seiyuu3

Well they finally announced it - one of the hottest anisong events Animelo Summer is on this year and the official site is now open. A preliminary list of artists attending are already on the site - with familiar names such as ALI Project, Kuribayashi Minami, Mizuki Nana, Chihara Minori, Ishikawa Chiaki, JAM Project, Momoi Halko, Hirano Aya, and two new players GRANRODEO and angela.

This year’s key word is “Challenge” - and with that they are definitely taking some new organizational challenges by not only upping the venue scale from Budoukan to Saitama Super Arena (the capacity depending on layout can be up to double the size), but also splitting the concert into two days, with what appears to be different artists performing on different days. I’m a bit torn on this move - as much as I like the prospects of two days worth of awesome live performances of anisongs, I don’t like them leaving me no choices but to go to both days to see all the artists I want to see.

On a related note, one of JAM Project’s long time female member Matsumoto Rika broke news shortly after the closing of JAM Project’s domestic concert tour that she will no longer take part in JAM Project and JAM Project related events. While hopeful fans were praying that it’s a late April’s Fool, but the profile picture of JAM Project at Animelo reflected this change. It’s a big blow to JAM Project, especially that JAM Project is supposedly doing a world tour this year (and what’s up with that anyway? Hardly any news is out regarding the schedule). Otakon still has her listed as guest, but I guess it’s up in the air.

Linky. You can also see part of the PV for the new song “Melty tale storage” there.

Nice pic, very classy. This could pass for an ad for cosmetics. :P Not hard to understand why even some girls would turn yuri for Minorin. The PV seems to be fairly similiar to what they’ve been doing so far - lots of standing around in big open space with Minorin doing her hand-waving thing. Well you either dig it or you loathe it.

Anyway, track listing is as follows:
1. Melty tale storage
2. Sandglass~Kioku no Ryushi
3. Echo of Melty tale storage [red strings ver.]
4. Melty tale storage (off vocal)
5. Sandglass~Kioku no Ryushi (off vocal)

Single on sale 26th March.

The PV was released today on Yahoo! Douga. So the usual. Video below.

I have a softspot for stop motion animation, so I like what they did in this PV in general. I’m not sure about the fetish cosplay though (cheerleader, megane look). I always did find the section at around the 4:10 mark of which the synchronisation for all the different looks of Nana-chan to that particular line of lyrics, all framed in a comic book style panel, quite catching to the eye.

Amazon JP delivered my package containing my copy of Mizuki Nana’s 17th single “Starcamp EP”. The short of it is that I was kind of surprised how much I enjoyed the single from the music stand point - I have not seen a single second of the tie-up anime “Rosario + Vampie”, not even the opening nor ending, so I approached this single purely as just more songs by Nana-chan. My original opinion of “Astrogation” holds - I enjoy listening to it when it comes up on the playlist, but it’s not one I would actively seek out to play as it doesn’t stick to my mind. “Cosmic Love” reminds me of some of the cute songs from Nana’s second album “Magic Attraction”, which I kind of enjoy. “Dancing in the velvet moon” turns out much better in recording compared to the version that Nana-chan performed at the last session of her Live Formula tour and was definitely the highlight of the single, and with a ballad “Soratokei” wraps it all up in one neat complete package. When Nana-chan claimed that this is an “all A-side single”, she wasn’t joking, as even though the songs aren’t mind-blowingly outstanding, the quality is definitely there.

However, ther was one major problem with this single. While I’m no audiophile and will not claim the ability to tell the minute difference between hi-fi equipment and a decent pair of bookshelf speakers, but one doesn’t really need to be a audiophile to tell that “Cosmic Love” and “Dancing in the velvet moon” had problems - there were massive clipping in the recording. Now on the other hand being an engineer who took some signal processing classes, I was able to quantify this by quickly looking at the waveform of the recording - and sure enough it confirms my suspicion. The recording for “Cosmic Love” and “Dancing in the velvet moon” was recorded way too loud and the majority of these two songs’ volume was over the normal threshold. To illustrate this let me show you the following:

The waveform on the top is from “Cosmic Love”, and the one at the bottom is “Meg Mell” from Clannad’s OST, which was just something I grabbed off the shelf at random. Without getting all technical, let’s just say that you want to clearly see the peaks of the waveform fall within the celling and the floor as in “Meg Mell”, and not touching and/or concentrated at the top/bottom as in the case of “Cosmic Love”, “Dancing in the velvet moon” is in the same boat as “Cosmic Love” but I’m not going to put up the graph. So if you found that the sound of these two songs on Starcamp EP sound rasped and was wondering, no it’s not what it’s suppose to sound like. At least I hope the people at King Records weren’t intending it to sound like this…

Seems that I am bitching about company failures alot lately.

