There’s some circumstantial evidence to support the claim that the vocals are from a different session, and not one taken recently. For one, her singing is not the same; the little quirks in her voice don’t line up between the two versions. On the other hand, it is close enough, i.e. the gap isn’t 7 years wide.

More circumstantially, I don’t think she’d want to step into the studio to record this again anyway. Final Distance, being the closest relative to Eternally, only ever got 2 live performances.

That’s too bad. I’ve always liked Eternally, being about as close to a high school dance ballad as you’re ever going to get out of Utada Hikaru. And just like Hero, I fell pretty hard for the sentimentality and faux-nostalgia (what could a 12 year old possibly be nostalgic for?). These days, the sentimentality’s still there, but not so much the nostalgia. Those memories are now subject to constant suppression.

Seems like reaction is generally favourable, on the strength of “better vocals.” There is a bit more in the way of embellishment, but better? Try louder. In this case, louder is kind of sort of better, if only because a boost at the mixer board beats me turning up the volume any day of the week.

But if this take was strictly better in terms of singing merit, you’d think that this would have been the one to make it into the gold master. Truth is, circa 2001, this alternate session was not better, although the differences are immaterial save for those additional decorative figures.

That’s the point, though. This slightly busier session fits well with the more prominent piano, guitar and string parts. It’s richer, yet at the same time it lacks the gravity of the original.

How could that be? Louder percussion, basically, because believe it or not, a strong backbeat generates more movement than a weak backbeat.

Vocals help, too. What one calls decoration — split voicing right in the first chorus, that ad-lib line in the first interlude — another perceives as distraction and excess. Are those things not there to fill space?

If nothing else, I wish that they kept the bass line strong. It feels as if the foundation has been knocked out of this re-cut.

So I get why they (whoever they are) did what they did. This re-cut is rosier and, lacking a solid tether, floats pretty well in air. Maybe that’s what innocent love is, after all.

It’s been over a week a while since THYME’s debut album first 9uality, and chances are pretty good that if you liked Fly Away, you’ll like at least 9 of the 12 tracks on the disc.

That’s not because most of the songs sound just like Fly Away, but I think that you’ll find a lot of the elements (or 9ualities?) that made Fly Away likeable throughout the album.

I’m not a fan of speaking of a performer’s or group’s “sound” and treating it like some ethereal concept, so here goes my attempt at expressing THYME’s appeal in marginally more tangible terms.

The first thing you ever hear in Fly Away is thyme (or Kamiyama Sayaka). I personally think that she’s not mixed, but speculation aside, there’s no disputing Western influence on her singing.

She can lilt, she can drawl, can casually slide up or down to her target pitch, and imitate the throaty rumble you get when putting a brass instrument at the edge of its dynamic range. Apart from these country and blues techniques, thyme generally carries a strong rhythmic line, driven home through varying combinations of the above skills, range jumping, and a choice of lyrics that lend themselves well to accenting and small lifts.

The songs emphasize thyme’s vocal abilities, but not in a way that she’s allowed to dominate throughout. Strong harmonizing vocals have a shading effect, and in numerous instances backing instrumentals have short but prominent figures. Occasionally, an entire counter line is introduced in the right or left audio channel.

And in babycar, her voice is run through a slight mute and tighten to recreate classic country dance hall. I have no idea if that’s the right term.

I know, “babycar” isn’t a word. One contentious result of all this Western influence is the insertion of engrish, of which thyme’s pronunciation track record is … mixed. Let’s leave it at that and go on to track specific notes.

01. Seiten (Fine Weather) was an indie song of theirs that they re-recorded for the album. Bringing in the string ensemble always seems to open up the acoustic landscape, and dropping them in and out is used to good effect heading into the final iteration of the chorus. Extended outro, with a new line closes off an atmospheric opener.

02. Hello is another atmospheric piece, this time with a courageous character, and some country inflection courtesy of the vocalist. Rhythmic right channel guitar in the second verse just adds to an already driving performance. The extended chorus that closes the track has lyrics that line up really well. Strings drop in and out, this time in a supporting to role to back a short detached line.

03. Our Rock Star has a very obvious guitar line, a short and insistent motif that begins on the right and ends up on the left. In the second verse, a counter line is added on the right. Obvious bass movement in the chorus. Harmonic progression is strong throughout the album, but a solid base (bass, too) and good balance is always appreciated.

