seiyuu3

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.

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.

I’ve talked about the Minamike’s seiyuu trio – Sato Rina, Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori’s manga effort here, and what do you know, they really are going to publish their work. From March this year, the Minamike radio show “Minamike no Minakike” will be collected and released in CD form, and according to the program’s site, the first pressing for the CD will come with the “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun” manga that the seiyuu drew. Not much else is known right know and checking the release schedule, it appears that there will be more than one CD for the program’s recording, so it’s unknown whether they are going to split the manga over the volumes or just release it on the first installment only.

Either way, I’m really interested in checking the manga out drawn by the three, plus I really enjoyed the radio show as well, so this should be a no-brainer purchase for me.

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.

Believe it or not, I’m actually not the type that follows seiyuu radio shows. However this season had me following the Minami-ke radio “Minami-ke no Minakike”. I’m not sure why I’m attracted to this particular radio show – it’s probably the random-ness of it, as each episode has no particular theme to it and it goes in all sorts of direction, and the adlib nature of the radio show resembles the anime itself. Of course it has the added attraction of having two seiyuu that I’m interested in – Inoue Marina and Chihara Minori, and I’m starting to warm up to Sato Rina as well.

One example of the random-ness of the show was when they talked about the show-within-show, the love drama “Sensei and Ninomiya-kun”, that the Minami sisters watches. Since in the anime there really is no story to this show, one of the seiyuu, Inoue Marina if I recall correctly, suggested that they could draw a shoujo manga of the show, and they can each take turn drawing a chapter each week. To keep it short, the idea got the go ahead and they are now serialising the manga, so to speak.

Originally they were doing it for fun and they weren’t going to show it to anyone, but since Inoue Marina is such an excellent drawer, Chihara Minori’s childhood dream was to be a mangaka and apparently Sato Rina is said to be a good drawer too according to her wiki entry, it turned into something they didn’t quite expected, so they’re now giving the listeners a glimps of it by posting a couple of sample pages from their manga.

First you have Sato Rina’s:

And here you have Inoue Marina’s:

The three of them joked about publishing it in one of the episodes, maybe at Comiket or package it as a special in the DVD or something, and who knows, maybe just like this little idea it may come true.

Chihara Minori announced 4 more sessions to her “Contact” live tour – according to reports it’s going to be at Osaka Nanba Hatch, Nagoya Diamond Hall and Tokyo Shinagawa Stellar Ball. At least this time the venues are of respectable sizes (all are 1000+ venues), and I get another chance at ticket draws as all my previous applications (5 goes) failed to get me any tickets.

Yamaha is releasing a music score book for Mizuki Nana. Apparently it will include some behind the scene off shots from live tours etc. I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent “I tried to play it” music boom on Niconico Douga – basically people who took videos of themselves playing their favourite anison with various musical instruments, and Hatsune Miku.

Some Nana-chan related “I tried to play it” links (requires Niconico Douga account)
1 Guitar player who played various Nana-chan songs
2 “Rush & Dash” drums
3 “Crystal Letter” on oboe
4 “Secret Ambition” on a koto

Old school famous seiyuu singer Kasahara Hiroko is re-releasing 5 albums from her earlier days. The trend of veteran seiyuu coming out and trying to recapture their music career seems to continue.

The Second Seiyuu Award has added a special new award – the Tomiyama Kei Award – to be award by the jury to the seiyuu that has the widest and broadest media reach as a seiyuu, or put simply the seiyuu with the most media “buzz” apparently. Personally I think the criteria is unclear and nature of the award seems iffy because it appears to be one of those “I can’t please everyone so I’ll just create another category” type of filler awards. Will wait and see who gets it and whether it turns out to be what I suspect the purpose of the award is what I think it is.

Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first:

The video is bad, as in “zomg I see pixels”. Packaging leaves much to be desired as well for the full price. But get over it.

The sound is still linear PCM Stereo. OK, not 5.1, but the mixing is good and consequently the awesome songs are still awesome.

Rewatching all the songs, the awesome feeling is still there.

Multi-angle for the duets and last encore is epic win. They’ve finally discovered the DVD spec.

