New Puffy Single! "Moyers"

Last week the new single "Moyers" by Puffy dropped. 

Many thoughts about this one, but it feels like a Puffy song which is good.  I will encapsulate in a review next week. No rush, their pace these days doesn't require it. :)  

Puffypipoyama Live TV Performance and PV

Here is a live version of Puffy's new song Puffypipoyama.

Using japanwebproxy.com you can view the PV here.

Not a great live performance, but given the nature of Puffypipoyama itself that does not really bother me.  Some songs, even great ones, do not translate well live.  The band being there to faux play along is even more rediculous than normal "live" Japanese TV show performances.

After watching the PV itself, it is fairly entertaining on a visual level.  Puffypipoyama is not good, at best it is derivative of Datsu Dystopia.  If an album of songs like either are on the docket for Puffy's next release it really makes me question the direction Puffy is taking.

Is Puffy trying to win new fans by changing their sound?

Is Puffy following a trend in the Japanese music scene?

The just following orders from the distributor?

Valid questions... but of course there are probably no good answers.

That said, Puffypipoyama is better than Wake Up, Make Up, which I realize is a low bar.

SWEET DROPS PV

We have been waiting for SWEET DROPS for a while now and been treated to snippets of the studio version. Over all I am very happy with the video and its production values are very high.

The production values snap me back to Hiyori Hime and the story arch reminds me of that as their relationship is adversarial with Yumi playing an angel and Ami taking on a devil. What I think ties the video together better is adding in the playfulness of Joining a Fan Club. It is also an interesting take to not have Ami or Yumi star in the video and rather tell the story of young love being supported or thwarted by Ami and Yumi. I am not sure if I entirely get the creepy robot guy at the end, maybe there is some sort of context or reference that went over my head.

The general sound of SWEET DROPS very much stays within the songs found on Thank You. It is tight and well produced. In my mind it sort of feels like an homage to Matthew Sweet whose throwback power pop resonates in the song. Probably not the case, but that has been how the single feels.



Overall Thank You and now SWEET DROPS makes me feel a lot more comfortable with the direction Puffy is taking and I am curious to see how that arcs into the next studio album.


P.S. One fun thing to noice in SWEET DROPS is that when Ami and Yumi are sitting back-to-back is that Ami is sitting on a cushion so it looks like she is slightly taller than Yumi (who is a slight bit taller in actuality)


(h/t to commenter hareonna20 for the find!)

Happy Birthday PV

The PV for Happy Birthday.


Puffy Ami Yumi - Happy birthday

My first impression: Very happy.



P.S. Re-did the embed as the original was pulled from YouTube.

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

Puffy RGW PV and Single

The new Puffy single RGW dropped last week and I finally got around to seeing the PV for it via YouTube. I have a few thoughts on RGW but I have not picked up the single yet. While mostly for the DVD, the other tracks may be songs I will wind up liking more. That is a different blog for a different day.

To start, it has been far too long since Tamio did anything with Puffy, so it is really exciting to see him working with Ami and Yumi again. I have mentioned in previous blogs there has been something missing with Puffy’s recent songs and that it Tamio.



Musically RGW tilts towards a rocking Christmas song, which is my personal preference for Puffy songs. The instrumentation is what I come to expect with a Tamio song, which is to say a layered, expressive and precise song that makes generous call backs to sounds of the past. Ami and Yumi deliver a straightforward and well harmonized duet but in the chorus it feels as if they are listing lyrics rather than belting them out. There is a nice balance that is struck, but I there are better Puffy/Tamio songs where both instruments and singing were both stellar (Oriental Diamond comes to mind).

Visually RGW is very much an inverted Tokyo I’m On My Way via the use of a black rotating stage combined with Mogura Like’s physical performances. There is a ribbon of plot with a little girl celebrating Christmas with the help of Ami and Yumi. It is sweet to the point of making my teeth ache, but way more chipper than Aoi Namida. The production design for RGW is simple and I think that it works well.

After watching RGW a few times, I am really starting to miss Ami and Yumi’s shapeless plaid jumpsuits circa Fever*Fever. I realize it is only a video and they are performers and costumes must be worn… but stylish hobo does not work for me. The rest of the costuming is great for the video and completely literal. If they sing out pink, a pink costume is forthcoming. This might be why they are dressed in patchwork, they might get lost in the color of the other performers.
Here is the video… until Song decides it has been on Yahoo long enough…

Dareka Ga Promotional Video

Just a quick post up. I had not seen Puffy's Dareka Ga video. While not new, it is new to me as I never saw it come across my YouTube trawling. I like the video for Ami and Yumi's silliness, but it also reminds me of Sunrise which was a touch too artistic. So I am kind of mixed over all, but I like the music itself... then again I liked Sunrise too.