04. forever we can make it! demonstrates the band’s ability to straight up rock out. Classic rock n’ roll riff in verse supports more contemporary phrase-length key modulation. Detached style in bridge creates some variety in texture. thyme likes to clip her words short in this one. She arguably looks the most mixed in the PV for this track.

05. Drive has ramp pitch slides in abundance. Echo effect plus lengthened slides make the bridges prominent passages. Simple rhythmic elements skew the spotlight towards thyme; this is very much a technical display for her. One of her more “gutsy blues” performances of this album.

06. Fly Away, Natsu no Sora’s OP, and what piqued my interest in the first place. Call and response between instrumentals in second verse. Slightly developmental bridge section ahead of the final chorus that starts out in the dominant key (probably?) that winds up in the home key in time for the last phrase of the song.

What can I say? I like short modulations between major and minor, major to minor chord transitions, and deceptive cadences. The way they’re pulled off — almost choral backing, a descending bass figure, or the fresh striking of a guitar chord to punctuate the change — doesn’t hurt either.

And somewhere in all that, there’s a piano. That’s just gravy.

Teppei Shimizu, the guitarist to thyme’s left (screen right) in all three of their PV’s, always seems to be singing along, and although he is credited with some backing vocals, I haven’t ever picked him out.

07. I’ll be back is notable for having the most prominent use of engrish. Heavy use of thick chords in time with snare drums. Other than that, it’s whatever kind of rock that was popularized in the mid-90’s, of which I’m generally not a fan of.

08. The LAST DAY [sic] is like Drive, with a more balanced arrangement that is still sparse enough to put the spotlight back on thyme. With more drive than Drive, instrumentals have punctuating roles, and thyme navigates a line that alternates between smooth verses and snappy, fast-talking choruses that’s pure syncopation. You hardly notice the walking tempo upon which all this activity is built upon.

09. babycar is the neatest track in the album. It’s not the richest song of the bunch, and without an extended bridge and outro, it’s also the shortest of the album. But in 3 minutes and 16 seconds, THYME has managed to nail history. They’ve brought in all the right instruments for a laid back country blues number.

As noted before, thyme’s voice is filtered through something resembling a large dance hall, the result being an echoey croon. Great piano part here, too, managing to keep things lazy without going into swing eighths.

10. My Life, the resident pensive track, is not dramatic, but it is richly arranged. Woodwinds gently mark out the beat during verses, and a myriad of brief figures layer weave enough texture to get lost in.

11. Humming Bird features a violin in a fiddle part, the first thing coming to mind being Vienna Teng’s Harbor. While not as up-tempo as Harbor, things are still kept pretty light. In addition to filling in little gaps and playing response to calls, the violin has a wavering line that adds a bit of weight during the chorus.

12. Wonderland brings out the piano and strings one last time for a casual stroll along sun-kissed sidewalks. Curious that the high hat is relegated to the right channel. Anyway, cross-channel reverb adds to atmosphere, and strings add a pulsing effect, like soft steps.

thyme has a really nice bounce in her voice throughout this song, but it shines in one particular section. In a bit of development midway through, she breaks out into a conversational stretch, as if straight out of a musical. It’s the equivalent of breaking into song in the middle of the street, and yet it’s fitting, not awkward. Facilitated by a smooth transition, thyme talks fast but with a lot less snap and a lot more round, navigating her line with a soft bounce.

With a giggle, the song, and album, comes to a close. first 9uality is all about accessibility, but beneath those instantly recognizable forms and styles is a meticulous attention to detail and a gutsy attitude geared towards doing cool stuff. The overall mood is sunny and coy, and for me is a solid contrast and change from the shadier haunts that is Heart Station.

A couple general notes before I go.

Hello and Drive comprised THYME’s first single. They have been touched up for the album, with Hello getting cleaner separation at the end, stronger strings, and giving the comping guitar the right channel for the verses. For Drive, thyme gets the echo effect for the bridge. I think they’re all great changes, and Hello in particular is noticeably clearer as a result.

The cheapest shipping option offered by CDJapan really does have lead times of up to three weeks. I didn’t believe it at first — Amazon’s free shipping option delivers in less than a week most times — until my order arrived just short of that.

