Puffy Covers Redux

Puffy Covers is a little more than a week away... and in the spirit of celebrating it's upcoming release; more covers!





My hunch is this is from a secondary school's annual festival (as seen in the film Linda Linda Linda... which if you have not seen... SEE IT!)... and neither are really well executed. But I do like the fact that there are two vocalists and they seem to have a bit of fun with their stage routine.

And this is not even the end of covers to come!

Okuda and Inoue: Asia no Junshin

Stumbled across this video of Tamio Okuda and Yosui Inoue performing Asia no Junshin. Neat stuff, even if the performance itself is a little uneven.

I hope everyone had a great New Years and I look forward to doing more writing about Puffy, which of all my projects is the one I have the most affection for.

Solo Solo

Just a quick post up for the long weekend. This is a really nifty concert vid* of Ami singing "Always Dreamin' About You" and Yumi singing "Watashi No Nozomi."



My best guess was this was from the Spike tour as their hair styles are similar. Anthony and Hareonna20 confirmed it was from the "2001: A Halfway of Space Odyssey." Likewise Ami and Yumi have done solo songs in concert as recently as Bring it. (I was wrong in my initial speculation, ergo some corrections Thanks guys!)

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving weekend (or for those outside of North America...a great weekend)!


(* also a nifty way to avoid doing my 15 post up... which I am still working on)

Time For Action Concert Clips

Not much to report, the Time For Action Tour is over and thus we enter the fugue state that is between Puffy albums. I will skim for Puffy news and while I hope Ami and Yumi will be doing news, erm blogging worthy things... Beyond maybe some summer festival appearances I am not sure what that might be.

Anyways here are a few videos from the 2011 Time For Action Tour. Hopefully more will crop up as it was broadcast on WOWOW. It doesn't look as polished a performance as Tour 10 Final, but then again it looks like Ami is hale and the weather is agreeable. Yumi looks great. I have no idea what Ami is thinking...


P.S. Back from Singapore. Only cool Puffy thing I encountered was Singapore Airlines on their entertainment system had both "Bring it!" and "Thank You" for on demand music selections. However the translation for the song titles I deeply suspect was Japanese to Chinese to Romanji... they were really, really odd.

Compare and Contrast: Hataraku Otoko

Hataraku Otoko is one of my favorite Puffy covers. It is rocking Puffy wrapped around a core of Tamio Okuda. It is also one of the least faithful covers I have ever heard (though DEVO's cover of the Hendrix classic Are You Experienced is right up there).

Where I thought the original Unicorn version of Hataraku Otoko is from a point in time in rock music I have a lot of problems with, much of which you have heard me apply to Andy Sturmer's old band Jelly Fish. It is more liad back and maybe playful... but it rubs me the wrong way. That is not taking anything away from Tamio Okuda or Unicorn. Tamio is as close to a living legend as one can get in the Japanese music scene, but sometimes even a vastly talented artist can deliver a clunker. Just ask me how I feel about Puffy's Wake Up, Make Up.

Puffy's version disassembles the song and rebuilds it to something I can listen to over and over... The only resemblance it has is with the original promotional video which uses some of the same shots.

So I was skimming YouTube and came across a very recent version of Hataraku Otoko by Unicorn and a the version Puffy did slightly further back at their Shibuya AX concert. It was interesting to see how both Unicorn and Puffy tackled the song. I'll let you watch then sort it out in comments.

A Video From Way Back

Going with something not related to "Thank You" for the weekend...

I am very shaky on the song and more important the line up in this particular live vid. Maybe you all can fill in the blacks.

R.G.W. Bonus Concert Footage Review

Bundled with the deluxe version of the R.G.W. single were six songs from Puffy’s 2010 Gekidan Asesu tour. I am really enjoying that this single is jam packed with six concert clips, which is about double what previous singles had. From reading Puffy’s blog , this might be a function of Puffy being between albums and serving as a way to fire up fans. For me it works, but I am somewhat qualified in that assessment.

This concert footage is from Puffy’s July 11, 2010 show at Showa Women’s University Hitomi Memorial Hall.* The quality of the footage is on par with the clips from the Bring it! singles, though to me it looks like they are fewer cameras and some of the shots are not as well composed. Hitomi Memorial Hall looks to be a step down from Shibuya-AX (which is relatively close by) and my impression is mainly that it is not as loud of a venue. The audio is crisp and very well engineered.


My overall impression is if you like the slower and poppy Puffy songs you will be very happy with the Gekidan Asesu concert selections. I did like that guitars were the usual driving instrument but this is not nearly as pronounced as the past. Both lead and rhythm seem to be a little less aggressive and seem to default to a surf revival sound. Keyboards felt more subdued than the last set of concert selections. Drums and bass remained good, but the bass volume could have been turned up a notch. It could be the rest of the concert was electrifying. It might be the venue was not optimal for recording. For me there was something lacking with the songs selected, but I cannot exactly put my finger upon it.

