#20 Hikaru Utada Hatsukoi At their best, pop stars turn the personal into the populist — they make songs for everyone, not for themselves, even if the inspiration comes from inside. Hikaru Utada’s 2016 comeback album Fantome stands as one of the 2010s most fascinating album, wrestling with loss and maturity in a way few…
Half of this entry should be relatively self-explanatory — these are albums that, for various reasons, just missed our final cut. All of them are worth your listening time, and them falling just outside of the top 30 really shows just how much good music came out of Japan. The other, though, is a bit…
It makes sense, when you think about…of course artists share new music primarily on the weekend, that’s the time they are free, just like everyone else in the world. So a round-up post…especially after a pretty fruitful weekend for new electronic highlights out of the country…seems appropriate. – Omoide Label dabbles in all sorts of…
A remix like this is tricky business — “Traveling” is one of Hikaru Utada’s best moments, one that still sounds surprisingly ahead of the times in 2015 (imagine what hearing this in 2001 would have been like). Osaka’s hyperactive Hiroki Yamamura is up to the task, though, mainly because he excels at making music that…
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfpX8lkaSdk”] Utada Hikaru’s new song “Goodbye Happiness” comes with a swell new video worth watching. The little “U Tube” logo in the corner should tip you off, though probably not as much as the from-a-web-cam perspective that it’s a send-up of all those devilspawn performances making up 60 percent of YouTube (which, ironically, are all…