With only about 13 minutes and change in PV’s, you’d think that the DVD would contain progressive video, but no; it’s all interlaced. This is even more incentive to encode, something which I haven’t done in a while.

Two points here.

The first is that perhaps my reading habits are different from most, having been influenced long ago by an article about how to write for sites (or blogs, if you want to call them that). I’ve since forgotten the URL, but I remember that it emphasized the feed as an event queue, and as a kind of ersatz push (it looks like push to you but your reader is actually polling).

The implication is that, for those who consider their feed as the primary delivery mechanism, you should never announce that you are going away, you should never apologize for being busy (which is really the same thing), and you should never proclaim that you are back.

If you are going on hiatus, stop writing. If you are back, start writing. Feed readers — and by extension your human readers — will never forget you.

I’m under no illusions, though; people can and do remove feeds from their readers. On the other hand, “Display only updated” mode makes it easy to forget that someone has stopped, and when they come back it’s as if they’d never left. Such are my own working assumptions.

But just as incoming data should trigger an interrupt, so should a closed pipe or socket. Teardown is the final event, is it not? Maybe it even deserves to raise an exception. I think it’s the responsible thing to do, because no one’s a fan of unintentional memory leaks. Whether or not the user chooses to release resources at that point is up to them.

The second point.

Hikki Station and U.Blog more or less covered the same space, with U.Blog being quicker to market and Hikki Station having a better presentation (i.e. site layout), but it was the translations that were Hikki Station’s selling point. I’d add to that the subtitled videos but those were taken down about as quickly as they were put up.

If nothing else, I’d like to see that MUSICA 2007 interview one day archived and put on a free host. Of course, that is Sanosuke’s decision.

I know that this is sense of entitlement talking, but if, for whatever reason, a site goes dark, I feel that the database should be exported out to a free host. Search engine caches and the Internet Archive can’t do it all. There is something very dissatisfying about the thought of having entire sites squirreled away in a zip file, or worse.

Because, it’s not all unreferenced storage, put out to curb for the garbage collector (if that’s how your GC rolls). If in doubt, better to leave things as they are. Storage is cheap, the number of external references could very well be non-zero, and if you ever decide to start again, it’d be that much easier.

After all, it’d be as if you had never left.

Given the volume of submissions to Jpopsuki, it was nice having an RSS feed to quickly scan the submissions for artists of interest. Unfortunately, that RSS feed has since gone kaboom and there’s no ETA on a fix, so I could have missed out on a bit of excitement.

Three Utada Hikaru live performances were submitted, as 1080i MPEG-2 transport streams: Deep River at the 17th Japan Golden Disc Awards, Colors at POPJAM in early 2003 (file date is wrong), and Heart Station at Music Station.

Given that HD transport stream captures are common now, the last one isn’t too interesting, but to see five year old footage at 1080i in about as raw a form as one can get, is a bit remarkable in its own right.

Prerequisites: an ISDB-S receiver to record the BShi channel, a DVR, plenty of storage in general, and a technically inclined Hikki fan that enjoys collecting her media appearances.

What are the odds?

In my technologically and monetarily impoverished state circa 2003, I lacked I/O bandwidth, drive storage, and my monitor topped out at 1024×768. When CD-R’s were the primary means of accommodating 700 MB files, HD would have elicited horror, or tears. At the time, 1080i and 48 kHz AAC (or AC3 over here) would not have been worth one CD every 4 minutes.

The monetary situation hasn’t changed much, but it’s a good thing Moore’s Law hasn’t either. Maybe it’s not fair to say that those who decided to pull and keep digital satellite streams were ahead of their time, but from my standpoint it certainly feels that way.

On a Hikki-related note, this eyelid phenomenon happens to me, too. But since double eyelids are said to be more attractive, maybe it pays to be modestly sleep-deprived?

Pointless trivia: DGIndex says that the average bitrate of these 2003 streams is 20 Mbps. Such is the advantage of wideband satellite transmission over 6 MHz terrestrial DTV standards. ATSC tops out at a rigid 19.39265846 Mbps, whereas ISDB-S can stuff two HD channels with its 51 Mbps capacity.

This isn’t the same question as “Who is THYME?” (English) Wikipedia seems to have a decent idea of the band, but nary a word on the group’s lead vocalist. This isn’t unusual, and indeed isn’t even a big deal, but then again most other artists don’t use a lower-cased English word for their stage name.