A big plus on these selections is that Ami seems more engaged this go around. Yumi seems a little detached. That is just an impression based upon past selections. I could very well be wrong as this is a fraction of the concert. Both Ami and Yumi look great, but a totally different make-up style than previous tours. Think more like their Lavuschka adverts than Tour 10. Yumi is back to short hair, Ami’s just past halfway down her back. They are not trying to look older or younger than they are, which I find to be nice.

Continuing to drift in Cosmopolitan Magazine territory… I will note Ami and Yumi are dressed up as color blind sailors. While I appreciate they do their own thing when it comes to appearance, the fine line between eccentric and ridiculous has been crossed. I now miss the plaid overalls from Fever*Fever and I never thought I would hear myself say that. However the dancer’s costumes totally take the sting from a wardrobe selection I do not like.

The overall track selection is hit and miss for me and it goes as follows:
1. Nice Buddy
2. Ai no Shirushi
3. Circuit No Musume
4. complaint
5. Boogie Woogie No 5
6. Youkai Puffy

Nice Buddy is one of my favorite Sturmer songs of Puffy’s and this rendition is a bit slower and mellow. I like the dueling bass and electric guitars near the end. It is pretty rare (if at all) Puffy’s bassist ever goes front and center and I thought that was nifty. One of the nice things about Puffy is that they give room for their backing band to contribute. Over all I liked Nice Buddy.

Ai no Shirushi is song that plays tug of war with me. I enjoy the studio version and (going against my usual preferences) the remix on An Illustrated History / PRMX also. As a concert selection it rarely works for me, it is too little of a song in a big room. That combined with a more subdued performance it becomes a performance that doesn’t work for me.

Circuit no Musume was not a selection I was looking forward to… similar reasons to the above. But for whatever reason the tone of the concert made this one fun. It always cracks me up when Ami and Yumi mug to the camera and break the glass barrier as-it-were. Backing vocals were fun and different making Circuit no Musume is an unexpectedly great track. I like it very much when Ami and Yumi surprise me.

The studio version of complaint via honeycreeper is a track I have always liked, so I was looking forward to hearing a live version. Of the concert footage for the RGW single, it is the fastest paced and comes together nicely. The guitarists are slightly out of synch with their backing vocals, but that is a minor quibble. I could listen to live songs like this all day and be perfectly happy.

Ska without horns? It feels weird to not have Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra supporting Boogie Woogie No 5, I am feeling spoiled from the Tour 10 Final live version. With a flip to the more electrified verison, I found myself not missing the horn support at all. That came as a surprise.

Also lots and lots of backup dancers… which is an understatement for Boogie Woogie No 5. So far as a visual performance I can take or leave dancing, but as it is in the show, it was good. The dancers costumes are ridiculously awful however. Good synchronization with all involved and Ami and Yumi do more dancing than as they say, a drunk person could handle… This was very cool to see. Boogie Woogie No 5 fit the tone and tenor of the show well and at times was kicked up a notch.

Youkai Puffy… of the six songs I was most looking forward to this one. As some might recall from my review of honeycreeper that this was one of my favorite songs from that album. Or I paraphrase it was a barn burner of a Skooby Do episode on meth. This version is something of a missed opportunity and while I still liked it… there were things I did not. The aforementioned dancers are en masse on stage then peel off to a pair. Then about a third of the way through the selection Ami and Yumi go off stage and their dance choreographer comes on stage.

There are a couple of funny tidbits to be had, but end result is she goes through a Youkai Puffy dance for the crowd. However you know something is padded when the producers of the DVD literally fast forward through the grindingly slow bits. I won’t say this killed it for me, but Youkai Puffy is a song built for speed not pit stops.

Ami and Yumi come back on stage and with a slow lead in Youkai Puffy gets back on the rails. The only benefit to the padded dance instruction is the crowd is now moving in synch with everyone on stage. I wish this selection has been more cohesive because the two parts were both great it was that middle part that put me off.

The bonus concert clips from R.G.W. were good fun. I would not categorize it as my favorite live footage as it felt slightly toned down. After watching the selections a half dozen times I was still thrilled to see Ami and Yumi's live performance. Their stage presence and ability to sing live are things I have greatly appreciated over the years and here is not exception.

Overall grades:
Music: B
Performance: B+
Production: B-


*say that five times fast…

h/t to the great Peace. Pop. Puffy for some of the concert details

Chameleon Diamonds In The Rough

Just a couple of videos that I came across while mining for Puffy material. The end results may be a touch rough, but I really admire these kids trying to wrangle Puffy songs.








