Opinion Prone

Dream
Yuna Ito’s 3rd album
27th May 2009

Sometimes I wish artists would come up with more interesting album names, but I guess this goes in perfect step with Yuna Ito’s previous two albums, Heart and Wish. Three singles were released ahead of Dream, but I’ve only heard “trust you” because it is one of my favorite theme songs ever. The second track, “今でも会いたいよ…” (“Ima demo aitaiyo…”),  is apparently an answer song to “今でもずっと” (“Ima demo zutto”) by Spontania feat. Yuna Ito, which I took the liberty of YouTubing before listening to this album, but that’s hardly enough to get a good impression of the duet pair and I doubt the fact that the second track here is an answer song will mean much to me. I’m more interested in finding out whether “love you,” “trust you,” and “miss you” will have any melodic or thematic relation to each other because that would be pretty awesome.

Anyway! First impressions, go~!

TRACK 01: love you
Very upbeat percussion intro! Vocals start off similarly perky and it doesn’t sound anything like “trust you,” lol. The melody sounds a bit haphazard and the transitions between Japanese and English don’t sound as smooth as they could be. The percussion is really repetitive and distracting, actually, and doesn’t fit every well with the vocals. The “I love you”s sound way casual and subsequently less meaningful. I really wish the percussion would let up — the drums are all over the place, there’s random bits of piano, and the cymbols kind of reset my train of thought every several measures. I’m having a really hard time distinguishing verses from chorus, which I only recognize from the haphazard “I love you”s. Bridge (?) slows down a bit, though the percussion doesn’t really let up. “I know you make me love you” just sounds incredibly awkward and Engrishy, which doesn’t fit since Yuna Ito’s English is generally very good. Song ends by fading away, kind of lame. Not a great way to start the album.

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Here it is, my review of Eureka seveN, which is a wonderfully obnoxious 2,000 words. (The MAL mirror is here.) The short version is that I didn’t like the series very much though it did have a lot of technical merits. As usual, the review is spoiler-free, but today, there shall be additional, spoilerific rambling in the rest of this entry, followed by some kind of epic fanboy/fanrage showdown in the comments because ghostlightning thinks there’s love to remember in Eureka seveN. How about that!

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Three months after this series finished, and I’ve finally finished the review for it. Finally.

I had such a hard time writing this. It’s hard to find a reasonable voice when all you can remember is everything that sucked. It isn’t an objectivity issue since you obviously can’t be objective writing something that’s completely opinion, but it’s still hard to fashion your opinion in a way that doesn’t make you seem like some fanraging idiot. After all, reviews are also supposed to be subtly persuasive, and it’s hard to be persuasive if you sound offended or butthurt about how terrible something is. It’s the same reason people tend to take the opinions of fanboys with a grain of salt. Don’t be overzealous. Write intelligently. Well, I tried.

Honestly, when this series first ended, I wanted to write a long, raging rant about how much I hated the ending and how terribly disappointing the entire thing was on a variety of different levels. But then I put it off and eventually didn’t feel like it anymore. I got the urge again as I was writing the review, and subsequently, the review spiraled into a bunch of sarcastic remarks. Some of them got edited out. Some of them didn’t. I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about it.

I do this for fun! This is fun, see? Fun!

I wonder if anyone’s actually polled the percentage of otaku that have at some point tried to learn Japanese. I wonder what a follow-up of such a poll would reveal about the percentage that actually attain some level of fluency. Anyone who watches subs on a regular or even semi-regular basis will be able to pick up a wide variety of everyday phrases and a decent slice of vocabulary. The observant ones might even be able to pick up some simple sentence structuring, verbs, and grammar. It’s a pretty awesome thing when you first realize that, hey, you know a bit of another language.

Undoubtedly, that’s why a lot of younger fans will insert bits and pieces of what they know into their speech or text online. It’s like a secret language, something esoteric to share between friends, and everybody likes thinking they’re special. Like Pig Latin though, the language is actually not so secret, or at the very least, the popular tidbits of the language that young fans like to parrot are not so secret, and they tend to annoy everybody over a certain age. Ostracized and mocked by the rest of the community, the young fans reach a point where they stop tacking -chan and -kun after all their friends’ names. There is a brief “maturing” period. And then they decide that they’re going to knuckle down and learn Japanese… for real this time.

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Tommy heavenly6 is my favorite of Tomoko Kawase’s projects, followed by the brilliant green. I’m not all that fond of Tommy february6, though it kind of reminds me a bit of Nana Kitade. Sadly, all of Tomoko’s projects were recently dropped by Sony, along with a few other artists like Sowelu. Doesn’t make any sense to me considering the popularity of her numerous anime tie-ins (“Pray” for Gintama, “Paper Moon” for SOUL EATER, “Unlimited Sky” for Gundam 00), but whatever… business is business? Sowelu just signed with Avex, but no word on Tomoko yet as far as I know. I don’t really doubt that she has a lot of options though. Regardless, this album was the latest and last released by Sony in late April. I only just got my hands on it, but here we go~.