It’s a shame that Wiki.ThePPN’s status is in DreamHost limbo. Just throwing that out there.

Anyway, my admittedly short search began at the Jpopmusic.com forums, wherein thyme is unmasked as Sayaka Kamiyama (given name / family name order) which…doesn’t mean anything to me. I can go play TF2 or something now, right?

Searching for that name leads to a possible kanji writing, along with a photo that seems far removed from what she looks like now. But if you plug 神山さやか into YouTube, you get a recently posted video of THYME promoting their Fly Away single. Although she only refers to herself as thyme in the video, the video itself is tagged with her real name.

Continuing on, the Japanese Wikipedia has a brief profile on her, linking her current and past musical careers. I’m loathe to buy too much into what Google Translate says, but it seems that she at least appeared on the now defunct ASAYAN idol search show during 2001, and met with some success judging by the release of 3 singles during 2002.

Incidentally, those singles are available on YesAsia. It’d be interesting to hear her, pre-THYME. As for the THYME indie singles? Nowhere in sight. But at least they re-recorded Seiten and Drive for their album.

Tying it all together is this Hatena Diary keyword page. Most interesting is that among her favourites she lists four female, Western, singer-songwriters, from whom I think she at least derives her forceful singing style.

And I think, that’s really what started me down the trail in the first place.

I’m such a sucker for strong harmonic progression.

I suppose you could read the signs to arrive at the same conclusion, being as transparent as she is, but it’s something else to have her admit it in writing, and Utada Hikaru has cemented her position as a celebrity that is simultaneously anti-social but outspoken. It makes my head spin, kind of.

Along the way, the interview touches on aspects of her past three albums, but Ultra Blue doesn’t get as much mention. Her goal of “un-genre-lization” is directly reflected in the lyrics of Opening and Crossover Interlude, as well as other Exodus tracks. See her thoughts on gender and compare them to YMMWTBAM.

At the time of the interview, the seeds of Heart Station were being sown. She wraps death, the abstraction of the person from the music, and that transcendental experience of being connected to everyone and everything into Teiku 5. Her world view advances no particular agenda, but it’s that mixture of resignation and cynicism that is so well integrated into Niji-iro Basu, and the album in general.

I’m reminded of someone’s YouTube comment, claiming that whatever one thinks of Exodus, it had to have happened for the next two CD’s to happen. S/he is probably right: Exodus is rough yet earnest, the mark of someone with experience freed from various restraints for the first time, someone who had something to prove and went (arguably) overboard while doing so.

Ultra Blue kept the passion (and Passion) but lost the roughness, the observations packaged in the richest production of the past three albums. Heart Station is decidedly less earnest, and honesty is of the cold, mostly dispassionate variety. If pushed a bit further, the music could border on despairing, and while some think that the interview is on the verge of that, I think it’s well within the purview of apathy.

While there’s a chock full of other stuff worth noting, you should read the whole thing even if you’re not a fan — maybe you’ll feel the same way as well — but the last thing I want to mention is the contradiction between the artist and her music. Even though she views herself in static terms, the whole concept of defying genre is to produce work that is anything but static.

That she has sacrificed everything that she is not for music wasn’t just some on the spot interview answer (like her last statements in that same video), but it’s not that true either. Rather, that she puts everything that she is not into her music, becomes everything that she is not (Hotel Lobby, anybody?) when in the recording studio or in the public eye, makes a lot more sense.

You may want to skip the preamble, which is mostly anecdotal.

The review preamble

So this is a Heart Station review, and a late one at that. It was something that I’d get around to eventually, but this is a pretty tardy kind of eventually for which I have no good reason.

The kicker was when I purchased the CD, which is a bit of a story in itself. Strangely, Heart Station was cheaper to get at the mall than online, and that’s before any shipping and handling costs. Despite the price difference, it’s going to take more than an Utada Hikaru CD to drag me out to the mall, and the extra push didn’t appear until recently.

I almost didn’t find it. In the past, Utada Hikaru stuff has appeared in the R&B/Rap section, the World Music section, and I think I heard somewhere that she was once found in the Electronic section, which is a bit of a stretch but still plausible. At this store, she was in none other than Pop, but Exodus was nowhere to be found. Kind of neat seeing two Japanese-language albums (Ultra Blue and Heart Station) within spitting distance of…U2…

Except not.

