July 19, 2005
Overdue Enlightenment
Ever had an album that you didn't really enjoy listening to the first few times and dropped it, only to relisten to it months later and discover it was awesome? This magical phenomenon of your brain suddenly "getting it" happens to me far too often, but even with my veteran experience...I was totally caught off guard this time with Yuki's recent album, "Joy."
Yuki Isoya, as many people may know, was the lead singer for the 90's j-rock band "Judy and Mary." After the breakup in 2001, she moved on to pursue her solo career and has been fairly successful. Joy, released this February, is her third album following "Prismic (2002)" and "Commune (2003)." While I was not really a fan of Yuki or JAM in general (I liked 'Radio' and 'Overdrive', but that's about it), I decided to grab "Joy" back in February simply out of curiosity and need for new music. After only listening it about two times, I got that "ehh it's okay but I will get around to it again a little later" feeling. A little later turned out to be a lot later: July, and totally by accident.
I am a pseudo-shuffler. This means I like to load up every single song I have in my collection onto my iRiver, and play it on shuffle..but I don't actually listen to the songs in the order that get shuffled. I usually start with a particular song on my mind and just hit the next button until I randomly get to it. If there is anything good along the way I might stop, but otherwise my thumb gets a really intense workout any time I'm listening to music. So, even though I shuffle, I never really try many new songs since they always just get skipped over after the first 2 seconds. Yuki was categorized as "skip." However, last Friday, I was dead tired from working and I fell asleep on the way home (good thing I wasn't driving huh?) with my iRiver still playing. About a half hour later, I woke up refreshed to a very pleasant sound. My mp3 player had shuffled to "Walking on the Skyline," track 4 of Joy. After it finished playing, I hit back and listened to again, then a third time.
It was time to become a Yuki fan. I turned off shuffle and let the album play out. Next was "Sweet Seventeen," which had the most ridiculously nasally vocals I've ever heard in my life, and it was so cute I wanted to melt. And I did melt, because next on the playlist was "Cider." Yuki constantly sounds like she's got a frog lodged in her throat, yet it's not a bad thing at all. It's an addicting voice. She's also got a flair for mangling words and vowels. With all her "schleins" and "schlas" and "ü's" or whatever the hell she's saying, sometimes I can't tell if she's belting out Japanese or some weird variation of German. Jerman, perhaps? I seriously wonder if she purposely constructed her singing voice or if she really just does sound like that in real life. This style of singing was fairly prominent when she was in JAM too, probably even moreso, and now I am busy cycling through old JAM stuff to give it another chance. If I end up liking it, I'll be pretty busy with 9 years of stuff to go through. That's a lot of music.
Joy wraps up with a few slower songs, which are also nice once again because of the voice. "Tinkerbell," track 11, gave me the gay temporarily because I really like it and I should not like songs named after pixies, but I digress. "Joy" is a great album which has resparked my interest in Yuki, and I can't believe I've been skipping over it all these months. So if you've got time, check it out.
Posted by Paranda at July 19, 2005 5:01 PM