Review Summary: Oomori Seiko establishes herself as a Queen of Pop with confidence and style
Oomori Seiko’s major label debut Sennou was a work of wildfire genius that revolutionised her sound from an indie-folk gauntlet to art-pop fireworks. It reinforced all the qualities that made her a distinctive voice to begin with, transformed her style superficially, and ultimately landed its place as one of the strongest albums of the decade. It was, however, so creatively charged, so fiercely unpredictable and so untempered in its brilliance that her inevitable follow-up album could never have been expected to take the same approach and end up hitting the same highs with the same inspiration and flourish. Her eagerness to burn through the pop rulebook was as much a wholehearted embrace of its aesthetics as it was a backhand against its convention - a great point well made, but also the kind that stings strongest and sharpest on its first iteration. As such, something a little more refined, a little less tumultuous and (dare I say) a little easier to pigeonhole within the pop landscape would be the shrewd step for a rising star to take in her position. The album in question, Tokyo Black Hole, turned out to be all of these things, wholeheartedly embracing the language of pop, giving Seiko’s respective penchants for chaos, deconstruction and forceful polarity a rest, and panning out as a defining release for her post-folk, major label era.
For the first time, we find ourselves with an Oomori Seiko release that can just as easily be called a
J-pop album, or even just
pop as it can a
Seiko album. Tokyo Black Hole is pop to its core: slick, well-produced, generally palatable pop. It’s not a description that inspires as much excitement as her early work’s raw edge or a cursive summary of Sennou’s twists and turns, but fortunately Seiko’s already watertight songwriting steps up a level here and furnishes the album with enough cohesive progressions, stylistic and sentimental variations, and fuckoff massive choruses to make it a doozy of an experience, all without sacrificing any sense of her distinctive force of personality. This is the kind of album that should be used as a yardstick to differentiate successful artists who ‘sell out’ from those headed for stardom.
It starts with a bang. Well, a full-handed downward strum on Seiko’s guitar: the first two songs are among most important in her career, charged with a sense of focus and resolve that demonstrate beyond doubt just how serious Seiko’s mainstream pop game has evolved to be. The opener
Tokyo Black Hole is a bittersweet, acoustic-driven number pulled off with great weight and confidence in a way that feels very much like a statement track for a wider audience. Tentative verses and a soaring chorus play out in a bittersweet ode to the empty, fleeting joy of Tokyo life and as Seiko’s voice rises and falls with the elusive urban euphoria she struggled to conjure and hold onto. As usual, she intersperses her scene with moments of quirk and irreverence - she teases a peek at her persona’s knickers at her skirt is blown up in a gust of wind, only to paint over the image in a well-placed menstrual smear - but the track also showcases a newfound maturity: the wild excitement that ran through her songwriting on Sennou were tempered into something much more measured and assured here, and it’s a sound that suits her well. This sets things up perfectly for the next track,
Magic Mirror. Perhaps even moreso than
Tokyo Black Hole, this is one feels absolutely vital to Seiko’s whole oeuvre and is an exemplary demonstration of her full strength. The gravitas and scale that ran through the previous song are dialled even further up here, but that track’s bittersweet reminiscence is swapped out for something fiercer, more decisive and startlingly ambitious:
Magic Mirror is nothing short of formidable. The broad shape of its structure sits comfortably within pop convention, but the song shifts gears expertly and with disarming frequency. It conveys a strong sense of urgency and uncertainty with its complex, busy arrangement and numerous flourishes (the striking guitar harmonies at the end of the verses; the fantastical string motif that cuts in after each line of the chorus; the tumultuous breakdown that follows the first chorus); I’m not sure what’s more impressive here between the razor-sharp sense of direction and focus that carries throughout every note of the song, or the momentous force offloaded by its powerhouse of a chorus. This song is cleverly structured in a number of ways, but most obvious is the difference in tone between the two choruses. Despite being practically identical, the differences in tension of the sections leading up them play out so that the first feels like a cathartic moment of exclamation and release, whereas the second is a pluckier victory lap. This development of tone is a fitting synecdoche for how Seiko balances and engages with potential listener attitudes to the album as a whole, and it goes a long way to foregrounding the confidence with which she establishes within and beyond the album’s opening salvo.
If these two songs feel like an epic overview of Oomori Seiko’s mission statement (both musical and lyrical), the following pair functions as more of a boots-on-the-ground immersion into the rush of commercial excitability.