Because despite marketing herself by her last name, she was for all intents and purposes one Hikaru Utada, and consequently put in sub-section H. Maybe that’s how we’re supposed to roll in the Western nations? Or just westernized inventory systems. Even the one staff member I asked was confounded since she didn’t show up in the system under U.

On the way out of the parking lot I spotted a pick-up truck. Or a station wagon. The vehicle doesn’t matter, but the license plate: BAKA-109. That capped a pretty good day.

Before getting to the review proper, I should note that it’s perhaps not a proper review. Looking back, Heart Station related events began late 2006, even if the album didn’t have a name at that point. Half of the album’s titles (excluding the interlude and including the bonus track) are from previous singles, and my opinions on those have been mostly unchanged, so some tracks are probably going to be light on opinions.

The review proper

Fans like to segment Hikki’s career based on her albums, and somewhere along the line that inevitably means her style and sound. It’s worked pretty well: from First Love right on up to Ultra Blue, any given track just “feels” right for its particular era, whether it’s because of production, performance, or varying contributions of both. Sometimes even just a dominant style is all it takes to bin a song.

Things are just a bit trickier with Heart Station. After the (jarring) reset button that was Exodus, things have settled some, and the album represents a much more incremental change, but it’s not like she’s stopped running off and doing different things. It’s more like she continues to run off and try new things, but at a slower pace.

Fight the Blues

Case in point, Fight the Blues could very well have wound up on UB as Keep Tryin’, v2.0. It opens instrumentals first followed by chorus, there is an exotic sounding bridge with the same kind of hollowed out harmony, an extended version of the chorus appears later on, and everything is wrapped up by an outro. The only argument to be made against Fight the Blues‘ inclusion in Ultra Blue, other than the title being a bit of a send-up, is that Keep Tryin’ is a lot richer in its ambiance.

Heart Station

I’ve said my piece on Heart Station. Lots of movement, especially in the chorus, but subdued all the same. The only thing I want to add is that Heart Station is night music. So is This is Love. Heart Station is track two on HS, This is Love is track two on UB. Probably just coincidence, but Fight the Blues and Keep Tryin’ are also the first tracks on their respective albums.

Beautiful World

I’ve also said my piece on Beautiful World, but it’s archived elsewhere. It’s a somewhat austere vision, but it’s shaping up to be a theme in this CD.

Flavor of Life (the ballad and the bonus)

Flavor of Life, in both the ballad and origination versions, is pretty pedestrian. The original is an up-tempo ballad-ish song with an electronic slant. As a full-blown ballad with acoustic backing, it lacks the impact found in similar works from her. Maybe plain was the intent, a ballad not devoted to extraordinary feelings, but ordinary life. And as it plods along, so does the rest of the world.

Stay Gold

It’s a bit odd to put two slow songs one back to back, but that’s where Stay Gold ends up. The more it’s listened to, the harder it is to engage with it. The piano line that first appears is something that can be instantly latched on to, but in a repetitive, somewhat hypnotic fashion that eventually fades into the mechanical rhythm elements. A faint layer of fuzz is placed upon the whole thing, like the distant pattering of rain. The music really hollows out any comfort in the words being sung.

Kiss & Cry

Kiss & Cry has a firmer grounding to the past, in terms of the material used (Hotel Lobby) and the bold, in your face singing and instrumentals reminiscent of her R&B work. It’s definitely one of the easier tracks that I can latch on to, if only for its slightly jaded colouring. Suck it up, take a chance, and when it’s all over, kiss and cry.

I should be a bit more specific than describing the opening as “brass fanfare,” which it is, but it also could very well be the ensuing free improv characteristic of a big band jazz ensemble closing off a number. There should be a term for this, but I can’t remember it.

There are too many of these little ironies in this album to write all of them off as coincidences.

Gentle Beast Interlude and Celebrate

Sampling material from within the same album, as is done in Gentle Beat Interlude, does not go unnoticed. Given that it transitions smoothly into Celebrate, I think of it as one track. Although Celebrate (you sexy lady) can stand on its own, I wonder if there is anything to take away from the use of Heart Station in the interlude and the fact that it was initially titled Desperation.

