Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Kayo Aiko's Tenth Single...

was released on August 23, 2006.  The title is '☆HOME MADE STAR☆ ~嘉陽愛子のテーマ~', the Japanese portion is pronounced 'Kayo Aiko no teemu' and can be translated as 'Kayo Aiko's Theme'.  The c/w is 'Orange road'.

Limited edition cover

Regular edition cover

Aiko's first album "Dolce" (really more of a collection of singles as both of her "albums" have been) was released in March of 2006 and with the only exception being the B-side of "Little Planets," they basically drained the well of all of her past material.  Which must have pissed off a few hardcore fans who'd been there since the beginning, having to buy a whole album for just 3 new songs.  Frankly, for fans like me who were just discovering her, "Dolce" was a godsend.  It featured all of the A-sides of her first nine singles so it saved me the task of having to track down all nine cd's at a time when I knew little (if any) Japanese and YouTube was still less than a year old so there were only 7 Aiko videos up for quite a long time.  (I still remember the shock of seeing that a new video had been uploaded one day, very much out of the blue.  It happened a couple of times as the site got more popular.  But whoever did that, thank you!)

So the summer came and was nearly over when HOME MADE STAR came out and it sort of was a resetting point as far as her music goes.  I wasn't really sure what to expect but once I hit play my stereo was going bonkers and I was just loving this song like crazy.  I couldn't wait to get it playing in the car and blast the crap out of it so that everyone could hear.  "Hey everyone!" I would say, "this is brand-fucking-new!"

The basic instrumentation of this song is a glossy, busy synth-bass, overlaid with horns (synth) and some wacka-ja-wacka guitar, topped with 15 layers of Aiko + the way-into-it backup singers (HAAAAAAAAA!) vocal tracks.  For being a Japanese idol pseudo-disco track it's actually pretty funky and really just a very unique and catchy song.

'Orange road' is a fairly mellow track about fall colors and just has a nice breezy mood about it.  Aiko's singing is rarely more earnest than her performance on this song, as she displays a strong grasp of some more difficult intervals and yet at some points nearly comes to a whisper.  There is an interesting vinyl crackling going on throughout the song and it's got touches of Magical Mystery Tour here and there as well.

I skipped over this single in my original reviews and it's taken nearly five years for me to come back and write this overview, but it's not from a lack of interest by any means.  This remains one of my most favorite Aiko singles after so many years and I loved it to death when I first listened to it way back when.  Not much has changed.  The A-side has so much power and the B-side is so contrastingly beautiful that I could probably go on for days and still have plenty to say about it.  I probably wanted to write a million words about this in the first place but was exhausted by the time I had written about all of the others to get to this point that I just gave up, thinking I had said everything possible about how great Aiko is and how much of a joy it is to listen to her music.

The downside of this release is that it was the first of her singles to not have an accompanying PV and that really kind of stung me.  It was a time of uncertainty -- I wondered, would this be her last single?  And other questions that were eventually answered as time went on.  No, this would not be her last recording, I have come to find out.  There was still a surprise or two to be revealed.