PUFFY - Dareka Ga - MyVideo

A Different Take On Puffy

Sorry I have been a little less than a blogging machine, other projects and events sidelined fun writing about Puffy. But fret not I have been jotting down notes for the next album reviews and once I start stitching them together I will post them up.

Anyways, today we have a guest blogger of sorts... my oldest daughter Ying who truly adores Puffy. So far as role models go, I could not pick out two better women in entertainment to look up to. They are humble, accomplished, funny and genuine.

I sat down with her this week and asked Ying what her favorite Puffy songs are right now. Usually she listens to whatever happens to be playing and but there are some she is more enthusiastic about than others. Today we agree on songs, tomorrow maybe not.

The first is Mother, which has consistently been her favorite to listen to since she was a really wee lass. Maybe it is the stop motion animation of the video or Ami and Yumi. This has always been on eof my favorites too.



The surprise selection was Jet Police, which she started liking after I started going through the Shibyua-AX concert footage. Normally she leans towards Yumi in all things Puffy, but this particular rendition of Jet Police she flips for Ami.



Lastly is Tokyo I'm On My Way... which she has been crazy about... Particularly the Tour 10 Final concert verison, or as she puts it Tokyo I'm On My Way with the pink and blue dress. She is particularly impressed with Yumi's attire.



An unexpected joy from listening to Puffy is that their music and videos are something my daughter and I can enjoy together. When I hear her make a request for a specific song or get irked I hit next to bypass a song she likes, it makes me smile.

The Places Puffy Led Me To

Puffy by themselves… soak up more time than I care to admit. When I sit down to listen to music it is good odds I will be listening to them. But Puffy is certainly not the only band I listen to regularly, but Puffy has afforded me the chance to discover more about a genre of music that I have come to greatly appreciate.... to the point of blogging about them and promoting them as serious artists.

Yet this article is not really about music I enjoy. Rather this is how I detoured into foolishness trying to find music inspired by my enjoyment of Puffy.

Not long after I discovered Puffy, I was combing YouTube and stumbled across a video for the song Harada Kinenbi, a multi-artist promotional effort for Sony’s Hit-n-Run label.
Speaking in generalities, I tend to hate group efforts, because they simply never seem to work. Harada Kinembi had been done the year before by Sony’s stable of stars and it was a complete train wreck of hack and pomposity… like We Are The World. The superb Lionel Ritchie could not have saved this one either.

What surprised me and tossed my musical sensibilities on their ear was that the 99 version of Harada Kinembi was dynamite! It is very well arranged and had a more humorous and playful undertone. It had a feeling that Sony’s talent was not shunted into a room and forced to kick out a song or be starved to death.




At this time my musical leanings were only beginning to shift to the east and while I was familiar with some of the artists in Harada Kinenbi, but there were many I knew nothing about that upon this first impression I knew I might like. I had to learn more about them.. One was the band The Wonder Soul Style, which is another blog... The other was a woman with dyed red hair and a stellar voice that merged beautifully with Ami and Yumi’s for a chorus. Google did not offer any pointers and I needed help.

As luck would have it, one thing I am not short of in life is associates who are fluent Japanese speakers. One e-mail to Dr. Doug and my question was answered. The singer in question was Izumi Tachibana. I had a name and I put Google went to work.

This is where I started to become grossly stupid.

Google tripped up Izumi Tachibana’s old website which redirected me to her new website. She had since married and changed her name. The site had a modest amount of information in English, but not enough to be useful. So I went to the Google well again…

One small problem however. I misread her new surname as Sakai and not Sakaki.

This one tiny mistake snowballed. There was a very well known Japanese singer named Izumi Sakai. Her back catalog had a number of albums that after mangled translations had very similar titles. As it turns out many Japanese artists have greatest hits albums with the moniker “Golden Best.” Izumi Sakai also had a very complete Wikipedia entry, which let me to what I thought was an unfortunite end.