It’s not the first time that Hikki has taken a run at latin, and Celebrate falls somewhere in between the stately and lamenting Letters and the more raucous affair that is One Night Magic. I’ve seen more comparisons made with the latter, but there is some leeway that spans the range of my perceptions.

As a result of having listened to something slower a bit before, the contrast makes Celebrate that much more up-tempo. On the other hand, if a faster track preceded it, then the opening bass line feels very heavy for a latin number. I don’t mean that it drags, but there certainly isn’t a party atmosphere. Rather, the party is being commented on from afar, in the same coy tone that defines Heart Station.

Prisoner of Love

Just because we may have heard bits and pieces of this track before doesn’t make it less solid. The old harmonies aren’t so ancient that they’ve lost their magic, the fact that the chorus sounds a lot like the verse in Wonder ‘Bout doesn’t make it any less snappy, and so on.

The thing is, it’s a little too grim sounding to belong on Distance, and it’s not so out there as to belong on Exodus, even if the lyrics were originally written in English. If anything, I’m reminded of contemporary strings-backed American R&B tracks, except with more prominent strings in that respect.

You’ll get no complaint about a prominent strings part from me. After all, Utada Unplugged isn’t Utada Unplugged without a strong string section.

Prisoner of Love is up there with Kiss & Cry as one of the most tangible tracks on this CD, which is in stark contrast to the next one.

Teiku 5

Fight the Blues might have appeared on UB, but Teiku 5 nearly did, and I can’t help but think it’s the opposite of Making Love, like Heart Station is to This is Love. It seems a bit of a stretch to link the two, and I’m having trouble articulating why, so for now it remains one of those “sounds about right” statements.

I’ve heard opinions that this is the Kairo of the album, it being the most out there of anything present, but I find that Teiku 5 is a lot better because the former doesn’t really register with me, while the latter is in a toss-up for best track on Heart Station.

The only other thing I have to add is that the explosion of sound after the dim opening makes this a colourful trip into the void.

Boku wa Kuma

The decision to put a song for new life after a song about death (or transcendence if you’re optimistic) is a good thematic one. The song itself, not so much. You might sing it to your kids, or your kids might sing it, so a job well done I suppose. I didn’t watch day-time children’s shows nor had lullabies sung to me, so maybe I’m missing an expected amount of nostalgia. I do, however, like to note when simple is deceptive, but that’s (simply) not the case here.

Niji-iro bus

The last in a short run of non-English titled tracks, and where Hikki shows her true colours. Not the colours of the rainbow, but a certain shade of green as she outdoes Kiss & Cry in her blunt commentary on life. And to think that the music, with its syncopated piano and slippery analog loops, has such a cheerful disposition — at first.

In no time at all, the leaping vocal motif used to transition from the chorus back to the verse fades into an expanding landscape before returning with a much sparser arrangement. The little details that made the first phase so quirky return, but twisted into a minor key in a turn towards wistful lament, capped by the occasional zephyr. As she repeats her first line in this section, she is backed by a haunting multi-voice part, rivaling the swelling chorus from Hotel Lobby, that marks the height of this song, or indeed the entire album.

In Sigma

Putting Ultra Blue and Heart Station side by side leads to mixed results. There are tracks that could have been on UB, and one that was made for it but was eventually dropped. And then, from out of nowhere, you get run over by a rainbow-coloured bus.

Ultra Blue is a lot more earnest. It was overall richly layered, with vibrant lines and strong vocals reflecting passionate feelings. With the exception of maybe Prisoner of Love, you won’t find any of those at the same time in a Heart Station track.

This is really a somewhat pained album, in a “truth hurts” kind of sense and it seems only right that the tracks are generally thinner and subdued. Where Ultra Blue covered the excitement of the night, Heart Station is generally about the hangover the day after. That’s not a strictly negative comment; it’s just the cynical truth, and Hikki has made the most of it.

Whoo! That’s why.

Contrary to unpopular belief, my Hikki-tardation has limits, and one of those lines in the sand was Bohemian Summer 2000. It was something that I actually kind of avoided, and the ridiculous looking cover art had something to do with it. But I also heard way, way back that it bordered on sub-par, while her Unplugged performance just one year later was held up as one of her best recordings at the time, studio or otherwise. I’m listening to the audio stream right now, and it still is up there.