生Kill the Time 4 You、、❤ and
Choshin Sedai Castella Standard MAGIC Maji KISS are slick pop songs full of energy and momentum, unafraid to plunge full on into the territory of all things gleeful and girly. The robust pop-rock arrangements provide enough substance to prevent
生Kill the Time 4 You、、❤ 's anime-esque hair-pulling, foot-stomping megaloadload of a chorus or
MAGIC Maji KISS’ swoon-ready verses from feeling overly destined for the sole purpose of being tentatively (or otherwise) imitated into hairbrushes in front of make-up mirrors; both tracks are a load of unpretentious fun and offer infectious hooks with a distinctly metropolitan tone appropriate to the album in general. This sense is consolidated by the album’s two bubbliest songs:
Aishiteru.com and
Sacchan no Sexy Curry are among the most congenial songs in Seiko’s canon and their placement at around the one-third to halfway mark pitches them as the album’s playful core, the presence of which is felt across the rest of its runtime. The former is in many ways the brightest, most inviting thing on offer here, catchy and forthright in a way that makes it one of the album’s most
necessary tracks, if not the best - it feels appropriate for pop album as confident as this to carry a single as approachable as
Aishiteru.com. On the other hand,
Sacchan no Sexy Curry goes so far into sweetness and whimsy that, on paper, it poses strong potential to be an irritating misstep of the most nauseating order. Featured as the OP for
Food Wars, this song boasts an easygoing lilt that is best qualified with various combinations of ‘cute-’, ‘pink-‘ and ‘fluffy-‘ toned vocabulary, but it lands square on as one of the album’s most effortlessly enjoyable moments with its cute chorus (the sentiment of which is effectively various iterations of
n’aww don’t be like that) and that triumphant, unmissable did-she-just-sing-that “sexy curry” coda that repeatedly makes me grin ear-to-ear. This one’s good for the soul.
Bubbly singles aside, Tokyo Black Hole isn’t without its share of quirky songs.
SHINPIN has an upbeat, off-kilter sense of ambiguity that bounces unpredictably its stop-start rhythms, dynamic arrangement and intriguing sense of melody. It all comes together for a danceable chorus, but Seiko keeps us on our toes for the most part here. On the other hand, where
SHINPIN is flashy and sporadic,
Kyuushoku Toubansei Hantai is slick to a fault. This track is one of the most understated and restrained in Seiko’s discography, carrying itself on subtle shifts of melody and a delicate, evasive melody that doesn’t throw itself at the listener the way most material here does, but is utterly irresistible once they find it. Seiko is typically at least somewhat exclamative as a vocalist; her voice has decent pitch but thin tone, and it tends to work best either when she works in expressive strain and personable inflections (which is most of the time) or when she calms things down and sings in more hushed tones. This is the only track here that sticks almost entirely to the latter register, and the results are spellbinding; it balances dynamic gentleness with a tentative, elusive undertone of tension that requires a few repeat listens to keep the full scope of. Most importantly, the track sets Seiko up to perform to her strengths in a completely different manner to the others: when she does eventually deliver a sustained, full-bodied note at the apex of the chorus, it comes after such a gradual ramping up of intensity and over such a delicate chord progression that her reedy, strained tone feels entirely appropriate and highly compelling.
Leaving aside
Kyuushoku Toubansei Hantai’s subtlety and the stunning opening pairing for a moment, it takes Tokyo Black Hole eight tracks to arrive at its most sensational highlight.
Gekiteki JOY! Before After is a messianically enlivening banger that stands as one of the most infectious, ambitious and incontrovertibly
fun tracks Seiko ever penned. Appropriately named (gekiteki = dramatic), the song cruises its way over verses full of suspense and swagger into an unexpectedly darker lurch of a pre-chorus. This introduces further tension and really screws things around both rhythmically and melodically, setting things up exactly right so that when she
then rolls into a ditsy, saccharine 4-bar segue in full levity, the listener has very little room for expectation when she drops in the mother of all huge choruses. This track is indecently catchy, in that bombastic, silly, impossibly enlivening way that many of ABBA’s hardest bops are irresistible for all but the most hard-hearted listeners.
Gekiteki JOY! is the kind of song that makes you want to grin at strangers on the street and walk with the kind of notable swagger that attracts filthy, envious looks for ostensible joy; it’s wholesomely, slightly edgy where appropriate, ecstatically danceable where inappropriate, and a hard and fast keeper out of all the songs in Seiko’s canon. This, in so many ways, is the perfect midway climax for Tokyo Black Hole.
Unfortunately, the album does not take very long to go downhill afterwards. The following track
Rock Me Rock Me is all things jaunty harmlessness and
Mushuusei Romantic ~Enchosen~ is an irritating duet with a cringe-inducing chorus. While these elements are largely successful elsewhere, these songs' arrangement and production are weak, falling to command the drama and engagement they seem to push for with their bland electric piano tones, minimal sense of inflection and mid-tempo waddle.