Izumi Sakai passed away in 2007. While taking an early morning walk as a respite from chemotherapy treatments, Sakai suffered a head trauma after falling from an ambulance platform. Sakai had previously fought uterine cancer, but that had spread to her lungs. While Sakai’s doctors were encouraged with her treatments, due to this illness she had been on a hiatus. This chronologically corresponded with the hiatus that the singer who was really Izumi Sakaki. I closed the book on this line of investigation.

Fast forward a few months.

Something was not right. I intuitively knew I was wrong about all of this and it simmered in the back of my mind. One morning these thoughts boiled over and I went back and started looking into Izumi Tachibana again. It hit me that while there were parallels in these two performers… I had misinterpreted something.

An hour later, I put my hands were on my head. I had been wrong and I knew why: I had been intellectually lazy. I only looked at the things that were similar between these Izumis, not what was different.

What unraveled my patchwork research was that Izumi Sakai was the best selling female artist is Japan during the 1990’s and to this day Sakai remains one of the top five best selling female artist in Japan. Sakai was also eponymous with the Japanese band Zard, whom she was the only permanent member. Izumi Sakai only appeared on TV seven times. She was painfully shy, yet by all accounts kind and down to earth. Despite being wildly popular, she never received a single award for her work.

It is one thing to discover an artist and learn about them posthumously. It is another to discover them and grow with them. Together moving forward with their songs and forming a soundtrack for our life. I very much feel this about Puffy.

Yet this revelation is not completely sad. Izumi Sakaki (formerly Tachibana) is alive and well. Like The Wonder Soul Style she is no longer with Sony. While Izumi Sakaki went down a different path than the more famous artists who sang Harada Kinenbi she continues as working artist and has a good sized back catalog of her own.

The end result of all this is neither Izumi Sakai nor Izumi Sakaki appeal to my Japanese rock sensibilities. This was a lot of hard work for something that did not work out. That happens. Likewise I have found incredible artists like Puffy via effortless accident.

Without Puffy I also would not have found many artists that I also enjoy.

P.S. The Wonder Soul Style… they are my J-Rock Waterloo. I have liked everything I have heard from them. Which is precious little beyond Midbooster and Harada Kinembi… so if you know any more about them. Please get a hold of me.

Hiyori Hime Promotional Video!

Here it is:


My first reaction is, "holy hell, they got themselves a budget!" Now we know why their last few videos looked like they were financed through Ami's daughter's paper route - apparently they were saving up for the big one.

Ok, probably not really - and I wonder why they suddenly have such obvious cash to spend. Is it for Shiina Ringo, who wrote and produced the song? After all, she's one of Japan's biggest stars. Not to say Puffy don't deserve it - I wish they had a big budget for all of their videos. But the difference between this and, say, "My Story" is pretty stark.

It is a great video, though, so I'm not complaining. Both girls look amazing in it.

I'm going to need to listen to the song itself a few more times to form an opinion on that. I'm actually pretty new to Shiina Ringo, and while I love the two albums that I have, I honestly have never heard a song written by her that sounded good being sung by someone else. (That list is not very exhaustive, though. Tokio and Utada Hikaru are about the extent of it, in addition now to Puffy.) Her voice is just so distinctive, and at least at her best is just so filled with emotion, that I think it's really listening to her that makes so much of her music so good.

One immediate thing I don't like is the mix. I feel this way about a lot of Puffy's recent stuff - the guitars are just too low in the mix, the vocals too high. This was supposedly produced by Shiina Ringo in addition to being written by her, but her own stuff is not mixed like this (at least not her early stuff; I haven't heard a lot of the later albums with Tokyo Jihen). It makes the song sound a little wimpy.

But I will listen again, and maybe I'll form a different opinion (or just get used to the mix).

My Story PV!

There's a high-quality version there if you pop the player. Tattoos ahoy!

One question - why is Yumi wearing shoes that are four sizes too big?

Great job on this one, girls. And kudos to the Merrymakers. This is the best Puffy single in a while.

Looking Back on 59: an Album Review

Let's all take a minute to think about the 59 album. It is a strange little piece of shiny plastic and aluminum, coming as it did at a weird time in Puffy's lives and careers. I've always wanted to know the full story behind its production. There was a lot going on in Puffy-ville, as Ami had just delivered her baby girl and "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi" was being readied for US launch. But Yumi was also coming off a divorce that hadn't played well in the tabloids, and the band's previous album Nice. had not sold well at home. They had earlier taken about six months off so Ami could do the whole mothering thing full time - real life had temporarily interrupted their careers.

They called 59 a "mini album", which almost sounds like an apology. As in "sorry, we couldn't record a full album, but here's what we could manage."

