mawareba Mawaro
Lai Lai
9
Lai Lai is everything.
Almost all the tracks on the new album sound as if their melodies are interchangeable. And the melodies for most of the choruses are way too repetitive. It's like the same notes repeated - no progression. The melody is like a bar long. Some of the songs are enough to drive you mad.
Dislike summer lovely days a lot, but seriously loathe affair. That song is RANCID. I'm like "what the FUCK is going on here? What is she trying to accomplish with this horrid beast?" It's so utterly disorganized. Sounds like it would be right up Namie's alley though. Just a bunch of crap noise without a proper chord progression to really highlight any hint of a melody.
My favs were:
busy lady
That's it. I gave it 4 stars.
reach for the moon I gave 3. Time Machine, laugh, I'm lonely, and shooting star I gave 2. The rest I gave none cause I'll probably never listen to again.
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See, this is what I was saying! lol
I guess I've just outgrown Ai because I love this kind of music but think these songs stink. The compositions are so incredibly barren and feel amateur, and then the production (mostly the vocal mixing... and just her timbre in general, which I find grating now) ruin the pieces of songs that I think have potential. I don't think she's ever been a great songwriter, but she could do bubblegum pop just fine and did well with her earlier ballads when she was actually playing around and not just doing generic piano stuff.
I don't think she's cut out for this more "mature" café-style songwriting she's been trying to do the past few albums. Because she's really not a strong composer, she tends to fall back on really repetitive and overly simplistic melodies that never build to anything. Everything falls flat when she's not hiding behind being cute or quirky or crazy honestly.
IMO, these songs just really highlight Ai's faults as a songwriter. They're not musically strong but try to hide that behind layers and layers of synths and vocal effects, so they sort of sound fine at a glance but beyond that there's no compositional substance to any of them. That sounds really pretentious, but idk how else to word it lmao.
affair had parts that I thought had potential on first listen, but that chorus (or whatever that is she starts the song on) is the most melodically drab thing I've heard in a long time. X_X It evokes nothing and certainly doesn't belong in the song stylistically. The whole song feels like she sat down and forced herself to write something honestly. Actually, the album as a whole kind of feels like that.
I'd probably like I'm lonely from a different vocalist, and maybe laugh. I shouldn't get into the vocals though, since I haven't really been a fan of her voice since LOVE COOK. x_x
I don't think it's a bad album for Ai's standards at all though really. I just think I've outgrown this really bare-bones, simplistic style of songwriting. If this were 2005, I'd probably be all over this shit too lol