Thursday, March 18th
-5:05 am
Update
- Jay
Navok
CD Review: "Koi
Suru Soldier"
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The
CD's FUN FUN letter font sure does make it look like it will be a FUN CD
to listen to while having FUN. |
Another fun song review, but this time of a slightly different nature.
Released back in early November, it's about time we got around to looking at
the CD single of everyone's favourite blue-haired/evil sailor senshi, Chisaki Hama.
For your listening perusal, I've made available brief clips of the two
songs on the CD (hosting thanks to Bill
Heineman):
Track 1
Track 2
The CD single's title and main song are the same: "Koi suru
soldier" (Loving soldier). One gets the feeling the record company
execs behind the CD decided on the title a few months before they found out about
the
series' caption change to "Guardian." While the piece of paper which
said "CHISAKI HAMA'S SINGLE" was lying in front of them when they
learned of the switch, at the time the logic was that nothing could be done,
as there wasn't an eraser on any of the pencils in the room. The distraction
over with, the executives then returned to their pet project of having a
million monkeys on a million typewriters write the entire works of
Shakespeare.
This is obviously her first CD release, and included on it are two songs:
the first song mentioned, Koi Suru Soldier and another, Kanojo wa
Ijiwaru ("The girl is mean"). Also on there are instrumental
(karaoke) versions of the two songs. I'll hand it to Chisaki's agent- he's a
good one. Not only did he get her a plum part (look how many Mercury-centric
episodes there have been, and how much attention she's getting from the
current arc) but she's got her own professional website (none of the other
girls have that) and her own CD single separate from the series. (Maybe the
other senshi's managers assumed that having them do work in addition to the
series would be too much, although that wouldn't explain Kitagawa's foray into
the world
of law enforcement advertising. It's also possible that the girls have a
clause their contracts that they can't do individual work, and Chisaki's
agency possibly went through a loophole of some sort. I dunno.)
While her agent's good, though, they need to fire whoever was the composer
of this music. I came up with better tunes mashing the keyboard in my college
MIDI class. I think the sound engineer had five minutes to prepare this so he grabbed
a box of Twinkies, shoved five into his gaping hole of a mouth, waddled to the
keyboard and got the melody through a randomizer function in Digital
Performer. With the sugar beginning to seep into his blood he then found the
"helicopter" sound effect bank on his synthesizer, and, like God in
Genesis 1:1, bellowed "Let me spice up this trite random melody with the
dulcet sound of choppers." And so it was done, and he saw it was good.
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Popping
out from behind a wall? I've never seen that done before. |
Our human jelly roll overlord thus decided to squeeze the sound effects
button for all it's worth- hitting it over and over- giggling to himself
quietly all the while. The result is Koi Suru Soldier, which not only kicks
off with these noises for absolutely no reason, but has a ~20 second interval
toward the end with a sound effects solo of various random noises. If the
sound effects bank of this guy's keyboard was a teenage girl it could justly
claim molestation for this travesty.
There is absolutely nothing memorable about the melody in either song,
which is why I am convinced that it was randomly created by a computer, by one of
Sony's fancy dog robots using a computer, or by a dog that thought it was a
robot which could use computers. The songs are unoriginal riffs that don't
actually produce a fluent melody (typical of pop, though) but they eventually
coalesce into something resembling what we call music. I could probably listen
to this CD three hours straight, shut it off, and still not be able to recall
how it was the songs went, despite the fact that they're both so repetitive in
and of themselves. But for the rest of my life I'll remember that damn
helicopter.
As for the lyrics, I got a good laugh at them, however they're about as
generic as you can get. Even if I could fathom why a 14 year old (which is how
old she was when this was written, as she turned 15 the day it came into
stores) would sing about her "darling" being "sexy" I
doubt I can understand why they felt the need to use nearly every verse from
"The Big Book of Pre-fabricated Pop Song Choruses." (The book is just 5 pages long,
and three of those pages are takes on using digestible and non-digestible
metaphors for the over-the-counter 'love' one finds stacked next to the
batteries at CVS.) Said book exists for the convenience of lazy writers, as
written by the lazy writers who came before them, and is not to be completely
ripped off. You do that and the whole pop music industry falls like the
dominos in the opening of Sawai Miyuu's "You,"
a scene which in turn was taken from "The Big Book of Exploitative
Filmmaking."
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15
years old.
"Go directly to jail, do not pass Go." |
Technically a good singer could still save these songs despite all the
difficulties already mentioned, but given that this is her first time singing
someplace other than the karaoke booth (and the fact that during her
theatrical training she probably took more knitting lessons than she did vocal
practice) it's not quite up to par. Not so bad for a first try (I'm assuming),
but it's really the equivalent of Miyuu's acting in her "first
movie"; somewhat amateurish. (Which, again, is to be expected given her
age.) In Koi Suru Soldier it sometimes feels like she's reading the lyrics off
a sheet while trying to induce tone rather than actually singing, and at times one
can feel her slowly incanting each syllable rather than pronouncing complete
words. And who knows why she randomly bleats "ooh" and
"ah"; maybe the sound guy couldn't pull off all the dumb effects he
wanted from the keyboard and demanded she do some of them herself. Note that
it's not as though she's saying these with any feeling to them; the
"ah" she makes sounds like what the Pillsbury Doughboy would say if
he was poked one too many times and just got bored of it.
During Kanojo wa Ijiwaru at times it's kind of like she's singing in
falsetto; that's partly because some notes she can't hit... or hasn't been trained
to hit. It's fairly clear that she didn't get much professional vocal help with this
and thus it really does feel like she's singing a karaoke version of someone
else's song. (Reminds me of the "Pretty
Cast" CD. I'd like to meet the genius that came up with that thing,
and punch him in the face after getting my $20 back.) Once again, trying hard,
but not quite pulling it off. I give her a lot of credit for the attempt,
though. Hopefully her future songs will fare better.
In conclusion I think these reviews are better left up to Dr. Xadium,
because he can actually bs
good and type up some long spiel analyzing tone and rhythm which makes it
sound like he knows what he's talking about, while I end up wanting to find
the composer and rip out his Korg's effects chip.
If you're actually interested in getting the CD, here's the Amazon
JP link. Note the hilarious Japanese review which gave it only one star.
The review's author writes, "I thought this song was weird." As long as you're paying exorbitant shipping costs, don't forget that
the first
DVD will be released soon too.
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