I’d better stop that. So firing up the performance at hand, maybe I’m just watching through Hikki goggles then, but it’s not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Oh sure, balance problems at the mixer board lead to instances where the band overpowers her voice; little things like inconsistent pitch control on the edge of her range and the tendency to just belt things out lead to an overall concert that isn’t as polished as her later ones.

And then there’s the occasion where she totally faked her high note in Wait and See, delegating it to pre-recorded vocals.

Yet it’s also the most entertaining. I don’t like having to choose between performance or perfection, but when presented with a barrel of fun, is it possible to say no?

You don’t see any of her other concert DVD’s featuring aerial footage of a baseball stadium. There’s just something about the scale of the event that makes it worth noting. Her backing instrumental section is probably second only to her Unplugged performance, but only because that had a string section. This was also the only time she had dancers, which generally just drove home the widely accepted fact that Hikki can’t dance.

Sound balance dissatisfaction is mitigated a bit by the fact that there’s some great drum work going on by John Blackwell and a 15 year old Tony Royster Jr. Many of the songs are percussion weighted and for good reason. Blackwell would later give the Unplugged performance its strong drive.

Highlights include the guest appearance of the arrangers of Wait and See towards the end, the drum duel between Blackwell and Royster, the best rendition of Amai Wana ~Paint it Black as well as pretty good performances of Take on Me, I Love You, Playback part2, and Living on My Own —

But none of the last four are her songs. In total she had 4.625 covers, if you count the John Luongo remix of First Love as a half, and her Shiina Ringo impression as an eighth.

Hilarious image of her jumping down as if holding a broken pogo stick aside, these covers are the reason for me lamenting about the good ol’ days that I never experienced. She exudes more attitude covering Freddie Mercury and Yamaguchi Momoe than she does in most of her own songs. The devil inside could be spotted four years prior.

The irony is that since 2000 her performances have retreated from the “I’m going to sing/do whatever the heck I want” attitude even as her songs incorporate more of it. You get the more tightly controlled performances as a result, but an equally controlled image comes with it. Bohemian Summer Hikki would step out swinging; by 2001 she was already beginning to pull her punches.

No more covers, no more crazy cosplaying band. In Hikaru no 5 she looked very much the diva; Utada United two of her elaborate costumes bordered on stuffy and immobile. About the only element that pressed forward unchanged was Kawano Kei, and his antics along with his presence were noticeably absent in 2006.

I think Hikki is one those artists that has always had their trypants on, it’s just that they’re a lot more apparent these days. Even when she’s trying to act casual, it comes across as forced more often than not. She’s fairly transparent, and there’s little reason to doubt that she’s holding back, for reasons that only she knows.

Paradoxically, she is better because of it. The same self-consciousness that makes her awkward on stage puts polish in the studio and fresh sounds on the staff paper. Can’t stage and studio peacefully co-exist? I suppose not: it was a struggle for Prisoner of Love — a product of a distant era (or DISTANCE era) — to be included into HEART STATION. My guess is that we will never see something quite like Bohemian Summer again.

But I hold out hope that one day she’ll devote a block of time to reclaiming a less obfuscated image of herself, forgoing the technological wizardry that propels her along today.

Kawano Kei would approve. That ought to be enough for anybody.

Is it strange that I haven’t seen the first broadcast episode of Macross Frontier, but I’ve listened to Triangler? The brand is strong with MS, and YK to a lesser extent, so while spare time is…spare, a bit of multi-tasking keeps me tuned in.

Feelings about the song are mixed. A bit of movement in the verse and a nice contrasting bounce in the bridge are pretty much negated by a chorus that is typical (as in middling) and tight (as in uptight). Given that the song opens with the chorus, the first thought was that Maaya was trying to do energetic rock, which for me has been a dicey hit-or-miss proposition in the past.

After the song was over not once, but five times, that impression still remained. Triangler is an imperfect trinity at best. But at least the lyrics rhyme at the beginning of both bridges.

Kotomichi is not a Yoko Kanno track, if that is a factor in anything. I think it’s been hammered into my head that airy voices are something to avoid, and there are a number of passages where Maaya’s voice is a weak whisper. But there are other places with signs of life strength, and on balance this is a decent ballad. It’s just that there are so many decent ballads, all very noticeably similar in style.