Title speaks for itself.

This is actually the first time I’ve heard the song in full. Quite a mainstream Jpop sounding song, and hardly one that puts up any sort of challenge to Nana-chan’s abilities. It’s catchy enough for a pop song, but like most mainstream pop it’s going to come and go really quickly without leaving much of a lasting impression. Then again that’s probably what they were going for anyway. At least it seems they’ve got a (slightly) bigger budget for the PV than usual, I mean check out the CGs! :p

Hyakka Seiran is a project started by Seiyuu Grandprix sometime last year. The premise is simple enough - grab some famous seiyuu, male and female, and get them to cover famous anime songs, then sell some CDs and voice ringtones. Sounds like a winning (money-making) formula, no? So what could possibly go wrong?

The volume I purchased, volume 2 of the female side, contained more than enough names that I’m very familiar with to pique my interest - Inoue Marina, Nazuka Kaori, Pak Romi, Kaneda Tomoko, Hirohashi Ryo and Yamamoto Maria. Throw in some interesting covers - like Inoue Marina covering Gurren Lagann’s “Sorairo Days” and Gundam SEED’s “Annani issyodatta no ni”, Pak Romi’s Fullmetal Alchemist’s “READY STEADY GO”, Mobile Suit Gundam’s “Ai senshi”, Aura Battler Dunbine’s “Dunbine Tobu”, Kaneda Tomoko’s “Combattler V” (yep I’m quite an old school mecha head) it was enough to get me to do a one-click purchase.

However, like everything too good to be true, there’s a catch. You see, they don’t actually get to sing the whole song, rather just snippets of it. “Hyakka” in the title - literally “one hundred songs”, means that the aim was to collect 100 songs on each CD, and how they did it was to have 10 seiyuu each singing 10 snippets to make it 100, so in reality you only get about 7 minutes for each seiyuu. This wasn’t a big issue, as I’ve already read a review which highlighted this fact, so although still rather disappointing, I was ready for it. Production, on the other hand, is clearly on the cheap side. It sounds like they gave the seiyuu no practice at all and just shove them in front of the mic and tell them to sing, karaoke style. Some songs even had clipping in the recording. Painful.

So why am I still talking about it? Not to discourage potential buyers nor going into a rant actually, because even with all the negatives, it still manage to turn out to be somewhat of a neat purchase.

While the karaoke-ness of the recordings was initially a huge turn off, after listening to a few of them singing it dawned on me that it can also be viewed as to how well some of these seiyuu can sing without mixing aids and after touches. While a majority of them sounds more or less like people singing in a karaoke, a few of them performed well enough that it was close to recording level of quality. The ones that managed to do that were Kitamura Eri, Pak Romi and Nakamura Chie.

Working backwards from the list, let’s start with Nakamura Chie. I’m not terribly familiar with Nakamura Chie (I don’t watch Naruto lolz), but she had that old-school style of singing that made her cover of 80’s classic “Pajama no mamade” (Creamy Mami) and “Natsu no Mirage” (Kimagure Orange Road) instantly triggering the nostalgia in me.

Pak Romi’s line up was a trip down the mecha memory lane. Her cover for Turn A Gundam’s “Tsuki no Mayu”, Brain Powerd’s “Ai no Rinkaku (Field)” was just pure love. Also her ability to deliver a sound that almost matches that to MIO’s (now known as MIQ) original powerful vocal performance in “Dunbine Tobu” commands lots of respect.

Finally, Kitamura Eri. Another one full of classics like Rinbu revolution, You Get to Burning, Give a reason, Alone, Pure Snow etc. and possiblly the best cover of Yuzurenai Negai I’ve heard, seconded only to Momoi Halko’s version last year. In fact it did so much for my opinion of Kitamura Eri’s singing ability that if she was to announce a CD right now, I would buy it in a whim with no questions asked.

Some of the other decent ones came from Yamamoto Maria and Inoue Marina. And to top it off Kaneda Tomoko’s track is just off the chart crazy since there is just no way for me, and I assume a lot of others, to take her voice and singing seriously - which is all good and well for comedic effect though.