Here's the track listing:

1. Teen Titans Theme
2. Sunrise
3. Joining a Fan Club
4. Kokoro ni hana wo
5. Kaze makase futari tabi
6. Forever
7. So Long Zero
8. Teen Titans Theme (Japanese version)

It is probably Puffy's worst album, but it's also under-appreciated. Japanese fans spurned it, and some of their less hardcore western fans may not even know it exists. It never had a US release, despite the fact that their previous two albums did. Instead, we got the soundtrack to the "Hi Hi" TV show, so the release of 59 got lost in that hoopla in the west. The "Hi Hi" soundtrack itself has four out of the six original songs from 59 anyway (depending on what you count), so Americans might not think they're missing much.

But they are! For one thing, this album has the Japanese version of "Teen Titans", which for some reason is actually tolerable to me whereas the English version really isn't. (This might cut both ways; my wife can't even listen to the Japanese version, she says the lyrics are so dumb.) It also has a somewhat different mix of "Joining a Fan Club" than we got on the "Hi Hi" soundtrack - though it's debatable which is better. (The US version is a little heavier.)

But the two real stars of the album are "Kokoro ni Hana wo" and "Kaze makase futari tabi", the former being a pretty straightforward but incredibly catchy rock song and the latter an electro sort of loungey bit of goofiness with some heavy guitars mixed in, which wouldn't have sounded out of place on the Spike album. And I still rank that album as my favorite Puffy release.

It is imperative that you hear - no, that you own - these two songs if you call yourself a Puffy fan. Both of these songs are as good as anything Ami and Yumi have ever recorded. You can visit CDJapan and listen to song samples there.

The rest of the album is not nearly as strong, being filled out by three animation theme songs ("Sunrise" and two versions of "Teen Titans"), a cover ("Joining a Fan Club"), a completely unnecessary second English remake of "Invisible Tomorrow" ("So Long Zero"), and the retro-inspired "Forever". Overall, it's a little sloppy sounding and it lacks any sort of distinguishable identity of its own. It seems an attempt to return to the eclectic era of Spike but, except when noted above, without nearly the same results. The problem is probably just that most of these songs aren't that memorable, or they sound like songs Puffy have recorded before (or they actually are). You can tell that even producer Andy Sturmer knew something was wrong given his copious use of fill synthesizers - it's pervasive throughout 59, and annoyingly noticeable. Unfortunately, this was the last full album he'd work with Puffy on.

Great artwork, though (excuse the crease - it's a poster foldout):


You can't really blame anyone involved for any of 59's shortcomings given all that was going on at the time, and I'm just grateful for the two essential but tragically unheralded tracks sandwiched in the middle of the album. Sometimes there are more important things in life than work.

Oh, two of my favorite Puffy videos are also from this album, even if the songs aren't my favorites - see below.

Couple technical notes. 59 went out of print almost immediately after its release, but it was re-released sometime in 2006. Whether it's still in print now, I don't know - but you can still order it from CDJapan. The original release was one of Sony's experiments with copy-protected CD's (you may have read the wikipedia article on this album, which I mostly wrote). I'm not sure if the re-release had the controls lifted, but I believe that it did.

Final Grades
Music: B-
Performance: B-
Production: C+

Buy 59 from CDJapan

Sunrise


Joining a Fan Club

All Because of You music video

Full song.


Hmmmm. I'll post my own thoughts at a later time.

btw, YouTube had the original clip removed - this one should be working now. It seems the record labels are continuing their war on those who would actually like to watch their promotional content. And they wonder why album sales continue to drop.

Closet Full of Love PV!

The "Closet Full of Love" promotional video that we've all been waiting for:


Were you in it?

DVD Review - CLIPS

2000 was a busy year for PUFFY - they practically packed an average band's career into the span of twelve months. Three (count 'em) DVD's in support of JET, one concert DVD in support of FEVER FEVER, a greatest hits collection (The Very Best of Puffy/amiyumi jet fever), two new singles, and an all-new album release (Spike). Oh, and this: Clips, a DVD compiling their promotional videos from the JET, FEVER FEVER and pre-Spike era. Whew!

As you can guess by how early some of these videos are, this DVD is fun. It's pretty short - only seven videos total, interspersed with footage from PUFFY's live introduction to American audiences at SXSW2000 - but these are some of the funniest, strangest, and most endearing videos they've made to date. Well, right up until "Umi Eto", anyway - when you can almost sense a change in attitude (or at least a change in image).

