MASSIVE DAMAGE

Introduction
After nearly two years since her last Japanese album hit the market, Utada Hikaru has released the follow up to her largely successful 'ULTRA BLUE,' entitled 'HEART STATION.' So when two sexy guys like Grungi Ankhfire and myself got our hands on the album, we decided to review it together and look at it from a multiperspectival view and combine our thoughts and analyses.

Here are some of the basics about the album:

Tracklist

1. Fight The Blues
2. HEART STATION
3. Beautiful World
4. Flavor Of Life -Ballad Version-
5. Stay Gold
6. Kiss & Cry
7. Gentle Beast Interlude
8. Celebrate
9. Prisoner Of Love
10. Take 5 (テイク 5)
11. Boku wa Kuma (ぼくはくま I'm a Bear)
12. Niji-iro Bus (虹色バス Rainbow Colored Bus)
13. Flavor Of Life (Bonus Track)


Much like ULTRA BLUE, HEART STATION has a lot of advance singles, six of them in fact, or seven if you count the bonus Flavor of Life, which appears twice on the album in the ballad and original mix forms. This means that half (or more) of the album has been heard already, so the exciting part of the album for those who have heard the singles already are, of course, the tracks that are only on the album.

So without further ado, let's get to some reviewin'!

Helm's Assessment:

Finally. It's felt a lot longer than it's actually been, but I've been really anticipating this ever since ULTRA BLUE came out and simply blew me away. I had never really followed Utada Hikaru before that, except for seeing the Keep Tryin' Promotional Video and liking her theme for the game Kingdom Hearts, Simple and Clean. ULTRA BLUE is easily one of my top J-Pop albums, and a favorite that I come back to every so often. I enjoy it every single time, so my expectations for HEART STATION were pretty high, of course.

So, finally HEART STATION arrived, and I listened. My first reaction upon finishing listening to this album was that "This is the best album I've heard so far in 2008." My second reaction, though, was that it feels like this has been done before, and it has--by Utada herself. I'm just going to say it: This is ULTRA BLUE 2. The album feels like an extension of ULTRA BLUE in the sense that the songs aren't very different sounding stylistically. There isn't anything surprising here: You still have Utada singing with several layers of her own voice over lots of simplistic micro-melodies that cling to your brain, which are accompanied by upbeat percussions, and to top it off they are of course expertly mixed and mastered. This is what Utada does and she does it well, however, it's not as good this time, and it might even be getting a little old. There is less variety, less Passion (pun alert!) and less originality.

In spite of that (and my caustic tone), these are still some very, very good songs that I enjoy quite a bit, with my favorite probably being Kiss & Cry, along with Heart Station, Fight the Blues, and Flavor of Life. Most of the new tracks are pretty good, although I wish there were more of them; I really feel like she releases too many advance singles and the album starts to feel like a compilation album, especially in the first half. (Also, Take 5 is cut tragically short...which may have been the idea.) The melodies that she made here are some of the strongest and best she's made. They're engaging, intricate and touching, yet they have trouble standing out when placed side by side, which leads to...

One of the problems that HEART STATION has is that it never bothers to really slow things down, and I think the album suffers a great deal because of it. The upbeat tempo throughout is almost nonstop. The singles she's released from the past 2 years that made it onto the album have been almost entirely uptempo, with the exception being Boku wa Kuma. These upbeat singles are stacked next to each other so tightly that it just feels like a big blur when I listen. This is due to the very apparent lack of pacing, and the album actually starts to sound kind of samey. The lack of breaks or changes in pace doesn't let the songs set themselves apart, and I think she realized this because she opted to put the Ballad Version of Flavor of Life in the fourth slot for this album. Why is this noteworthy? Simple, really. While I at first objected to the Ballad Version being there over the original mix, it's obvious to me now that the regular single version of Flavor of Life would blend in too much with the five tracks that surround that fourth slot. It's almost as if she was putting the album together and said to herself, "Oh shit! I forgot to write some ballads!" It was put there for a reason, and that reason is to try (furtively) to give the listener a breather because as I said before, the rest of this album is a pretty active listen. Ironically, one of the slow parts of Celebrate she says "Stop...let me breathe." That's about all you'll get to soak in the tracks' differences and nuances.

The bottom line: We all know that people are going to buy her stuff up because of rampant fanboy/girlism for one of the biggest pop stars in Asia, but let's not sell Utada short: there are some damned good songs on here. She is still putting out incredibly catchy and enjoyable music that I think has quite the lasting appeal. As firmly as I believe that last statement, I'm hoping that Utada does a little different the next time around. I'm not saying that she has to reinvent herself, but that she's gotten a little too comfortable with her own sound and that she's not challenging herself enough. However, with her new English album on the horizon we may see some new ideas come to life as she tries to reach different audiences, and it'll be interesting to see what she has in store for the different markets.