Must see acts: Suara, Jyukai, Nana (of course), all the duets, JAM Project, move, Takahashi Youko, Okui Masami. (Actually it’s really hard to leave people out of this list.)

Skippable: Bouken Desho Desho ~ Punk Desho version.

Major disappointment: They took out Dekaranger.

Verdict: Buy (Better with discount)

Link: Amazon.jp / CD Japan

Remember what I said for Chihara Minori’s previous concert? Minorin’s previous birthday live was a great concert, as everything was perfect. i melody, however, was merely an okay one.

It wasn’t Minorin’s fault – she was magnificent that night. The choice of music was a nice mix-up of her personal offerings, old and new, as well as some anime tunes to add variety. Special mention to her covering “卒業” (Sotsugyou/Graduation) by Ozaki Yutaka, a hit song from the 80’s, which demonstrated a side of her vocals that we’ve never heard from her in any of her current works before. Her acoustic section was also fantastic, as she play tunes on her new guitar, named Rain, and performed yet another song she had composed and written herself during her roadside performance days, as well as getting everyone to sing along with a short new song she composed just for this live. The live band that they assembled for Minorin were also great musicans. Even the sound engineers did a splendid job of ensuring that the volumes for each instrument is tuned at the right levels.

So what went wrong? A bit on the management side, a bit on the venue, and as much as it pains me to say it, mostly from the crowd.

While the venue was rated for 400 people, it was simply an absurd idea to actually try to fit 400 people in there, especially since they took out some space which they reserved for the VIPs (friends and relatives). Everyone in the arena were rubbing shoulders and trying to not step on each other’s toes. Add in a small bunch of crazy fans that are now showing way too much enthusiasm without concern of others as well as the lack of space – jumping up and down to the beats and waving 5 different colours of glowsticks depending on the song – it was a real mood breaker. There were two instances where brawls nearly started next to me as crazy fans jumped into the people in front of him which led to some pushing and shoving, and I had to withheld MY own urge to punch one guy in the face as he jumped into me several times without apologising. Good thing is this is Japan, because I can’t see how anyone will be able to get away with this kind of behaviour anywhere else. The crazy Minorin fans also picked up a bad habit from the Tamura Yukari fans – yelling “Minorin! Minorin!” at the top of their lungs during the chorus of several songs, drowning out the vocals. And finally, when the crowd left the floor was covered with rubbish – used glowsticks and promo flyers were littered everywhere. I pray this doesn’t give Minorin a bad reputation – because Yukarin once received a warning due to the misbehaviour of her fans at a certain venue which nearly got her blacklisted from major concert hall venues in Tokyo – though in Yukarin’s case the fans quickly step back in line when words of that got out and now everything is okay again.

With how much love and care Minorin shows to her supporters, I hope that the fans can also learn to be a bit more considerate to others themselves. Let’s hope things will improve come the concert tour next year.

みのりんのファン達、みのりんを困せないように、マナーを守って、一緒にコンサートを楽しみましょ。

At today’s birthday live, Minorin has given every attendee a hand-written thank you note. Yes, every single one of the 400-plus attendee recieved one, each slightly different from the others.

This is why I love Minorin.

Minorin’s new album “Contact” officially goes on sale today and I got my hands on a, very literally, shiny copy. The fold out Minorin picture which spans 3 full folds is impressive, though the lyrics booklet could use a few more photos IMO. I can understand focusing on selling her on the merit of her voice, but it’s undeniable that Minorin is quite attractive, and her smile is especially charming, they should show it off more.

On the music side, so far my impression of it is generally positive, but I don’t think there are any tracks which quite swept me off my feet like my first encounter with “Shijin no Tabi”. Speaking of “Shijin no Tabi”, I’m very VERY annoyed that they decided to make a gapless transition between the ending of “Contact” – the track which preceeds “Shijin no Tabi” – straight into the pumping intro while competely cropping out the beautiful piano solo lead-in of the PV version, as it means I can’t listen to the track on repeat without feeling that the intro is missing something and it being abrupt. This means I’ll have to buy the PV DVD come December (not that I wasn’t going to buy it mind you) and rip that version instead. In the mean time I’ll just have to go back to looping the lower quality live recording which I made during the announcement.