Here's the track list:

1. PRMX - a remix compilation video
2. Tararan
3. Puffy de Rumba
4. Nichiyobi no Musume
5. Yume no Tameni
6. Ai de Tsuon Min
7. Umi Eto

All of those romanizations were taken directly from the DVD menu, so I'm not being pretentious for spelling "Tararan" that way or stupid for leaving the "u" out of "Nichiyobi". Oh, and what is track 6? Why, it's the Mandarin Chinese version of "Ai no Shirushi", of course. They not only sang it in Chinese, they made the video in Chinese too - with Japanese subtitles. I confess I'd never seen most of these PV's - or even knew they existed! - before buying Clips. Hey, gimme a break; I'm an American. We're a little slow when it comes to PUFFY.

To be honest, it's almost criminal how much Sony charged for this DVD when it launched. ¥4,305, or about $40 US - for about 30 minutes worth of footage. That's $1.25 per minute! Only a record label with a band as popular as PUFFY at that time could get away with this. All of PUFFY's other 2000 releases were priced similarly, and even with one major release about every two months, people still bought them.

Nowadays, if you can find it on the used market, Clips is one of the cheaper PUFFY discs out there. I paid around $15 for mine on Yahoo Auctions, and that was probably too much. You can get it for less (if you're in Japan). You can also very, very occasionally find it on Ebay. Of course, you can also just go and watch all the videos on YouTube, but then where's the satisfaction in that? Ok, be my guest, I know you want to look - but if you're like me, you enjoy actually owning these collections, and even more, you enjoy the much better picture quality of a DVD.

Because there's no real way to cohesively review a clip collection, I'm gonna do what I did with Fun Clips Fun Club and just go track by track.

PRMX

Well, that's a disturbing image to lead off with, isn't it! This video can see the future, and it ain't pretty. (No offense to those two actresses, whoever they are.)

Most of this video is stuff we've seen before, remixed just like the music. It's a compilation of songs from PUFFY's past designed to evoke nostalgia (or to milk a few bucks out of the same songs a second time around) while being updated just enough to sound new. The visuals are taken straight out of the videos for the songs being remixed, with new effects added and new editing. Remixed songs include "Kore ga Watashi no Ikirumichi", "Electric Beach Fever", "Ajia no Junshin" and one other that I'm forgetting right now. It's actually all kinda forgettable, really.

Tararan

This song has always been one of my guilty pleasures - it's a little too cutesy for me to play in public, but I've always loved Andy Sturmer's melodies in this, and I love the way the girls sing it. The video is almost syrupy sweet, but it's irresistible. It's definitely girly. There's a whole lot of choreography. There are Rodney Alan Greenblat animated caricatures dancing along with Ami and Yumi. No, I would not put this on during halftime of a football game I was watching with my friends. I don't liked to get laughed at. But I love this video.

Puffy de Rumba

This video, even as strange and funny as it is, was kind of a new direction. It features Ami and Yumi singing in the middle of a forest, complete with backup dancers and... Jimi Hendrix?! Or at least, an actor playing him (convincingly, I might add - Olympic White left-handed stratocaster and all).

At one point, Hendrix somehow falls unconscious in a stream in the forest, only to be revived by Ami and Yumi's feeding him an honest-to-god magic mushroom. This obvious bit of illicit drug peddling is not even disguised - he immediately begins hallucinating.

And look at the girls. They look noticeably more mature than they did in "Tararan" - they look like girls in their twenties, not like the teenagers they had intentionally been evoking earlier on. In fact, they look pretty similar here to how they look now. This was probably the first "adult themed" video that they made, and they'd sort of alternate back and forth between styles from then on.

Nichiyobi no Musume

PUFFY play petty criminals in this one, and it's hilarious. One problem: the video kind of blows its load in the first shot, which is the funniest of all. It's pictured above - Ami and Yumi steal this little kid's big-wheel. That's funny enough, but his reaction - which seems to be genuine - is priceless. He runs towards the camera, screaming in anguish at the top of his lungs (or so I imagine).

The rest of the video sees PUFFY get chased by the cops for stealing their bicycles and other random harmless little crimes. I have to mention the afro's being sported by Ami and Yumi - this was probably the start of their hairstyle experimentation. And it's the only time I've ever seen them with this one.

