The following is a repost from my old blog. This past year held the tragic news that producer Tsunku got throat cancer and had his vocal cords removed. Altho I haven’t been a fan of the direction of the group since the late 00s, I still love the old records and if you count yourself as a fan of the music and are not saddened by this event, you are a horrible person and deserve to fail at every stupid thing you do. This is definitely one of my strangest and most thorough reviews and I’m going to try not to read it as much as possible before I change my mind. And now, an excuse to use the horizontal rule:

Needs Moar Tsunku

I was messing around the other day with hooking my boom box to my 8-track. Long story, but the point is the CDs got switched around. I cued up a track that I thought was going to something I recorded earlier. It was something else. But I didn’t place it right away. I was using a stereo cable into a mono input. It didn’t notice the mistake listening to my own recording because it was in mono. But now I was only hearing half the song. The hilarious half? Maybe.

It was Rainbow 7.

Yes, you can do this digitally. It might even sound a little better. But I never had a reason to try. And I’m sure other people have noticed this, slowly taken off their headphones, closed their eyes, and tried to forget, tried to forget….

No, I have to post it. I think it’s cool. You can hear down into the mix, not just the backing voices (sometimes multiple Tsunkus or other backups), but there’s a lot going on that you just can barely hear in the full mix. They spent time putting in that in there. For me, that’s a lot of the greatness of it. If you have not heard this music at all, this is not a good place to start. If you have and not really gotten why I keep going on about it, maybe it helps. Maybe it seems even dumber. But I don’t think so. I can’t make you like it, but maybe I can get you to respect the process of it? RE-SPECT.

OK, I was gonna be clever about this, but I will just post each full song. You can listen to as much as you like. I dunno know if I’ll do this for each album now. It’s undoubtedly my turn from offbeat hobby to unhealthy obsession. And for this, I blame…you. Yes, you. ENABLERS! Anyway, whatever, it’s cool…I can stop whenever I want, it’s cool:

Still with me? I like the weird little keyboard sound that shadows the voices (it goes in and out). There’s also a couple time the mix gets chopped up by manually moving the faders. You could hear that anyway, but that’s a crazy thing to do on a professional pop record, you can do it a lot cleaner if you want. It’s like he did it for the hell of it. Much like…this entire track makes no sense. I guess this isn’t that popular an album on the whole. I love it. It might have the most weird shit like this of any of the records. Maybe they don’t get away with everything in most people minds, but they’ll try anything, and that’s what I want in a producer and a group.

Suuure…you kinda knew that stuff was there. He can’t be on every track tho, right? RIGHT?!!?

Nope, that’s Uchida You! Because sometimes…9 girls is just one short? Well, she gets paid a whole lot less. Maybe they need some kind of generic baseline voice in there? Maybe she lays down a guide voice. Don’t know. There’s a little bit of male voice in there, too, but it’s Hiroaki Takeuchi. Because 1 male singer in a 9 (+1) girl vocal group is not enough. I can’t find info on either of these singers, they are just session people it seems.

I like the backing to this one a lot. It takes out most of the bass part so you can hear what some of the other parts are doing. I like the string (synth) part in the pre-chorus a lot. And you have to give to to T-dog on this one, his part sounds pretty good by itself. Of course he’s helped out by Atsuko Inaba. Almost gave him too much credit there.

This song is nothing special backing-wise. It’s a great song. There’s some little things. Chorus work is credited to “AKIRA” here…I really hate these one-name credits, some people are less than proud to be working on this stuff. Maybe that’s his (studio) stage name, whatever, you can’t google it, dude. He’s no session guy, he’s also doing the whole backing. I always wondered about the weird sound effects in the background of this song. There’s like, seagulls and…a dentist’s drill? What is that? Why is that? No clarification from this mix.

Ah, a live track…what could go wrong? [Do I have put an additional warning for fans of this song NOT to listen to this? I just did.]

Yeah, it’s not really a live track. And that’s not Tsunku. But it is a guy, Yuichi Takashi (in addition to the mysterious Uchida You). That’s not just any guy, he’s one of H!P’s best arrangers (who deserve an entire post themselves), so don’t laugh too hard at his pitch-shifted ass (Unless being an H!P arranger is already worth laughing at, even odds.) Think of the bind they were in: a duo song and only 1 girl backup singer?! Dude stepped up. “I’ll just pitch-shift it! No one will know.” No one will know… And introducing the Hello!Project Wonderful Hearts Tour Staff as “The Wotas”. Why not just record that part live for real? You just don’t get it do you?

This mix is cool for the guitar doubling the chorus. Hiroaki Takeuchi again popping up here and there, interesting harmonies.

This song is all the girls. And by “the girls”, I include You Uchida. This track is unique (or rare) in crediting actual members with additional chorus work, Ai & Yossie. This ruins my theory that additional backups are used just to free up the girls’ time and/or the company’s money and…wait…I’m trying to make sense of things again. There’s no hope in that, folks, just enjoy it. This is a beautiful song no matter what you do to it. I tend to skip over it in the car. I can enjoy it even more knowing there’s twice the Yossie. You can hear it too…they know what they’re doing, just go with it.

No surprises here, there was no attempt to hide. Still interesting. Check out the bass notes on the chorus! If you were hating Tsunku for this one, forget it. It’s Takeuchi again.

Now there’s Tsunku, Tsunk’n it up again. Another one you knew he was there, but he does some weird stuff to his vocals just because he can.

More pitch shifting! You can hear some other fx stand out.

Finally, this was the first song I noticed (in its 1st incarnation) with “the voice” that goes through the whole chorus. He almost goes goes out of his way to sound like a weird old man on this one and make it stand out in the mix, unlike a lot of the other ones that are just beefing up the bottom end (…sounds like something…someone other than Tsunku would…nevermind). Also credited on this track is “Siroh Tsubuyaki” on “tsubayaki” (chatter). This could be Anime voice actor Shiro Tsubuyaki as a 2nd male voice. It does sound like it’s doubletracked or two guys on the chorus heard this way. Maybe he’s doing the “HU” part. Maybe it’s an inside joke. I don’t know if you noticed, but this guy has a bit of a queer sense of humor. Strange I mean.

….”Oi” is right.

If you need the files for some reason, lemme know.

No one asked for the files. You do not need the files. %

Oh right, you can buy the CD. Buy the CD.