The CD is clearly for the seiyuu otaku only, and even for those interested, the best way to sum up this CD will be that it’s like a box of chocolate samplers - some are tasty, some are not terribly good, and some makes you crave for more of the same flavour, but in the end there’s just not enough of it. I’ve made clips of what I think were the two best performers on this disk - Kitamura Eri and Pak Romi - and embed them below. Have a listen yourself.

Kitamura Eri’s



Pak Romi’s

Mizuki Nana’s 17th single “Starcamp EP” goes on sale next week - to all you people coming in looking for downloads and torrents, check the release date first ya fools! And for the record this site does not provide downloads and torrents - anyway this means that heavy promotion is about to begin. Yahoo Japan is going to stream the PV for Astrogation starting this Friday, and Nana-chan is scheduled to appear on television program “Oto Riko!” on the 18th. In the mean time a 15 second long commerical can be found below.

On a sort-of related topic (related to Nana-chan anyway), I was made aware of this certain scene from episode 17 of Majintantei Nougaminerou:

LOLZ at the two guys that were obviously drawn to cover the two Ns of “Nana”, so this can’t be a fluke. Looks like someone at Madhouse is a Nana-chan fan. If you are wondering where the source pictures are from and for, they are from the canned sweets which were sold on the recent Live Formula tour as part of the tour goods.

Info on Tamura Yukari’s new album is now up. Titled “Izayoi no Tsuki, Kanaria no Koi”, it will be released on 27th of February, which is also Yukarin’s birthday (she’s turning 17, again). The first pressing will come with a DVD containing the PV to one of the songs in the album “Chelsea Girl”. The release of this album also means that there would be plenty of new songs to look forward to for her Budoukan live in March.

Since both King Records and Yukarin’s own homepage fails at images, it is again up to Amazon JP to save the day with a nice big image of the cover.

Chihara Minori will also be releasing a new single on 26th March. Title is not yet known. I think there’s a good chance that we might get to hear it at the final sessions of her live tour.

Horie Yui just released her highly anticipated album “Darling” yesterday. The promotional train for this album is insane - Yui was literally on the cover of every single seiyuu magazine, with hm3 running a cover special which spans 3 consecutive issues no less. We’ve even spotted a big poster ad at Akihabara station (no pictures, sorry). No doubt it is part of VIMS’ plan to get back some lost ground now that a few of the other seiyuu artists are nibbling at Yui’s heels. Will be keeping an eye on the Oricon charts to see whether the big promotional effect is going to pay off or not. sent might also have a word or two on the album later on now that his copy came in.

Finally, one release that surely fell under the radar for many people is Takahashi Mikako’s album “sweet” which was also released yesterday. Not only is the album fully produced by Mikako herself, she also wrote the lyrics and composed the music to every single one of the 10 tracks in the album. Apparently it took her 3 years to do all of this. Mikako is a decent enough singer, I’m tempted to buy it, half out of respect for her effort and half out of curiosity.

The small image is not because of bias, just that it’s the biggest image I could find.

Picture taken from Amazon JP. Don’t ask me why the official page hasn’t got a decent size picture but Amazon does.

The complete tracklisting was also revealed:
1. Astrogation
2. COSMIC LOVE
3. Dancing in the velvet moon
4. Soratokei

Astrogation’s composer and arrangement is credited to Sumiya Jun. You can find some of his past works here. I think this is the first time him and Nana-chan has worked together.

First a happy new year to you all. seiyuu3 is currently reporting from Osaka, energy all spent just after attending Mizuki Nana’s countdown live at Grand Cube Osaka.

At today’s concert, Nana-chan announced the title for her 17th single. The title is “Star Camp EP”. According to Nana-chan, the title came from card number 17 of a tarot deck, “The Star”, as this is her 17th single, “Camp” represents where everyone gathers together to have fun, and “EP” as in Extended Play, as this single will contain 4 songs. The big news is that “Star Camp EP” will be the Feburary opening theme song for mainstream TV music program Ongaku Senshi Music Fighter, which broadcasts on Nippon Televison Network. Readers with good memory might recall that “Orchestral Fantasia” - one of Nana-chan’s song from her latest album “Great Activity”, was featured as a power play song for the same music program in November last year. Nana-chan providing her song for this program as an opening theme is a huge achievement, as going through the list of artists whom also performed songs for the program will get you familiar big Jpop names such as Hamasaki Ayumi, TRF, EXCILE, hitomi, Every Little Thing, to just name a few. This might give Nana-chan a shot to get some more single sales, though I doubt we would see record breaking numbers as the coupling tracks for Gonzo harem love comedy “Rosario to Vampire” isn’t going to have what it takes to pull in the numbers like the Nanoha opening theme singles IMO.