Yume no Tameni

This is one of my favorite songs from Fever Fever, and I never even realized it was a single before buying this DVD. (Hell, I probably own it - I've never listened to half my early CD singles, and don't even remember what I have.) You really get two videos in one with this song, as it's split half and half between clips from an outdoor performance of the song and stylized, choreographed and neon-lit pseudo-nightclub scenes. The performance clips are very high-energy, especially considering that the song is actually pretty laid-back and early Beatles-esque. But I guess the Beatles had their fair share of wild crowds too, especially in the early years with their kinda mellow brand of boy-band rock.

The other half of the video features Ami and Yumi dancing around, along with a couple of "guests" that include some western chick dressed up like a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader (ok, maybe I'm not remember this quite right) and the same dude who played Jimi Hendrix in "Puffy de Rumba". I guess they liked him.

Ai de Tsuon Min

Not real sure of the backstory behind this one - feel free to chime in with a comment if there's some nugget of info that I'm missing. Basically, this is "Ai no Shirushi" in Chinese. Seems most likely that Puffy are, or would like to be, popular in China and were throwing their fans there a bone with this song. They've always wanted to be a global band, and they're no stranger to singing in a foreign language. I wonder how they managed to get the pronunciations down without actually knowing Mandarin - though for all I know, their Chinese is unintelligible.

The video itself is intended to give a little taste of their Fever Fever tour. It features some strategically interspliced clips from actual live shows combined with shots of Ami and Yumi replicating the live experience on a studio stage. There's a lot of handclapping to the beat going on. This has never been one of my favorite PUFFY songs - it's got too much of a "George of the Jungle" feel to it. But the girls are cute, in the way they were in those early days.

Umi Eto

This video's a brand new bag. The song itself is one of their harder and punkier songs, and it's off the album I've always considered their transition into a more adult sound. The visuals are split in half between clips of their performance of this song at SXSW 2000 and shots of Ami and Yumi looking positively dour as they wander around Tokyo in pant suits that were obviously inspired by 1970's London punk fashion. I don't think they crack a smile once in these sequences. A definite sign of what was to come over the next few years as they remade themselves into a grown-up band. Hey, when you're approaching 30, it's tough to keep up the teeny-bopper act... though they'd resurrect it later for "Hi Hi".

Like with Fun Clips Fun Club, it's pretty interesting to see the progression from the start of this compilation to the end. Whereas that DVD had them moving from indie rock into a more corporate pop punk look and sound, Clips shows their progression from a couple of cutesy girls in a pop act to a serious hard rock band. Even the clips before "Umi Eto" include scenes and themes that show the direction they were quickly moving in.

There's also just a huge amount of choreography here - I gotta say that while I've seen them dance plenty of times before, I never realized how pervasive it was in their act in those early days. Literally every early single had its own dance, most of them pretty damn complex, and they're all in that sort of goofy style that may or may not be ironic. It's fun to watch, but maybe a little overdone. I think I actually prefer their modern incarnation, where they pull out the choreography sparingly, and where it's definitely at least half-ironic when they do.

As for the SXSW footage, it's interspersed in between each video and is purposely cut short so you never get a full song - until "Umi Eto". I'm not sure if they were a little shy about this performance (it was their first in the United States, and they look understandably nervous), or if they weren't too happy with the cramped, close-in footage or what, but the clips of this show cut in and out seemingly at random. They're still some nice little extras.

Like all PUFFY DVD's, this DVD is region 2 and will not work on unmodified US players. It's also a 4:3, non-widescreen DVD. The picture quality is good, considering the original standard-def source material.

Ah, who am I kidding? Here's one video, have fun searching for the rest.

Oriental Diamond Video Released!

Whoa - only a few days after Kuchibiru Motion, Ami announced today via her blog that both of the single PV's have now been released. These girls are going nuts lately. Take a little break before you guys burn out, man! Anyway, check it out:


Online Videos by Veoh.com
Panda hats!

Anyone who wondered whether the Kuchibiru Motion video signaled a new direction for PUFFY now has their answer. This is absolutely vintage PUFFY here. No surprise there - the song was written by Tamio Okuda and Yosui Inoue, who were responsible for many of PUFFY's early hits. And the band has crafted a video to go along with it that would have fit in with any of their PV's from the 1990's.

I love the Kuchibiru Motion video, but I love this too... and this is a lot closer to what I think of when I think of PUFFY. (It's also a better song, in my opinion.) Ami's blog entry, from what I can understand, suggests that this was intentional - one PV is what you'd expect from them, one is completely the opposite.