Dramatic Shiseikatsu is a slight step up with its pluckier melodies and semi-energetic chorus, but it’s a long way behind the album’s better cuts and comes off as prototype for kitixxxgaia’s middle-of-the-road tracks than anything else. Fortunately, things pick up as outlined with the stellar
Kyuushoku Toubansei Hantai just in time before for the the album to get back on track before coming to a close with the grandiose ballad
Shoujo Manga Shounen Manga. The track takes an expansive, polished approach with a strong nostalgic over in a way that makes for a highly suitable conclusion; its towering reminiscence and quaint brass arrangement are bold without venturing into extravagance, and the song’s epic scope rounds the album off in satisfying style. Never one to undercook things, Seiko supports this with one of her stronger lyric knockouts, weaving a touching portrait of lost youth from assorted perspectives and interactions.
It’s worth pointing out here that Seiko’s lyrics, translated* or untranslated, are a key part of her craft and are indispensable in elevating her songs from enjoyable, whacky pop music to the work of an artist of the most special quality, both in their own written value and in how they chime with her broader musical vision with all its twists, turns, jolts and excesses. The impetuous, eclectic scope of this is reflected in her writing, but much as she anchors her pick ’n’ mix of genres in rock-solid songwriting, she never takes her lyrical subject matter into the abstract. Much of the time, it’s as though she’s waging war with everyday subject matter while simultaneously acknowledging that she has herself been consumed by it. Her mishmash of voices is fiercely passionate in a way that feels at once bitter, powerful, and often distinctly girlish, ranging from bratty affectation to personal and/or performative confession, from observational incisiveness and wistful thinking to joyful exclamation cute fixation.
Shoujo Manga Shounen Manga covers all these bases and is virtually a cornerstone of her personally orientated early- to mid-career style (later works kitixxxgaia and Kusokawa Party would grapple more overtly with wider society on top of this). As such, we are treated to a range of themes including but not limited to a sordid, stained portrayal of romance (
Nostalgic J-Pop), generational impermanence (
Aoi Heya), the confused interplay between human relationships and multimedia clutter (Kimi to Eiga) and assorted feelings of worthlessness and performativity (
Saishuu Koen,
Ongaku o Suteyo、Soshite Ongaku He). It’s a good read, and its tonal scope raises the tone impressively, but most importantly, in true Seiko style, these lyrics are beautiful and painful in a way that bleeds through otherwise cluttered and disparately detailed imagery, turning them into a single compelling voice that couldn’t ever have belonged to anyone else.
And that just about covers all there is to be covered! While Sennou remains her most creative (and best) work, Tokyo Black Hole is in many ways the definitive Oomori Seiko album. In the following years kitixxxgaia would see her undertake an ambivalent effort to inflate her newly acquired status of Diplomatic Pop Queen to Revolutionary Pop Goddess, while Kusokawa Party was a far more aggressive reconfiguration of her most earnest themes; neither of them represent her in quite as much immediacy as Tokyo Black Hole and neither are half as inviting as a port of entry. That said, in its palatability Tokyo Black Hole is a little short on the unapologetic forcefulness and contrarianism that run fiercely through her other work, launching it continuously between the twin impressions of dissenting genius on the warpath and impossibly verbose drunk girl at a party. Zettai Shoujo and Sennou in particular were
weird albums, full of a weirdness that felt at once extravagant but also distinctly hers. The relative lack of this here may be seen as a shame by some and a relief by others, but while these songs and this tracklist are by no means too cohesive for their own good, they’re far from the full picture. It’s good to see that Seiko never saw Tokyo Black Hole as an excuse to get complacent in pop convention, as she swiftly moved on to bigger, more dramatic things in the form of kitixxxgaia. However, even as her most well-behaved album it still evidence her craft in great strength, and demonstrates a certain amount of focus and restraint that isn’t as clear in her other work to boot. As such, Tokyo Black Hole makes for a fantastic point of entry for a first-time listener and a thoroughly essential outing to anyone already partial to the most rewarding figure in pop today.
Shoujo Manga Shounen Manga
Abridged; trans. Kittys Blues
There are 34 clusters in this classroom who have 34 philosophies they don’t know what to do with
They lend and borrow CDs, movies and comics among themselves, searching for someone with the same soul
. . .
The student council president conceived a child with the teacher of the class next to the neighbor class
We loved each other, lusted for each others souls
The two of them kissed at the morning assembly
The two of them are covered with wounds
The two of them kissed
. . .
So that my 34 precious students
Won’t see how immature I am as a person
I always sing someone else’s songs
I will never sing of my own love
*lyric translations:
TOKYO BLACK HOLE: https://kimonobeat.tumblr.com/post/141944936521/oomori-seiko-lyrics-tokyo-black-hole
Magic Mirror: https://www.lyrical-nonsense.com/lyrics/seiko-oomori/magic-mirror/
Shoujo Manga Shounen Manga: https://kittysblues.tumblr.com/post/174238962373/shoujo-manga-shounen-manga-少女漫画少年漫画-lyrics