Grung's two cents:

Now that I've gotten a hold of Utada Hikaru's new album, I can confirm what I feared from the singles : It's a "disappointment". But don't you go thinking that I don't like it, it's still really good, just not as good as I had hoped it to be. I think that there are a number of things wrong with this album.

As a start, take the tracklist itself : 7 tracks out of 13 were already released on singles before the release, and even if that's just one more than for ULTRA BLUE, they're not as well placed. I mean, after the first track, you get 5 single tracks in a row. That's just too much, and you rapidly feel you're listening to some kind of singles compilation. What's worse, the album closes with Flavor of Life, the ballad version of which you already heard on track 4. Add to that Boku wa Kuma, which may be cute and all, but can't really be compared to Utada's usual tracks, and you're left with something quite weaker than her previous effort.

That said, the singles were good for the most part, so that kinda makes up for the poor ordering.
And after a fair number of listening sessions, as you become used to all the tracks, the "compilation effect" tends to wear off. But another characteristic of the album surfaces then : it's less varied than ULTRA BLUE.

At first, I was sad not to be listening to a second ULTRA BLUE, but after I while, I saw it was for the better. The softer overtone that's dominating HEART STATION kind of make room for a future album with more bells and whistles, while letting Utada try some new stuff. Because if you listen to her back catalog, you'll see that she never went that far into the "electro" territory. Before ULTRA BLUE, she was doing stuff that was close to R'n'B, then she did an album really driven by her voice (that was what really stood out from ULTRA BLUE for me, more than the instrumentations, even if they were her best so far), and now this.

With HEART STATION, Hikki retains the grooviness of her earlier works but modifies her sound palette. The result is a song where vocals really become an instrument, more than something dominating the whole album. Of course, that's not to say she sings too quietly or that her voice isn't well used. But I found myself humming instrumental parts almost as often as I mumbled vocal melodies. And that is something that never happened with her last album, where the singing had a more prominent role in almost all songs. And in addition, the impression I got from HEART STATION was that she somewhat used more layering than before, which certainly explains partly my feelings about this album's vocal melodies...

All in all, HEART STATION is still an awesome album. Take 5, for example, is one of those track I'm sure I'll get back to quite frequently and for a long time. Beautiful World also is one of my favourites Hikki tracks since the release of the single. So there's a lot to love about the disc, despite some "disappointing" aspects. But now that she did something a little bit more toned down, I sure hope she's going to deliver another epic record like ULTRA BLUE was. Still, good job, Ms. Utada !

Reactions:

Helmholz says: It's clear that we agree on a lot of things, including what you called the "compilation effect," which is compounded when you take into consideration that one of those thirteen tracks is an interlude that's not very long, and that Flavor of Life at the end is just a bonus track. Will future reprints even include that one? Not to mention Take 5 really feels like a rip-off because of the way it ends. Although to be entirely fair, ULTRA BLUE had a lot of advance singles, an interlude, and COLORS which was on her first Singles Compilation before it was on an album. Seriously, it took three and a half years for COLORS to be on an album. That seems to be kind of cheap when you think about it.

I'm less familiar with her older stuff so after listening to these two albums it is clear to me that this woman is in love with her own voice. As you said, her voice becomes an instrument for her and she does this while singing the main parts and I think it might be just a little too much. Maybe she should learn a new instrument.

Other than that I'm not sure how you can not call this a second ULTRA BLUE, as some of the songs sound like they were just leftover from the last album. But that's what I think!

And Ms. Utada, indeed. She's single again now, right?

Grungi says: Correct, she is now single. But back to the album, even if I do agree that a couple songs on HEART STATION could almost have made it on ULTRA BLUE, my opinion that it wasn't ULTRA BLUE II comes from the album as a whole. To give an analogy, ULTRA BLUE was akin to riding a rollercoaster, whereas HEART STATION felt more like cruising on a highway. That's exaggerating, of course, but still, it depicts what I felt quite well.

And as for me, one of the few things that I didn't really agree with was the fact that you call listening to HEART STATION a "pretty active listen". On the contrary, even after quite a few listens, I'm still thinking that this new album makes for better background music than her previous offering, but as is almost everything about music, it's very subjective.

But one conclusion that comes quite clearly out of this little joint review is that, yes, it is a very good album, albeit some weaknesses, but that each listener will probably get something different from it, depending on their tastes. And isn't that what music should be all about ?

Labels: 2008, album, HEART STATION, helmholz, j-pop, music, reviews, Utada Hikaru