Little update: Those of you subscribing via an RSS feed, I've noticed that at least Google Reader does not embed Veoh video properly. Not sure why this is, but I'll have to think about going back to YouTube for that reason. To watch this video, just click through to the blog itself.

Kuchibiru Motion video released!

Ok, so maybe those shots on the PUFFY staff diary weren't from the new album cover shoot. (Hey, the staff diary implied it.) Because here's the same location in the brand new Kuchibiru Motion video - check it out:


Online Videos by Veoh.com
As one of my co-workers put it, "it's a total fetish video!" Ha, seriously, that's gotta be intentional - and I love the idea. The song is not as immediately catchy as most of their tunes, but it is growing on me. It's a song that requires more than one listen to really get a feel for it. I still think the vocals are a little too hot in the mix; the guitars should be driving this song. I am diggin' the look, though...

What do you all think about the song and video? Leave a comment and let me know.

By the way, I started linking to Veoh (vs. YouTube) simply because the still image they're using for this video looks better. But they win out on video quality too, and purely by chance, their embedded player fills my blog column width perfectly. (Thanks to puffyamiyumiworld.com for turning me on to that site.) So I'll probably continue using them to embed video unless anybody's got any objections. Their file sizes do seem larger, so they might not work as well with slower connections - let me know if you have any problems.

Fun Clips Fun Club DVD Review

As one of the only PUFFY DVD's still in print and therefore somewhat easy to come by, I thought it might be relevant for some of you to take a look back at FUN CLIPS FUN CLUB. This 2005 release includes nine of their promotional videos dating to around 2002, and in one of the few really good extras on any PUFFY DVD, about that many live clips as a "bonus track" on the disc.

Since this is a clip collection, I thought I'd take it song by song and spend a paragraph or so on each video. I'll talk a bit about the live material separately. First, the main track listing:

1. Boogie Woogie No. 5
2. Atarashi Hibi (Brand New Days)
3. Aoi Namida
4. Hurricane
5. Akai Buranko (Red Swing)
6. PRMX Turbo
7. Sunrise
8. Teen Titans Theme
9. Joining a Fan Club

Here's the bonus live material:

5/24/2004 Shibuya O-East
Invisible Tomorrow
Umi Eto
Tokusuru Karada

8/14/2004 Rising Sun Rock Festival
Ajia no Junshin

8/28/2004 Setstock '04
Wild Girls on Circuit

10/10/2004 House of Blues (L.A.)
Joining a Fan Club

10/29/2004 Club Quattro
Beef

While the live material is all from 2004, the videos span a number of years and show quite a transformation both in PUFFY's music and look over that time period. Track by track:

Boogie Woogie No. 5Still one of PUFFY's most popular songs, this collaboration with the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra is one of PUFFY's most slickly-produced, densely-choreographed videos to this day. Shot against an all-white background, it's a singing, playing, dancing extravaganza.


Atarashi HibiShot in the style of an 8mm home movie; one of PUFFY's many low-budget videos without much of anything to do with the song. Ami and Yumi ride bikes, walk around, and generally traipse around the countryside. They both look very young in this video; younger than they usually did at this point. I really like this video; it's got its own charm. Makes me feel relaxed.


Aoi NamidaThis is a serious song and it's treated as such in the video. Both girls look quite a bit older in this than they did in Atarashi Hibi, probably intentionally as they're meant to be sort of a "mentor" for a troubled school girl. PUFFY spend time in the girl's house, at a train station and out at the beach as they tell her what's what. Not one of my favorite songs, but maybe one they wanted as a single for its subject matter. Yumi had apparently just dyed her hair brown, but it hadn't yet grown out from the spiked style of, well, Spike. It looks a bit awkward.


HurricaneLots of choreography here, and another slick production. Not one of my favorite songs but definitely one of my favorite videos. Basically PUFFY singing and dancing around an extremely windy room. There's a lot of humor in their performance, their dancing is probably the best I've seen, and they both look great. Watch for the shot of Yumi singing "Let me show you a magokoro" - it cracks me up every time.


Akai BurankoThe sole representative here from the album Nice (unless you count the Teen Titans Theme), and apparently shot for the most part during their "Rolling Debut Revue" tour of 2002. Includes lots of concert and backstage footage, edited together with gusto. This is a great example of a "live" video for a recorded song - it really injects some energy into it. This was shot during PUFFY's "indie rock" period, when they were wearing a lot of ratty cargo pants and punk band t-shirts and not doing much with their hair. I actually wish they'd kept on like this; it gives them a bit more street cred, at least in the US. Not a very mainstream look in Japan, though.


