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As listed by Animate. There’s a DVD version too but who cares about that when we have glorious HD legs.

While there’re no details yet, chances are good that it will be Tokyo session of the 4th Anniversary Concert with some clips from the other sessions thrown in for good measure. I knew not having Kugyuu meant the chances of us getting something this time will be high, and we get HD straight away, boo yeah!

Instead this is a review of Kagamine Ren/Lin cover album by Shimoda Asami - because as I’ve said when the news about the release of this CD came out, I’m more excited by this CD than Ultimate Diamond from the get-go. I know Nana-chan had broken records etc etc, and even with both albums on hand I find myself coming back to this a whole lot more. Plus many others had already reviewed Ultimate Diamond, so I don’t feel the need to preach to the choir either.

I must first confess though, I actually haven’t heard any of the original Vocaloid versions of the songs before the announcement of the CD. Even at that, I’ve only listened to the ones that I’ve linked to on this blog and maybe one or two others at most. So I’m going into the songs with a fairly clean slate.

The album overall has some pretty good variety in its music - and anyone who’s read my CD impressions should know that I LOVE variety from my seiyuu singers CDs. There’s a couple of ballads, a few cute songs, anisong, normal j-pop and electronic. Asapon also didn’t pull any punches when it comes to showing off her voice abilities – throughout the entire CD she employs different tones and vocal range depending on the style of the songs, whether it is a slightly more mature tone rarely heard from her thus far (頑張ろうよ, Soundless voice, ジェミニ), her signature child-like playful one (おてんば姫の歌♪,イタズラムスメ), mimicking the surreal and robotic Vocaloid voice (ココロ, 炉心融解) and even employing two completely different tones within the same song (リンリンシグナル, South North Story). Some of these songs were obviously not composed with the limit of a human pop song singer in mind and contains some pretty crazy sections where the notes just keeps climbing higher and higher, such as in 頑張ろうよ (Ganbarouyo) and 炉心融解 (Roshinyoukai). Asapon manages to pull off those notes though, the result is eerily good that one can’t help to think that if it’s really her or they just employed the help from the Vocaloid software.

On the flip side though, the major failing of the album is that it’s hard to get a feel of a particular music style for Asapon - the album is a cover of songs not belonging to her and it shows. Asapon did a great job covering the Vocaloid songs and she plays into the different characters and stlye of the songs with ease, but none of the songs felt truly representative of her own singing style. As stated by the album this is Kagamine Rin/Len featuring Shimoda Asami, so I suppose we are to treated this as a character image album, rather than a personal album. It doesn’t pose much of a problem for a first release as the priority now is just to get her name out there in the most effective manner possible (and I do firmly believe that using the Vocaloid name here is an effective marketing strategy), but if Asapon is serious about getting a personal singing career she would need to find her own image later.

Overall the album is very solid. Fans of Asapon has no excuse in not picking this one up. Others thinking of dipping their toes in should find comfort in that the singing is good and there’s enough music variety in there and you are bound to find something you like.

Top picks of the album in no particular order:
頑張ろうよ, イタズラムスメ, リンリンシグナル, Soundless voice, 炉心融解, South North Story

Finally we’re getting something more interesting at Animelo 09 other than the goods and greats, but still rather run of the mill, vocalists that we’ve been served with thus far.

Ohtsuki Kenji and the Zentsubou Shoujo-tachi from the Sayanara Zetsubou Sensei series is now added to the Sunday line-up of Animelo 09. The Zetsubou Shoujo-tachi currently involves 9 seiyuus of the 2nd year female students and they are:
Nonaka Ai
Inoue Marina
Kobayashi Yuu
Sawashiro Miyuki
Shintani Ryoko
Sanada Asami
Tanii Asuka
Goto Yuuko
Matsuki Miyu

Depending on the songs, the members will be different, but in general the ones that are the regulars are Nonaka Ai, Inoue Marina, Kobayashi Yuu, Shintani Ryoko and Sawashiro Miyuki. My prediction is that Nonaka Ai, Inoue Marina and Kobayashi Yuu will almost definitely appear due to their King Records involvement as well as being regulars of either personal concerts and/or King Records events. Shintani Ryoko with her Lantis ties and her vast experience in concerts would also mean she’s unlikely to reject this opportunity to perform at such an event. That leaves Sawashiro Miyuki as a bit of a wild card. While Sawashiro Miyuki’s not much of the concert and event type, she does have some theatre experience, so her appearance is not totally out of the question. Though my personal predicition is that we would see the group without Sawashiro Miyuki.

I’m sure that similiar to last year’s im@s appearance we will find out exactly who will appear as the day of the concert drews near, in the mean time we’ll just have to wait and see.

If you’re still on the fence about the Kagamine Rin/Len cover album by Shimoda Asami, you can now head over to the official homepage and check out samples of all 13 song at the discography section.

Currently I would say the songs リンリンシグナル (Rin Rin Signal), Daybreak, Soundless Voice catches my attention the most. Since I’ve became used to listening to Asapon’s Futami Ami/Mami playful and nasal singing voice a lot due to im@s, these 3 songs seems to provide the different angle, the more serious and mature angle, to her voice which I’m looking forward to sample. I also like in Rin Rin Signal where Asapon switches between the Rin and Len voice.

The CD goes on sale on the 10th of June.

The Shimoda Asami Channel at Nicodouga has also been updated with a video of the CD jacket photo session. Must watch for fans of Asapon.

