Ayu's music: when did it start to go downhill for you?

[channy]

I consider the releases from 1998 to 2008 of Ayu's musical career as the most important, iconic and original ones. GUILTY is like the death and reBiRTH of Ayu as a singer to me. As much as I appreciate the album almost entirely, it happened to become the biggest and most noticeable turning point in terms of everything she's done before.

GUILTY had a highly unforeseen, rough and un-ayuish sound signature and certainly proved Avex to be open and risky enough to go paths that I personally would describe as mostly not suitable for "regular" pop consumers. An absolute novelty, alienating at first but, to me, very convincing in terms of quality and longevity, eventually.

However, that very unique ayu-feel lived and ended with GUILTY; these days I sometimes wonder if it might have been also me getting older at that time. Well, Ayu never got back to the pre-GUILTY brilliance but as other users mentioned before, every album that would follow up had at least a couple of new evergreens

Lowest point to this day? A ONE! It's the only album I can hardly listen to in full and at most did so maybe twice. Terrible, screechy, distorted loudness all over the place. "Anything for You" and "Walk" are always on my MP3-Player, though. Two gems buried beneath a layer of musical cruelity.

Oh, and to this day I have not been able to get over the changes in her voice. Only the pre-GUILTY ayu-"voices" (yea, they've always differed from each other with every new album coming out back then) make me feel completely comfortable and happy with her music