Nana-chan is set to kick off 2008 in a big way.

2007 Christmas week sees two big seiyuu DVD releases - Yukarin’s concert DVD “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” and Minorin’s first music clip DVD “Message 01″. So how do they stack up and are they worth the price of admission? Read on.

First, Yukarin’s concert DVD set containing footage from the 2006 Christmas concert “Pinkle Twinkle Party” as well as this year’s summer tour “Sweet Milky Way”. After a few fumbles in the beginning, the past couple of years King Record’s concert DVD products has improved dramatically and has remained pretty solid - both in terms of the quality of the actual content on the disk as well as the presentation of the package. “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” keeps up with the trend, so what you get for 6,800yen is a massive 3 disk set in a 4 fold digi pack, a nice thick booklet containing pictures and interviews, and a hard cardboard box to house it all. Click on the second and third picture for large size photo.

Just looking at the pictures, you can tell that King Record really knows the people they are selling to. It’s all good and well that the package is pretty, so how about the actual content? Again keeping up with their recent effort, what you get is the concert recorded in anamorphic widescreen with linear PCM stereo sound - this is about as good as they can get without moving to HD disks such as Blu-ray or HD-DVD (FWIW, Suara’s concert on Blu-ray was beautiful, so I’m eagerly waiting for a Nana-chan or Yukarin concert on a HD disk). The video compression is also good, so visually it is nice as well, check out a few screen grabs below (click for full size):

Some of you might have read my ranting against the Haruhi Gekisou DVD at other places, for reference’s sake, here’s a grab from the Gekisou DVD, again click for full size.

Compare the crispness of the screen grabs, added with the fact that the Gekisou DVD was 4:3 letterboxed (with insane overscan compensation) and I think it should be clear that the Gekisou DVD was a damn mess. Not to mention the difference in price was only a mere 800yen and I think you can understand my beef with the Gekisou disk.

As for the content’s side, we’ve talked about Yukarin’s live performance enough here but it’s worth repeating - she sings well and her MCs are fun, so you do get your money’s worth.

Moving on to Minorin’s “Message 01″

The packaging is not fancy - only coming in a standard CD size jewel case, no big deal, but my first big disappointment was the 4:3 letterbox video despite the fact that the entire disk’s video was in widescreen! On the plus side though there were no major problems with the video compression, so not all were lost.

This is the second Lantis produce DVD that I’ve bought - Animelo 2007 being the first which had bad video compression - and judging from this disk it looks like Lantis could learn a thing or two from King Record. Other than that though, the content itself was quite substantial with 96 minutes of running time, off setting the original fear of a 3,000yen price tag for 3 PV clips. The documentary section makes up the bulk of it and it will take me some time to get through the entire disk, though quickly skimming through the footage I found some nice gems in there including videos of Minorin’s street live days in Akihabara, definitely worth watching to see just how far she had came. Included with the DVD was a bonus audio CD containing one track titled “Contact 13th”. My first reaction was to ripped it and add it as the 13th track to the Contact album playlist, then I replace the mangled album version of “Shinji no Tabi” with the full version from the DVD and gave it a few play through and all of a sudden it made the album seem more complete. Surprising how one or two tracks can make or break an entire album. As a side note, Lantis collaborated with the usual anime goods stores for extra goodies and Animate was giving out special posters:

When I saw the sample on Lantis’ special page I knew I had to get the disk at Animate just for this poster, and I have to say it is one of the better free posters I’ve got from Animate for a long long time. Now I’ll just have to decide whether I want to use this poster in place of the Junpaku Sanctuary poster currently on the wall.

In conclusion, Yukarin’s DVD is another quality product that is highly recommended to anyone having a passing interest in her music career. On the other hand, Minorin’s DVD would not disappoint hardcore fans, however I don’t think it will be as worthy of a purchase to non-followers compared to the Yukarin DVD.