Speaking as a
Halcali fan, the last year hasn't exactly been easy. I still remember waking up early one Sunday morning to catch a preview of their then new
Sony single
Tip Taps Tip on
Eureka Seven. It was a shocking lesson in not getting your hopes up, as so much patient expectation was met with what at the time easily ranked as their most timid and mediocre releases (little did I know their was worse to come). Disappointing, you might say.
What has happened since then can probably be best described as frustrating;
Tip Taps Tip, which I came down hard upon at the time, was followed by the block busting
Twinkle Star, which despite it's abysmal chart showing was a marvellous single, containing almost everything I loved about Halcali in the first place. Again, my hopes went up.
Then straight back down again with the release of the criminally weak
LOOK, and of course you know how the rest of the story goes. The reason why I mention this is that their third album seems to have taken this feeling of frustration, compressed it into sound and burnt it onto a CD. Whenever you start to feel like the album is going up, they find a way to bring it back down, and even after one listen it's hard to ignore the feeling of discontentment, and yes, disappointment.
I mean, just look at the track listing again. Frankly, having nearly half of a relatively short album be comprised of old material just isn't good enough. I know it's the industry standard to do such things, but there's just something irritatingly lazy about it- even worse when you try to mask the fact of what you've done by sticking the words
SPECIAL EDITION next to one of those old singles, only to reveal that it is in fact little more than the radio edit! It makes an already short album feel even shorter, and puts the weight of it's success or failure almost entirely on the shoulders of the 6 tracks worth of new material that's on here.
Right then. The first 15 minutes of this album are fantastic. Opening track
Doo The Hammer is actually a full, proper song, unlike the 'introduction' type skits that opened their previous two. It's a great start too- with the vocals pushed right to the front, it falls under that brilliant rapping/singing hybrid they do so well, with a sweet chorus that sneaks up on you and stays with you. It reminds me a bit of those great b-sides
Hiroshi Nakamura was putting out- the perfect mix between older 'goofy'
For Life Halcali and newer 'grown up'
Sony Halcali.
Even better, it picks up and even improves the following track, their last single
It's Party Time. I was never sure about that as a choice for a single, but it flows out of
Hammer almost as if in one continuous beat; the two compliment each other perfectly.
Even better is the next track,
Koi No Bunbunbun. I'm putting this down as not only my favourite song on the album, but also as one of my favourites full stop. They haven't made nearly enough songs like this recently- a pop song with a brilliant synthesised bass loop, a simple, maddeningly catchy chorus and that overall unusual sense of
Halcali-ness that some producers can bring out and some just can't (and this album has both types).
This track is followed by
Twinkle Star, and despite the two tracks clashing a little (another problem the album predictably has, but we'll come to that later), I still take my hat off to one of the best j-pop singles of the last year, and it wraps up a solid, 4 track opening for the album.
Then things start to come unstuck.
Again, I think the trouble ultimately comes down to the fact that this album has too many singles, and singles that weren't particularly strong to start with. So like I said, we look to the remaining 6 songs worth of new material to make or break it. I would say that three (possibly four) make the cut; the two mentioned above and the
Polysics title track.
OK, so
Cyborg Oretachi sounds
exactly like a
Polysics song, but it's still got that catchy electronic beep beep beep that seems to go together with
Halcali so well, and a hardcore rap in the middle. After the double hum drum hit of
endless lover's rain and
LOOK Special Edition (rolls eyes) it sounds even better, with a surprisingly discordant "guitar battle" at the end between
Haruka and
Yukari.
It's not enough though. Remember when
Halcali first signed to
Sony and they came out with that awful press release shot where they looked just like harmless
MTV R'n'B stalwarts
The Heartdales? One thing I was grateful for was that, whatever happened to
Halcali this year, they didn't go down that route. That is, at least, until track 8 on this album,
Driver's Licence. It's the absolute worst kind of blandly inoffensive, production line R'n'B, and
Halcali should never have been allowed to waste their time on it
. I have no love for
LOOK, but this is one of the worst songs they've ever released. It's utterly soulless. Skip.
I don't know what's going on with
Fessu De Ouissu either, except that, even after listening to it 5 times, I still can't remember a single note of it. I have heard enough of producers
Your Song Is Good though, to know that it just sounds like a weak
YSIG song. What is it with these producers? Both these guys and
Polysics have basically released, what, abandoned studio tracks from their last albums? I hope that isn't true. There really isn't much to say for this song in any case.
Just look back on the last few tracks though,
LOOK, followed by a weird electronic dance track followed by a rank and file R'n'B number followed by some kind of cod reggae track. Even a novice producer must have looked at that tracklisting and thought "this won't work". And it doesn't. The album feels exactly like what it is- a lot of singles padded with filler. It's even less cohesive than
Ongaku, which suffered from a similar problem (although I'm getting more and more tempted to go back and give that album a second, long look).
Despite coming up with a fairly decent closing number in
Harukari Michi (which, like
Driver's Licence, they had a hand in writing the lyrics for), after track 4 on this album the smile pretty much goes from my face, reappearing only sporadically. I'll sum it up like this, starting from track 5 through to track 12- not bad I suppose (a grower?), skip, good song, skip, skip, OK single, skip, good song.
So, again, frustration. Tracks like
Koi No Bunbunbun show their potential for greatness, while at the same time, lazy rubbish like
Driver's Licence brings it back down.
It
Tip Taps Tip all over again- a long, long wait for something that, in the end, really struggles to deliver.
ONE DAY LATER... I gave this album about four listens before writing the above. I realise that I deserve to give them much more than that. I'm going to stay with this new album for a week, then come back to it. Please, if you haven't listened to the album yet, or are new to
Halcali and thinking of trying them out, don't let what I wrote above discourage you!
