Avril Lavigne eat your heart out, cause with My Story, Japanese pop icon Ayumi Hamasaki delivers a pop-rock-electronica offensive that blows you out of the water. Word has it her lyrics are a shade deeper than yours too…
See the Japanese music scene is held in fairly low regard by the mainstream ‘western’ music industry – certainly the pop side of things. Few Japanese artists have achieved significant crossover success, except for leftfield, jazz and underground acts like DJ Krush, Kyoto Jazz Massive and to a lesser extent Buffalo Daughter. So if you’re not Japanese – or possibly Indonesian, you probably won’t have heard of Ayumi Hamasaki. Don’t sweat it though, she’s only the biggest Japanese celebrity since….actually, I don’t know any other big Japanese celebrities, except their poster boy prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and he ain’t so hot nowadays. Anyway, back in 2002, Ayumi single-handedly accounted for 42.6% of sales for Japan’s most successful label Avex, she endorses a vast array of products and inspires a devotion bordering on the messianic from her fan base which extends from teenagers to straightlaced execs. Everything about Ayumi’s latest album My Story is sophisticated – its production values, its savvy use of heavy metal power guitar dramatizing catchy pop melodies and its crisp electronic embellishments. Much of it is musically inane, but this is well done cheese and Ayumi’s poetic lyrics (ok, so you might have to resort to reading them in translation) give it an edge. Plus it keeps surprising you – Moments starts off with 3 minutes of fluff and then flips the script off the back of an Iron Maiden-esque guitar solo. Some of the softer electronica vibe-ology reminds me of All Saints, especially the album’s opener Catcher In The Light. The Game puts Ayumi’s voice through a voicoder and uses a wall of distorted guitar to build into a horribly catchy chorus. But it’s the overall grandiosity of My Story, the way it revels in its sound whether cheesy or otherwise, that marks it out.