Most of the tracks on GUMism had already been released on Nico Nico Douga, so it's more of a best-of CD than anything, but I preordered it quite a while ago and have intentionally been avoiding hearing any of the tracks I hadn't already heard, so a lot of it was new to me. It's a bit early for me to be calling any top tracks but after a couple of listens I think it's a pretty solid compilation. Rosetta and For my soul are two tracks that are particularly sticking in my head so far though.
EDIT: after listening more, my favourite song would have to be 恋はきっと急上昇. I'm not real keen on any songs earlier in the album (ロゼッタ is good, 十面相 is overrated), mainly because the tuning on Gumi's voice sounds pretty amateurish. The latter half starts out heavier, which isn't usually my thing, but the songs are well done and I've found myself listening to them over and over. It winds down a bit for the last few tracks to end the album on a softer note, although I'm not a big fan of cosMo@暴走P's song. It's not bad, I just don't like his sound much in general.
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| I wish they didn't include her original character art. Seriously, it's horrible. |
(totally stole this idea from MixedNuts/HHH)
It's got more of a rock feel than I thought it would, which isn't a bad thing at all; I think Gumi has quite a well-suited voice for that sort of music. I'm a bit surprised that there aren't any DECO*27 songs on there, especially since 弱虫モンブラン and モザイクロール are almost certainly the most well-known Gumi songs. Perhaps he just wasn't interested.
If you want to listen to it or see the romaji tracklist it's up on MikuDB.
As you can see from the photo above, the CD came with some extras: a sticker, two keychains/dangly things, and a faux bank card. It's not the first CD I've bought to come with a credit card thing, although I'm still not sure what the idea behind them is. Still, it looks cool enough.
I really like the little extras that get thrown in with a lot of Japanese CDs (well, the ones aimed at the 'otaku' market anyway, I don't know about commercial ones). It's a neat idea, they must cost next to nothing to make, and it's an added incentive to buy the CD. I wonder if major record companies have ever considered trying the same sort of thing with western bands? It's something that you can't download and it's got a certain collector's appeal to it that the CD on its own doesn't always have. Given the way they always whinge about piracy, you'd think they'd be trying anything and everything to increase sales.
Blog stuff:
It's looking like I'm finally getting back into my Japanese study after a good couple of months of basically nothing. The only reason for my extended hiatus was laziness (and it's so true that stopping at all makes it that much harder to get back into it), which is subsiding for now at least. I'm back into vocab grinding, although I'm yet to start on kanji again. It's a shame that smart.fm (the site I was using for vocab) is transitioning into a paid service. I'm not sure whether I'll give up on it or not; I have to decide if paying would give me any motivation boost or not, and if I decide not then I'll find some other service or just move over to Anki for vocab too.
Speaking of getting back into things, with the Starcraft 2 ladder reset I might just get back into 1v1 games again. Expect this to last a maximum of one week, when I will probably ragequit from being constantly cheesed.
>It's a shame that smart.fm (the site I was using for vocab) is transitioning into a paid service
ReplyDeleteYeah, but I guess I always expected it. Those years of free service were basically a beta test.
>Expect this to last a maximum of one week, when I will probably ragequit from being constantly cheesed.
You'd be doing extremely well to make it through a week of cheese.
>Tony ver. Miku
ReplyDeleteDelicious.
Little extras are always great. I think it would be too much work to package extras with CDs unless they're cards or something. I doubt that the majority of western consumers would care about cards either.
If there is some on nico I will take a peek.
ReplyDelete>I don't know about commercial ones
ReplyDeleteA lot of western CDs gets bonus tracks, stickers and whatnot when released in Japan, and a lot of Japanese artists throw in extra stuff in their albums as well. It happens here in the west too, but not as often and I think it's more common with smaller labels than the major ones.