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Tracklist |
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01 - Polyrhythm
02 - Plastic Smile
03 - GAME
04 - Baby Cruising Love
05 - Chocolate Disco
06 - Macaroni
07 - Ceramic Girl
08 - Take me Take me
09 - Secret Secret
10 - Butterfly
11 - Twinkle Snow Powdery Snow
12 - Puppy love |
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Review |
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Much has been made of Perfume's long struggle to "make it" and how sweet it is now that they have, but, really, three sort-of cute girls dancing and singing vapid pop songs aren't anything new to Japan, or any place for that matter. Why they are now so beloved and inescapable all across this country is due to a near-perfect convergence of great marketing, a mysterious image, cute dance moves, some downright weird, yet alluring, video direction, and, well, great songs. The team of svengalis responsible for this work, including songwriter Nakata Yasutaka from Capsule, are to be applauded. Perfume's Game is the most likable pop phenomenon since "Hey Ya!"
The ingredients used in Perfume's super catchy recipe are easily recognizable right from the start of the album in the hit single "Polyrhythm." The first, and most prominent, is the three ladies' chorus of autotuned voices. This could be written off as mere studio trickery meant to cover up their lack of singing ability, but it comes off as more of an aesthetic choice. The warbly, faux-vocoder texture of their voices comes from the same mold as T-Pain's, but is much more palatable in the context of Perfume's dreamy techno-pop than T-Pain's cartoonishly sleazy R&B. In addition, the melodies being sung are deceptively complex, and almost uniformly catchy to the Nth degree, belying their rhythmic simplicity. In fact, the only real melodic failure on Game comes when the vocal rhythm gets too bouncy for it's own good on the verses of "Ceramic Girl." The stark piano-backed verses of "Baby Cruising Love" and the entirety of the monumental slow-jam "Macaroni" show how it should really be done.
Along with the vocals, the backing beats are almost like secondary melodies unto themselves. The grinding bass of title track "Game" makes for a hard-hitting club anthem, while "Butterfly" comes across much more mystically thanks a nonstop flow of tinkling arpeggios. At other times, the insidiously simple way that the beats are interwoven with the group's vocals make the songs great, like on "Take me Take me," which still soars despite five and a half minutes of some seriously inane lyrics. Some of Game's best songs are reminiscent of the futuristic, European synthiness of Daft Punk's Discovery, and others of Deee-Lite's organic, disco grooves, but "Baby Cruising Love" and "Secret Secret" make it known that Perfume isn't just aspiring towards those sorts of influences, but has taken their place alongside them.
In a Matrix-like world filled with ragged independent artists raging against the pop-star machine it takes a group like Perfume to help us realize that that battle has long since become irrelevant (just like the Matrix movies themselves, Hi-OH!). While the indie purist does everything they can to repudiate the plastic and pretense of the pop world, the pop-star embraces trends as if they were a lifesaver that could keep them afloat amongst the ever changing musical currents of our day. Perfume falls into neither category. Instead, they're a three-piece hovercraft, powered by their own sort of pretense fusion, that has risen above the currents of pop music and is obliviously unaffected by them entirely. Game isn't aimed at the seventeen year-old ditz with her skirt hiked up too high, the hipper-than-thou kid with Radiohead plastered on his dorm room wall, nor even the greasy faced Akiba-kei guy on the fourth floor of Mandarake, but all of them are equally likely to enjoy the heck out of it. When it comes to an album with infectious beats and hypnotic melodies like this, we really have no choice but to like it, dance to it, and tell the whole world about it... you just may not know it yet. |
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