Saw it on the Nicodouga live stream. The seiyuu for the 3 new characters are:

Hidaka Ai: Tomatsu Haruka
Mizutani Eri: Hanazawa Kana
Akizuki Ryo: Sanpei Yuuko

The addition of Toma-chan and Kana-chan is a bit from the left field, since the im@s franchise haven’t been known to get established seiyuu, let alone the freshest and hottest idol seiyuu currently around (Kugimiya Rie was grabbed before her big break FWIW). Potentially this could be a negative thing, as these hot idols will be much harder to book for events and such (refer to Kugyu), so I’m thinking the direction of the DS game and its new characters might be slightly different than the current batch of idols we have so far. Also the singing skills of the seiyuu are a little on the average side, but either way I’ll still be looking forward to Toma-chan and Kana-chan covering the famous im@s songs such as Shiny Smile and Go My Way! because to me one of the most fascinating aspect of the im@s franchise is listening to the seiyuu with different voice qualities and abilities singing the same songs.

Both Toma-chan and Kana-chan made an appearance at the concert today and performed the theme song for the game “Hello!”. Follow the link below if you have a Nico account.

EDIT: For those without Nico accounts:

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Lantis has announced that it will hold a two day outdoor concert at Fujikyu Highland Conifer Forest on September 26th and 27th. The official homepage can be found here.

Hailing itself to be the first ever big size outdoor anisong concert, the venue’s capacity is up there with the likes of Super Arena capable of seating some 18000 people. The line up of artists contains a lot of familiar names that we’ve all seen at Animelo, some other fairly well-known/experience artists/seiyuu, plus a few more of the less active seiyuu artists that usually won’t be seen much at live events, let alone one of this kind of scale. With Kageyama Hironobu/JAM Project at the helms leading there shouldn’t be much to worry about, and I fully expect this will look and feel a lot like Animelo, though we are obviously lacking in a couple of the big acts of Animelo from other music labels. The line up is by no means shabby though it remains to be seen how well Lantis can pull something of this scale and size off all by themselves. One thing is almost certain though, with only Lantis behind this event, there shouldn’t be any rights issues and we can probably expect that they will release this event on disk sometime in the future. Just hope that it is not as bad as the 2007 Animelo disk set that Lantis was responsible for.

Official PoRk sauce.

I know that a lot of Japanese guests and companies planned attendance for overseas anime and game cons/events had been heavily affected by the swine flu, and understandably fans aren’t happy. Just thought that I’ll throw in a balancer so that people can know that the Japanese domestic fans are getting hit too (well they should, considering that Japan’s confirmed cases of swine flu is so high and still going up by the day).

FWIW, the Fukuoka session is still a go, while the Tokyo session is under review.

When they missed the original May 1st release date last Friday and replaced the icon with an “preparing release” I’ve figured that they ran into a little problem but with the long Golden Week holiday in Japan starting last weekend it would mean the earliest we would see the song would be when everyone got back to work (which is today), and true enough the song is now available on the Japanese iTunes Store here. It’s an iTunes Plus song (ie no DRM, unlike the US store the Japanese store has not gone completely DRM free so it is not a given to be iTunes Plus) and cost 200yen. Although I’ve tried searching from the other stores such as US/UK/AU it doesn’t seem to be available internationally. So if you really want to buy it and can’t wait for the album release you might have to jump through the usual hoops such as to buy a Japanese iTunes Store point card from exporters.

As for the song itself, it’s a fairly catchy song and Asapon managed to keep it fairly close to the voice that is produced by the Vocaloid software, which is a good sign of what to expect from the upcoming album. Here’s a sample of the song.

On a related note, the second video for the Shimoda Asami Channel on NicoDouga is now available, and a new track to be included in the Prism album is revealed to be “soundless voice” by ひとしずく (Hitoshizuku), whom to the surprise of the many NicoDouga fans turns out to be a female user of the Vocaloid software. The song itself is a slow sorrowful ballad and is a Ren song (the boy voice).

The channel is here and viewing the videos doesn’t require registration. Though if you want to become a member of the channel’s community (and thus be able to comment on the videos of the channel) you will need to have a NicoDouga account.

Also Asapon’s first cover of a Kagamine Rin song イタズラムスメ (Itazuramusume, original can be heard here) will be made available on the iTunes Music Store (hopefully *not* limited to the Japan store) on May 1st.

So like Discotheque, the latest PV was leaked on the Internet again.

Unlike those crazy erojiji fangirls whom are suffering from dizzy-ness due to blood lost from the nose, let’s look at this PV and song objectively.

The first thing which strikes me about this song and PV is that feels like an act which a visual-kei J-rock band would do. With Nana’s continuing re-appearance at NHK’s Music Japan program (she’s going on for the third time in May) couple with the song that is veering away from the usual anisong image in the public’s mind, I think it’s fairly safe to say that she has set her sight firmly on the market outside her usual anime otaku fanbase and is testing waters with something that is a little more plateable on the mainstream scale (I don’t think it would be wrong for me to say that visual-kei J-rock is less on the extreme end of the mainstream spectrum than anisong). Who can blame her now that she is the indesputable top artist in the anisong sphere, there’s nowhere else for her to go except branching out as the otakusphere is only so big. That said, historically speaking, this sort of branching had all been fairly disastrous since technically speaking, mainstream and otaku taste simply don’t mix very well (which should be fairly obvious just by the very definition of these words alone), and catering to either one usually means the other will be alienated. So it remains to be seen how well Nana can balance her acts from now on.

As for the PV and song - Do I like it? It’s not bad, but I’m not quite as excited as the crazy erojiji fangirls. Does that mean my masculinity is in question? That or Nana is getting really good at turning girls gay.