Reviews (10) Long Kiss Good Bye/FLASH

Reasons for the delay in writing this: 1) Unbelievably slammed with work 2) I actually had a fairly hard time finding it.

None of the regular chains I went to had it, and it eventually took a longer trip out to Tower in order to pick it up. My first reaction to this was to hope that this meant that people were buying up enough copies to see it into the higher reaches of the Oricon chart. Alas, it seems to have peaked at 53.

Not the shock to the system that Twinkle Star was, but it's worrying that even packaging Halcali with something as marketable as a popular anime show doesn't seem to get results. I hated the idea of them being tacked onto the popularity of something else in this way back in the TTT days and I hate it now. Again, taking a band as unique and exciting as Halcali and giving them constraints as bland as 'the ending theme for an anime' seems a horrible waste of their talents. Both TTT and LOOK were awful.

That said though, I think this single surprisingly, and thankfully bucks that trend and delivers a sweet, memorable pop song that at least has the decency to stick around in your head for a while after its finished. Like I said before, it does pretty much what you expect, but its the first time in a long time that a Halcali single came out with a chorus that made me sit up and pay attention the first time I heard it.

I think the b-side FLASH is good enough to make me wish this had been a double a-side, and both songs would have got PV's. Outside of the pressure and constraints of being the main song, Ram Rider (who wrote one of the highlights of Cyborg, Halcali Michi) come up with a catchy electro pop song reminiscent of Nifuku Hoshi from the Stawberry Chips single.

What I find most satisfying about this single though is that for the first time in a long time, if someone told me they wanted to listen to some recent Halcali stuff, I'd be more then happy to put this CD in their hands.