TRACK 01: Wait For Me There (YouTube it)
Distorted, kinda dark sorta intro. Vocals start plainly, but it picks up nicely — has a good beat. Some pretty awkward sounding Engrish, but Tomoko’s voice is confident and smooth. Sometimes I like to just pretend that she isn’t butchering a language she doesn’t know that well. The words become less important than the sound and the emotion, and this song has a very relaxed, feel-good mood to be. Did she just say, “Let’s have some tea”? Some interesting vocal overlaps in the bridge, though I don’t think this is her best example of harmony. Song ends as smoothly and plainly as it starts. All around not a bad go, but not all that interesting either.

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My friends are always shocked and appalled at just how much modern pop culture I seem to have missed out on. Music, movies, and a few decades worth of references and jokes all go over my head. Before this, I had never seen a Star Trek movie. It wasn’t avoidance; it was just a matter of no one ever sitting me down in front of a TV and saying, “Hey! Watch this movie!” I had seen an episode or two of Next Generation once while wasting time in my roommate’s room, but that was about it. I liked that episode or two (because Patrick Stewert is kind of awesome), but it wasn’t enough to make me go out of my way to see more of it, especially since I don’t have a TV myself.

The aforementioned roommate is actually a closet Trekkie, but I guess “closet” negates any evangelical aspect. Still, roomie’s [also Trekkie] parents were in town last weekend and offered to treat, so why the hell not? Let’s go see a movie. Who cares if it’s finals weekend?

Star Trek

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Usually my album reviews are labeled “first impressions” instead of “reviews” because I think it’s an interesting angle to compile my first thoughts on an album during my initial hearing of it; impressions of music are more prone to changing over time and a tenth hearing may very well be different from a second hearing. But that theme doesn’t really apply here as its a compilation album! HYDE’s first solo compilation album, uninspiredly entitled HYDE, contains all of his singles, as well as a few popular tracks from his four existing albums.

So that portion of his discography isn’t really isn’t something I listen to often. There are a few songs I like, sure, but the majority is kind of just “eh.” Still, compilation albums are a good way to revisit things, right? I figure, what the hell.

TRACK 01: Made in Heaven
As Faith is my least favorite HYDE album, I don’t remember this song very well at all. There’s a nice guitar opening; intro vocals are pretty typical of HYDE’s solo work, though a bit rough and forceful. This is in Engrish, but I can’t understand much beyond a word here and there. I kinda feel bad because it sounds like he’s trying so hard. The chorus doesn’t stand out much and sounds pretty awkward with the poor Engrish. It leads into the second verse with little pause; meanwhile, the music in the background isn’t very interesting as it isn’t changing up much. Most of this song blurs together for me, including the end.

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Bucky O’Hare was one of those awesome cartoons from the 90′s that almost no one seems to remember nowadays. Bucky was the underdog beating up toads in space while the Ninja Turtles beat up foot soldiers in Manhattan. I have many fond memories of it, though I don’t think I actually ever saw the entirety of the thirteen-episode series back in the day. Still, the fondness stayed with me, and I was excited when I found out that the TV show was based on a comic series.

The comic was written by Larry Hama and penciled by Michael Golden. Hama is a third-generation Japanese-American, but that doesn’t really explain why I’ve always thought Bucky O’Hare had a very anime/manga feel to it. The original comic ran in the late 80′s and only had one plotline; more were written to coincide with the TV series when it debuted in 1990. The original comic along with two of the later, additional issues were collected together in a manga-like graphic novel released by Vanguard in 2007. I have no idea why they didn’t include the rest of the additional issues, but it doesn’t really matter. I ordered my copy of Vanguard’s release of Bucky O’Hare when I ordered my copy of Viz’s releaseof DOGS vol. 0, and I gotta say: Bucky’s comic is very disappointing.

Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars

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A month or two ago, BookCloseouts was having a $0.99 TOKYOPOP sale. Browsing through, there were a bunch of old, random titles I cared little about… along with Planetes vol. 1 and both volumes of Kanpai! The former was more of an impulse, but the latter was something I’d kindasorta wanted to check out for a while, but never wanted to put down the money for since I was half-certain that it would suck. I guess it’s kind of sad that as much as I love Gravitation, I never had too much respect for Maki Murakami. Maybe it’s because of her doujinshi. Maybe it’s because of Gravitation EX. But yeah — even though I liked the one-shot off which Kanpai! is based, I wasn’t too inclined towards the title.

But come on, for ninety-nine cents? The whole order plus shipping cost less than a normally-priced TP manga. So here is a review.

I actually finished reading Kanpai! a few weeks ago but never got around to writing a review. I had to sit down and force myself to just do it tonight though since I’m bringing the two volumes with me to a departmental garage sale thing tomorrow — if I’m lucky, I might actually profit a little from them, hahaha. Maybe I’ll also be able to get rid of this copy of Catcher in the Rye.

Finally! The announcement of the license came in July of last year, but DOGS finally officially released middle of last week (though a few people have reported seeing them in stores before then). I had had my preorder through HeavyInk, which has only served me well in the past, but I’m beginning to think that their strength is only in subscriptions and US trades, rather than licensed manga — typical of a comic store, I guess. They seem to have had various complications/delays with my order, so I finally just canceled it and ordered through Amazon. It arrived within three days. Because they only included bubble packaging on one side, my cover was a little warped, but other than that: it’s beautiful~.

I’ve updated my MAL review for DOGS to include some commentary about Viz’s release, but I’m going to do an in-depth semi-review here because I feel like it.

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