PRMX TurboLike the song itself, this video is sort of a mashup of past stuff, re-edited and sped up, slowed down or with new effects added. Kinda neat if you're feeling nostalgic, but not really something you're going to re-watch a bunch of times. There does seem to be some footage included that was probably shot for the early "Run! Puffy! Run!" long-form video but didn't make the cut, so that's one thing to keep the interest level up.

Incidentally, the station they're waiting at for the 1 train above is one station away from the one I use twice a day :)


SunriseA controversial video not coincidentally from their least popular album "59". Either you think this video is postmodern avant-garde brilliance or you think they've lost their minds. The song is nice, and it served as the theme to the anime SD Mobile Gundam Force, but the video's got nothing to do with that. Instead, it features Ami and Yumi collecting garbage. They don't sing... well, not much anyway. They don't dance. There's no band. It's similar in tone to Atarashi Hibi, but with better production values... and more garbage. I think it's brilliant.


Teen Titans ThemeA throwaway cartoon theme song but with a cute video. A much different style than most of their videos, seemingly intended for the same audience as the "Teen Titans" TV show - young American kids. Guitar Wolf makes a guest cameo that probably none of the video's target demographic will get the reference to.


Joining a Fan ClubPUFFY's cover of Andy Sturmer's Jellyfish song is treated as light bubblegum pop in the video, which, judging by the girls' outfits, is themed after their characters in the "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi" cartoon. It feels a bit fake. Still, it's a fun video in which both girls engage in a slow-motion water balloon/food fight - one of the cool things about them has always been their ability to laugh at themselves. By the end of the video, they're both covered in pie.

The progression from track 1 to track 9 is pretty stark. Their early videos - and I'd say "Atarashi Hibi" is the last in that style - were all pretty naturalistic. Ami and Yumi looked like regular girls, and the videos were shot with very low budgets - purposely like a student film or home movie. That's part of what made them popular in the first place; the public could identify with them. By track 9, everything seems a bit more calculated - there's a lot more obvious marketing going on (in this case, of the cartoon), and the mood is a lot less natural and a lot more geared to one particular targeted demographic.

The live material is a great bonus - almost too much of a bonus to be considered one. The Shibuya performance, especially, warrants its own full-length DVD - and I wish we'd gotten one. Could this have been footage from an abandoned project? It seems like a pretty complex production for just three songs. (This was also the performance used in the opening credits for "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi".) In any case, it's "Tokusuru Karada" that's the standout of this show - they really look like they're having fun. Not to mention both of the girls' hair styles, which are as distinctive as they've ever been.

The other clips are more hit and miss. It is nice to see them perform in daylight, and without the benefit of a light show at some of these large festivals - it's just a bit of a change from the standard concert DVD. But as I know firsthand, they're better at night and with their own dedicated crowd on their side.

The House of Blues clip is odd in that the audio is not very good... and "Joining a Fan Club" is not really among their best songs. I'm sure it was included because it's really a clip of Cartoon Network's New Year's Eve countdown - it was used to ring in the New Year in 2005 - so it has an air of importance.

However, their cover of Tamio Okuda's "Beef" totally rocks. This is not a song they've ever done before to my knowledge, and it's not on any PUFFY album. This is a driving rock song in the Steppenwolf vein, and they're obviously into it - and they work it out.

I don't even know who the guitar chick below is, but I have to give her props for playing lead on a left-handed Fender Jazzmaster. That's hardcore:

The DVD is region 2, and as much of this footage is several years old, it's non-anamorphic 4:3. It still looks pretty good, though, although the concert footage varies in quality with the venue.

This was the first PUFFY DVD I bought, and I have to say that it was exactly what I was looking for. Japanese music DVD's can be expensive, so I wasn't sure I wanted to spend all that money on one single concert performance (which are by nature little snapshots in time) or alternatively on just a bunch of random videos. This DVD gives you a bit of both, with some really interesting stuff, although a few of the clips are a little disappointing. It also obviously only covers a few years worth of videos and a few 2004 shows. For me, it was enough to convince me I wanted more - a jumping-off point for the rest of their DVD collection. I'm now on a mission to acquire them all, and that's still in process. I'll bring you more reviews of both new and old DVD's coming soon!