Came for Kanno, Stayed for Natsumi Kiyoura
I have this bad habit of gambling on debut albums. Thankfully it happens only once every year or three. It’s no big deal; only $40 tops down the drain tops… Maybe that is why I kept on doing it.
This time, it is Natsumi Kiyoura’s first solo album, called 19 Colors. CDJapan actually wrote it up better than I could have. To save you the trouble, I’ll just word drop a bit:
- A song produced w/ Yoko Kanno
- Spice and Wolf Season 1 OP
- Sasameki Koto OP/ED
- Keroro ED14
- Some song from Ristorante Paradiso (full version)
- Sketchbook OP new version
And other stuff.
If you read that CDJ promo piece, you might wonder why people compare Kiyoura with Maaya Sakamoto. Besides the Kanno connection, I guess, that is because both of them are child talents that grew up into this weird acting/music/seiyuu niche after they aged out the children’s talent bracket. Maaya is roughly 10 years senior of Natsumi IIRC.
As for the Yoko Kanno connection, the Kanno song, “Ano ne demo ne,” is not much to write home about. It reminds me of Maaya’s pop-ish tracks from, I dunno, Dive. It is a little jarring considering the rest of Kiyoura’s album is laid-back, jazzy, and overall nowhere nearly as intense as Maaya’s sound. I didn’t like it much, and you know I whore out for Kanno (who’s actually on the keyboard for it) any day.
On the other hand, unlike Maaya’s very early work, Kiyoura’s songs actually are cohesive, and the overall product is spot on if you enjoy crap like, well, Ristorante Paradiso. It’s like, sometimes these seiyuu-pop-idol types need a while to find a sound that works with their voice, but Kiyoura has already got it. Or is closing in on it, at any rate.
In short, just need more songs like Tabi no Touchuu yeah? Yeah. I’m not going to break the tracks down one by one; not my style anyways. I think it’s a good thing rather than a bad thing when the album goes down smooth without dips, but also without many outstanding marks. The more rock-like tracks on the album sound like “winded down idol group music” for lack of a better term, but even so Kiyoura adds a notable touch to the sound. It just isn’t so haunting or so memorable as her most outstanding track.
I was oddly surprised by Nijiiro Pocket however. The full cut is so much better…
Random factoid time.
- I think there really are a total of 19 colors on the album if you add something to something.
- The studio live that’s on the DVD were televised at one point? Not sure how they got on Youtube in the first place. Nice to have on DVD nonetheless. There are 4 performances, total, acoustic arrangements, I had a good time playing it in the background.
- The front cover of the insert booklet, which you see as the album cover, writes the album name “19 Colors” in (American) English. The rest of the album, at least everywhere I looked, writes it in kanji (十九色). I take this to mean that the proper way to refer to the name of this album is by its translated term in whichever language you choose. At the same time, the first track, also the title track, has the same name, and it is labeled itself by kanji only. For that I used the romanized term. Seems inconsistent but oh well.
Track list–
- Jyukuiro
- Tabi no Tochu
- Ano ne Demo ne
- Giniro no Kanashimi
- Neverland
- Nijiiro Pocket
- Kanashii Hodo Aoku <album version>
- Pallet
- Kaze Sagashi <full-colored samba mix>
- Bokura no Aikotoba
- Nanairo
- Midnight Love Call
PS. Limited Edition and Regular Edition at CDJ (affiliate links).
Year In Review: N-Squared List
Just like last year, I guess some things have not changed. This could be a reference.
Year in Review: She’s Going the Distance, a Great Feat of Strength
Going to mention a list of 12 lists of 12 items each. So a nested list. All 144 items. Annotated for the most part. Don’t ask me why I use these pronouns the way I do…
Horo Is Not Laputa
Yes, Horo really does mean something bad in Finnish. The term is a slang for slut, really, and is used as slang in insult.
At least so says the Finnish people I saw online.
It makes you wonder what other terms are out there which makes jibberish sense in one language but totally BAD in another. Maybe CLAMP and Ichiro Sakaki had the right idea and named their characters after known variables with corporate marketing that has done their homework…sometimes. And I say sometimes, hopefully as you know, with the allusion to the Chevy Nova. It does make a nice name for a fiery villain I guess.
Google, by the way, suggested an alternative. If you read about this unknown Balkan band they come up with an alternative etymology.
Fur in the Ointment
I too thought Wolf Spice (Old Spice’s traditional brand name?), better known as Spice and Wolf, an anime adopted from another light novel series, was spot on.
The right vibe is there at least in the first episode. Someone told me that it makes him think Tony Taka. Must be all that nudity. But I sort of see where he’s coming from. There’s a sense of realism in the way how character art is chiseled out of ink that is most relevant in good anime porn which, coincidentally, was also part of what made Scrapped Princess good (as in, style, feel and suspension of belief rather than “woah can you believe her boobs?”). Honestly nether show really did a great job about character design at this point, when compared to their peer. Classics like Lodoss War OAV still put the typical TV sword & sorcery production to shame when it comes to design and stills. It’s not really a minus for Spice and Wolf, at any rate, but a very good thing.
Anyways, I suppose it’s much more palatable to put human-animal lead characters in a verbal narrative than a visual one, simply because those who reads it exercise their free will to visualize what they read …or not. Put it bluntly, the freedom to selectively ignore things is one of the growing strengths of the traditional print media. I can forget that Horo is practically a werewolf in appearance if I’m just reading a book about Horo, unless the author wants to mention that she has has a tail and wolf ears hanging out to dry every time the imaginary camera in my head (as directed by the book) points her way. In a TV show or movie, I don’t control the camera so I don’t control what I see. And even if I give the show the benefit of the doubt that they want to drive this point home in the pilot episode, it’s a great distraction to an otherwise perfectly fine episode of anime.
In my own experience I think most fantasy authors do make an effort to wow their audience with a hook; but most know enough about the pop knowledge level of their readers to not make a big deal about the setting unless you are doing something really neat. I can’t decide if all that nudity and fur is there to wow the audience, or just to provide exposition and set the tone and theme for the series. I only know that it bothers me a lot. Despite my furry-phobia, I think it’s just not the best take to tell a serious story. It’s not to say that strange fantasy things and nudity can’t make a good first impression (I think Sister of Wellbur is a good example of the right first impression you can make, contrary to my feeling of that show), but it has to be used with a lot of care that I’m not sure I’m seeing right now.
How serious is Spice and Wolf going to be, anyways? The whole”moeblob” thing with today’s anime has never been better treated, IMO, than how Sutepri introduces Suppi-kun. I hope they don’t just stick that aspect of “genre norm” into the characters and rend that feeling of “immersiveness,” the distinction that separates great fantasies from forgettable ones.
