Perfume have released a preview of their upcoming single, Magic of Love, and it’s your typical lot of electro-pop — not that I really mind. Basically it’s some catchy shit, in a kind of familiar way. The single, in all its variations, is set to hit the shelves on the 22nd of May.
Perfume – love the world
Release date: 2008/07/09
Tracklist:
1. love the world
2. edge
3. love the world (instrumental)
4. edge (extended mix)
You know, I have to be honest with you even if it means you’ll hate me (people wanted to damn near slaughter CJ after his less-than-enthusiastic review of GAME). I’m a rather new fan of Perfume, only finding out about them after Polyrhythm but before Baby Cruising Love. Things started really going well for Perfume after the release of Baby Cruising Love and especially during the release of GAME… quite honestly, things started going TOO well for them. Anyone remember that certain appeal Perfume lost after everyone and their grandma started loving them and calling them the best thing to happen to J-pop in years?
Brace yourself, what I’m about to say might shock you: Perfume is overrated. *gasp!* And when I say overrated, I mean REALLY fuckin’ overrated. There, I said it. CJ was right on in his review of GAME. It does get old real fast, the Perfume sound. It sounded so fresh the first time around, but it is used over and over and over again in their music until I’m bored to tears. They are good, but geez, they aren’t THAT good.
Now, I’m not childish enough to hate a group just because everyone else loves them. Of course not, that’d be silly. That’s irrelevant and not the real issue here. Still though, while everyone else started loving them more and more, raving about them endlessly, I found myself not caring about them at the same increasing pace. Needless to say, GAME was a disappointment to me and love the world continues in the same vein. Nakataka Yasuka gave them exactly the kind of single you’d expect from Perfume. It’s catchy, once again featuring heavy usage of vocoders and it has the trademark Perfume technopop sound. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, you decide. As for me? It’s boring and too safe. A rehash.
One could say Perfume is simply a group you either love or hate. That’d be flattering them; I simply don’t care about them. The post-Baby Cruising Love Perfume anyway. I will continue giving them the benefit of the doubt and checking all their future releases without any prejudice towards them. I sincerely hope for something to catch my interest and make me a fan again. In the mean time, though, I’ll happily await the day when their much too excessive fame will finally start dwindling down and others will understand they’ve gotten old much too fast.
After I made my previous post, wu-san from International Wota wanted me to elaborate on a particular thing I said in the post;
I f****** wish he’d explore a line he throws up in more detail.
“Would you really listen to this if it wasn’t Japanese?”
Christ, it’s something I always think about, however menacing or impartial it may be. I can’t be angry however, as it’s not like I’ve attempted to pursue the issue.
The reason I didn’t go more into detail on this one is that it’s really a pretty difficult subject to take on, as I’m honestly a bit torn on the subject myself… but this request from wu-san along with HarimaKenji’s comment to the post made me think about this. I’ll attempt to write a little on how I feel about the matter. This post became a bit shorter than usual, but this time I really tried to kind of abbreviate and make my opinion on the matter clearer and more brief.
Mikitty is not quite convinced you’re in it for “just the music”…
Release date: 2008/01/16
Tracklisting:
1. Baby Cruising Love
2. Macaroni
3. Baby Cruising Love (instrumental)
4. Macaroni (instrumental)
I don’t really make an effort to hide the fact from friends that I enjoy J-pop. And as such, sometimes when sharing some songs from said genre, a friend has a tendency to ask me “would you really listen to this if it wasn’t Japanese?”
Often I can honestly answer him “yes”, or at least a “yes, though I might not think to check something like this out if it wasn’t Japanese.” However, with this song… If he asked me the same about this song, I’m not sure what I would answer. I mean, while I would say I’m quite open-minded when it comes to music, this is something so not what I’d usually listen to, it’s not even funny. Hell, not only do I think I would probably not listen to it if it wasn’t Japanese, I can’t even believe it myself I’m listening to this, even if it is Japanese.
Not to mention enjoying it… immensely.
Personally I only learned of Perfume not long ago, I think it was from this post from Hello! girl blog, when I saw it linked on Int’l Wota. Usually I don’t even like to check out reviews of artists I don’t know, but for some reason I did that day, and I’m glad I did. I watched the PV and said “pfft, this isn’t THAT special, why all the hype?” However, a day or two later I was still thinking about the song and realized there was something in it that clicked with me right away. I was just intrigued by the song and hell, the cute girls, too. I had to go back and re-watch the PV… and then download their whole discography after that. So that’s the brief history of me and Perfume so far. I tried to listen to all their singles before reviewing this and I did, but I can’t say I’ve listened enough to all of it enough in order to properly compare it with their past offerings… but whatever, enough of that now.