Your Love Songs reviews!!!

[DA1SUK1DAY01691]

I must agree with those who think the album flows well, because it REALLY does.

Cohesively as an album, this is one of her best studio albums in her career; the sound shifts from one track to another, each being individually great yet still part of a whole. That's a hard line to walk—shifting sounds too drastically to make for a varied album or not shifting enough to make a bland album—but she pulls off being able to create different songs which all work well together.

Overall, my favorite stand out album tracks are "Love Song," "Sending mail," and "November." Her single tracks were all very strong; added with these album tracks and a few really well-placed instrumentals and you have arguably the easiest flowing album. (For the record, I felt GIRL NEXT DOOR's debut album was great with the non-stop feel, but "Love Songs" totally dusts its butt.)

"Like a doll" feels like she dropped the ball there for a little while, since this is my weakest track on the album (even more than "Sweet Season," if you're wondering), but even the weakest song on the album offers something we haven't really seen before. I don't know what, but something separates this album from the rest of the lineup.

In response to the "lack of album ballads," we didn't need any to begin with. I think we've had enough single ballads (MOON, crossroad, SEVEN DAYS WAR, Virgin Road, and Sweet Season) to make up for any album ballads we may have encountered. I think it was smart of her not to include any ballad-ish album tracks because those would have made the album bland.

And to be quite honest, until I read Komuro Tetsuya composed most of this album, he was the furthest thing from my mind; kudos to him because he has this distinct sound one can't really take their ears off from even if they wanted to, and he was able to break out of that for the most part. (What I mean is most of his compositions could be seen as just revamps of his older material or one could very well replace vocals with other TK-related artists and would basically sound the same. I think Ayu's work here is actually unique without too much TK-flair.)

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Wow, following lumieregrl makes me feel not too bright. Haha. I didn't do what she did, but rather went off of sound alone. Maybe when I read the full translations of these songs rather than pull from the song directly as much as I can, the review will become better. Hahaha.