Unrelated notes... A full RGW single review will be done over the weekend, so look for that next week. I have a slew of reviews in process that I will hopefully firm up when I have the end of the month off from my day gig.

Countdown Japan 0910: Asia no Junshin

A quick post up. A clip from Countdown Japan 0910. Ami and Yumi are in pretty good form, though they go off key at a couple points their energy is great. I am not sure how I feel about their current band, I was just getting used to the last one... Anyways, enjoy Asia no Junshin... I will be doing final edit for the next album review and hopefully get that posted up on Monday.



(h/t to bonsaipark for finding the vid)

A Flashback To The Past...

Sorry gang, other commitments have been eating away at writing time, but I came across this video today. Fairly dated but a version of Asia No Junshin one I have not seen....



I would probably describe this one as more fun than good, but it is for a TV spot so most of the problems stem from that. Hearing Glay and Ami do Asia No Junshin live, from roughly the same time was really great however.

Have a great weekend. Hopefully I will have more opportunity to write over Thanksgiving week. That also implies free time to listen to music, which is a major benefit!

Wedding Bell "live"

Someone - maybe TofuUnion? - posted a link to this in a comment a little while back, and it's probably worth dedicating a late post to:


This is actually one of my favorite songs on Bring It!, and this "live" video is well shot, but the lip-syncing really bothers me. They never used to do this, but I'm seeing it more and more... it's not just them either, but it seems industry-wide in Japan. They're following our lead, which is pretty unfortunate in this case - one of the things I always liked about Japanese pop music was that even the biggest, most popular and often least-talented singers always had to sing their own songs live on TV. So you'd finally get to hear how awful Leah Dizon really was without any studio tricks to back her up. (Go ahead, click the link and fast forward a bit - but I warn you, it's painful. It's saying something that AKB48 is actually the more talented bunch in that video.) Really separated the wheat from the chaff.

Anyway, what's the point of watching somebody just mouth the words to an album track?

But this is not really the case any longer, at least not with some shows, and even Puffy are now lip-syncing through most of their TV appearances. This performance seems to have some live instrumentation and possibly vocals over it, but it's mostly just them trying to look like they're singing. Which wouldn't have been so obvious at the time it was filmed, but is now.

EDIT: Anthony pointed this video out in the comments, and I thought I'd add it here because I think it's kind of hilarious. Puffy + SMAP singing the same song (all together), and this one sounds like it's not lip-synced - although it may have just been re-recorded in advance for this show. It still looks a little too effortless.

New single! Dareka ga

PUFFY have a new single out, and pretty quick after the release of BRING IT! It's the theme song to some new Naruto anime, I guess, and I haven't had time to read much about it yet but it'd surprise me if it wasn't a cover. I'll have a bit more on it tomorrow, but here's a live version of it below to tide you over (and sorry about the low, somewhat out of sync audio - the options on YouTube are limited):


btw, unrelated but I have been waiting a long time to see this again:

Ami/Yumi solo, a newish interview, and a lost TV commercial

TofuUnion found some great recent Puffy videos on YouTube that I hadn't seen before. I admit I don't do daily Puffy searches there, but I do look around quite often, so I think these are probably worth re-posting - if I hadn't seen them, I doubt I'm the only one.

This is my favorite - Ami playing "Always Dreamin' About You" and Yumi playing "Watashi no Nozomi", both solo:


I'm a sucker for seeing them actually play their instruments. I know they can, they just either never seem to want to, or more likely are encouraged not to. And it's super-rare to actually see video of them playing solo like this. Apparently this is from the "2001: a halfway of space odyssey" concert.

Here's a recent interview from DokoGaTV, which is not something I'd heard of but is apparently a Hawaiian TV station that also now broadcasts in Japan:


It's not the greatest interview, honestly - it feels like something that should have happened in conjunction with the "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi" show launch. It feels like they're past all this. He does ask one question about honeycreeper, but it's a question any of their fans would already know the answer to. I really wonder who this interview is intended for.

But it's still interesting only in that it's subtitled for an American audience. It's not often these days that we get to see newly translated interviews with them.

And lastly, a 1 minute commercial for cooking oil. I know exactly when this is from - it was this campaign, so 2005/2006. But I've never seen this full-length ad - you don't see these a lot on Japanese TV, where the ads usually come at you rapid fire.


I'm amused at the fact that when Ami flips the food up in the air, it clearly comes down all over the place despite the editor's valiant attempt at obscuring it.

