Review Summary: pop will eat itself and you and me
Aimyon is-was-remains(?) bloody great. She writes very-much-mainstream pop songs for very-much-universal consumption, yet brings an uncommon edge to that art: her brand is sullen, her songs saccharine. At her best, her sardonic lyrics and irresistible knack for whimsy spur one another towards some of the finest contemporary J-pop classics (“Marigold”, “Harunohi”). At her worst - well, the stock answer might have been a vague mumble about some of her tracks being a little indistinct, but
Falling into your eyes Record doesn’t so much illuminate that page of Aimyon’s biography as flip the damn table on which the ever-precious desk lamp of negativity was placed. It enjoys a brief early grace period courtesy of opener “Futaba”, a spirited collection of all Aimyon’s most reliable tropes both musical and lyrical. This is nice. It is also completely inadequate preparation for how “Super Girl”, most super-cursed of all girls, follows through with, bar none, the most atrocious mix I have ever heard on a record this adamantly commercial. This is not a nitpick. This is not a preferential observation. This is the story of closing the tab the album was playing from on reflex within 15 seconds of exposure, certain of a dodgy upload, only to open Spotify and experience exactly the same simulation of impeding deafness twice in the space of a minute. I wish I could pinpoint “Super Girl”’s strengths or style beyond a jaunty string of bass and key grooves that occasionally support distantly anthemic waveforms, but so little of the song is even audible that we’ll give it its mercy killing and move the kuso on. A producer somewhere has blood on their hands (Spotify declines to name them, and honestly I’d be grateful in their shoes).
Unfortunately, this album’s missteps go far beyond the cosmetic: any pop fans who extol the value of stylistic versatility at all costs are going to have a field day here. “Getting Stronger, but so blue” is an acceptable foray into some mutually self-sabotaging RnB x pop-rock sonic suicide pact that would sound good next to any given song on the Oricon chart; “Your Heart” is a
borderline acceptable into stompy butt country-pop-rock that would sound good next to any given song on the Oricon chart --- and yet, somehow,
none of these manage to ‘sound good’ anywhere within a 5-track of “Heart”, aka
the Oricon ballad that you’ve already heard on every J-pop record you’ve ever spun, distinct only in that it opens with a totally incongruous electronic kick drum assault because reasons (sorry,
heartbeats). “Heart” itself is hardly any better or worse than the rest of its kin, and yet its mark seems to have been made - Spotify reliably informs me that it is the album’s most played song by a small distance, and it bears to remember that this shit dropped on a Warner Music sub-label and spent a total of
35 weeks on the charts. Spotify is also the reason that all song titles in this review are cited in erratically capitalised English - Jesus fuck, Aimyon, your producers or your localisation team: one of them must go.
The enabling factor behind the album’s spiralling issues is that Aimyon’s songwriting here is plain lightweight by her previous standards, too frequently fleeting in its emotional heft, far too frequently an echo of the same chart norms she popularised with such vitality. “Heart” is particularly unfortunate to that end, but “Into the land of Mystery” and “Figure” also see her stumble in the once-meticulous tiptoe she once trod along the line between the innocuously user-friendly and the gratingly vapid. The album’s concerted abundance of substance is continually undercut by its lack of the substantive - “The Mystery of Persona” finds itself crippled here, a feint at angstier territory that touches on broken hearts and rice omelettes that ends up too ephemeral not to ring hollow in such half-baked company. This pattern repeats itself perniciously: of the album’s 13 songs, none truly sound the same, yet almost all are interchangeably slapdash. Few belong together; it is rare to hear an album at once so componentially bland and yet fantastically dysfunctional. Still, all is is not completely lost: “My First Love is Crying” is a fine pop song, and as its chorus eponym eponyms in touchingly photogenic style, one of the stormclouds of bad faith swirling above this Record’s commercial arcade-desert acquires an argentine edge. Good - but the best part of this record by a vast margin is the first minute or so of “3776”. Aimyon’s arrangement transitions from a nod at lo-fi hip-hop to all-out doey country pop with the kind of effortlessness that gives me some hope for her future if genre frittering remains the order of the day. Her talents are intermittently, acutely apparent throughout this record - all the more shame that so much of them goes to waste.
