Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrenekoi
I see Love Songs - Party Queen - LOVE again as a trilogy, as the 3 of them deal with Ayu's feeling towards her own views on romantic love and love life, something she had not explored as much before, and in that sense, IMO La is the conclusion she got out of what she started reflecting about during LS.
But I also think La is interesting as a package. Isolated, most of the songs are far from her most interesting.
In a way, La is also the album were Ayu's aesthetic gets less dream-like and more realistic. Girl became a cynic  |
That's a very interesting take on it. Perhaps that makes sense looking at the lyrics, I don't know, but Love Songs, Party Queen and Love again are very different musically within the context of her discography. Love Songs also is a very particular album musically because it has a cohesive concept much more so than most of the albums she released since MY STORY. Almost all the songs are written by the same person and the arrangement of almost all the tracks is based on a similar take "what if we mixed tetsyua's electronic music and added classical instruments and acoustic elements". It's also a departure from the formula with a summer song and winter ballad etc.
The promotion and commerical performance of Love Songs is more similar to the albums before it than PQ and later albums. LS had singles leading up to it and performed relatively well. Ayu always had a drop in sales from one album to the next, but the drop from RnRC to LS is much lower than from LS to PQ and lower than many of her other drops in terms of %. Also Five was a relatively big success for her. Something really changed with PQ.
I would probably agree that her "golden time" could be set from 2000 to 2006, although I think you could also say it's from 2000 - 2004 (ending with MY STORY) or from 2000 until the release of FIVE.