Puffy at J-Wave Live 2000 + 8 Video

I posted about this show back in August, but at that time all I had was a little photo, a set list and show report. Well, how about the performance itself? Some kind soul has granted your wish:


Doesn't appear to be all of it - it's missing two songs ("Basket Case" and "Kore ga Watashi no Ikirumichi"). But still, at almost 20 minutes, it seems to be worth your while. Honestly, I can't really tell as my new computer is now in the shop and I'm typing this on an ancient Celeron PC that can't even play Veoh or YouTube video. I can see little snippets before it hitches up and freezes. Sigh.

Puffy at Rock in Japan Festival 2008 - Video!

Thanks to timwamoonface for posting this at the puffyamiyumiworld.com forums, and obviously to Uutygfavailable for uploading to YouTube in the first place.

You probably read my previous post about Puffy's appearance at Rock in Japan Festival 2008; now we've got video of the event:

Basket Case


Asia no Junshin


My Story


They don't sound the best I've heard them sound live, but I think partly it's the venue and having to use the house sound system. They never sound as good at festivals as they do when playing alone - just one more reason why festivals suck.

And for those who care, click the following link for a bonus clip of Kimura Kaela singing at the same festival - in a miniskirt! Probably not the most advisable outfit when the cameraman is shooting from below the stage.

My Story "Live"

These are a little old now, but I hadn't posted 'em yet so I may as well.

Japanese music shows are really starting to suck. I don't remember them going so heavy on the pre-recorded instrumentation and the backing tracks 7 or 8 years ago. The band may as well not even be there. And cutting a four minute song down to two minutes?? That's a low blow. This is Music Japan, and this barely qualifies as "live":


Another one - from The M:


Blah. It's not Puffy's fault, though - I want to hear them play it for real.

Kimi to Ohtobai Live at Shibuya AX

I didn't upload this, and I wasn't planning on doing so. But since somebody else did, I'll link to it here since a) most of you will find it anyway, b) it gives me a chance to talk about it, and c) it's now out of print, so you probably can't buy it (CDJapan is out). Look around for it anyway. The DVD (from the "All Because of You" limited edition CD) is a lot better - the sound, the picture quality, the whole feel of it. It's way more immersive. Unfortunately there's not even a high-quality YouTube link for this. Watch it all the way through - it builds, just like it does on the album.


This is my favorite song on honeycreeper, and watching them play it live is almost like watching some other band. They're not the bubbly happy people they usually are (except for Shigeo Naka, who's working hard!). Something is happening to Ami over the years - she used to be the "cute" one, and she was always smiling, and so animated on stage. Now she's absolutely deadly sometimes, when the mood is right. I kinda like it.

[Yumi's just always been that way :) ]

By the way, the other videos from this show are also up - watch 'em while they last. But please, buy the DVD if you can!

Ami's Brian Setzer Hot Rod Guitar

I posted in the midst of a drunken stupor a while back about Puffy's guitars - they really can play, you know. (Who am I still trying to convince?) Well, I didn't even realize I had this video - this is Ami showing off her Gretsch Brian Setzer Hot Rod to Setzer himself. She says she bought it because it's so beautiful, even though it's too big for her.

And what the heck, even though it's not my favorite song, I've left their performance of "Tokyo I'm On My Way" tacked on afterwards.


I like how soft-spoken Setzer is; he even sounds a little nervous! The guy's a legend and he acts like that. Sounds like he's even trying his hand at a little Japanese at the beginning of the clip.

By the way, you too can own a purple Gretsch G6120SH Brian Setzer Hot Rod guitar, for the reasonable sum of just $2,450.

PUFFY on PopJam

Aaaand, we're back. Sorta. My house guests have moved on; hopefully I haven't missed any big Puffy news over the past few days. (I threw that single announcement up in about five minutes on my way out to Coney Island the other day.)

Anyway, here's a somewhat random video to celebrate my return. It's Puffy on PopJam from a year or so ago. The performance of "Hataraku Otoko" was posted previously on YouTube by somebody else, but they had cut the little interview that came afterwards for some reason. I've now restored it. And the commercials too! (Ok, you don't care about those, but I just didn't bother cutting them out.)

I know, it's not much, but it's something.

Here you go:

All Because of You Live

I've been sitting on a couple of these videos for a few days and other people went and posted 'em first. I may as well still link to them here.

You've seen the promotional video, now check out PUFFY singing "All Because of You" live (more or less).

Music Fair:


Hey! Hey! Hey!:


Music Japan (with a bit of interview at the top):

Aspect ratio's off on that last one. Annoying.

I'm trying not to be too negative about it but I think the weakness of the song really shows when it's played live. It just sounds awkward. I think the measure of any band is really how they sound live, and that's true of songs as well. PUFFY is a great live band, but this is not a great live song.

I'm looking for something that I can feel excited about posting again...