Vampire Knight vol.1

Bare with me as I give you one of the most convoluted manga plots in recent history.

Cross Academy is a school which is devided into two classes, who never see each other, A Day Class, and a Night Class.

The Day class is just like any other class. The Night class is made of Vampires. I bet you weren’t expecting that, huh? I mean, Vampires, in a manga called Vampire Knight? No way!

Yes way.

On top of that, it’s a secret. However, left to guarding the secret, and the classmates from each other, are Yuki and Zero. Both Orphans with shady relations to Vampires. Their families were both killed by them. However Yuki (female) was rescued by Kaname. This ofcourse was a long time ago and bygones are bygones, right? Wrong.

This first volume is not paced well. I didn’t really notice this reading only one chapter per month, but in it’s collected fromat it’s a little something like reading the summary of a direct to video movie : Zero becomes a vampire, Yuki seems to like him and Kaname and is torn between a pure blood and a transforming Vampire on the verge of mental collapse, who also hunts them and is visited by his old mentor who is phased out by the end of the volume!!

It’s full of melodrama and suggestive blood sucking positions. but it gets better. once it figure out what the fack it’s going to be about!

Tohoshinki~ T

If this album could be a little bit more awesome, it would be missing “Forever Love” and it would include the “Purple Line” music video! The only real misses on this album are”Clap!” which is annoying and horribly repetetive and ofcourse “Forever Love”.

Luckily for us all, Tohoshinki is more interested in getting us to dance than overkilling us with boring ballads. We all know they can sing beautifully, but we’d rather have them moan and groan their way into our pants..i mean hearts!

Their third album in Japan is also their strongest one. It’s r&b. There’s very little pop, and a whole lot of funk. Which suits our boys pretty well.

The new songs are some of the  best ones on here. Purple line, Darkness eyes, Rainbow…i could really name them all. but, what i can say is you should start here and work your way back if you’re new to Tohoshinki, and if you’re not, you should invest the time into buying this album brought you by the letter “T”.

Koda Kumi~ Kingdom

With an album title such as “kingdom”, one can only assume the artist expected to reign the charts. However, an unfortunate, moronic statement uttered by our beautiful song bird, can easily be blamed for the reign not being as long lasting as everyone’s expectations were.

However, her lady’s court is still entertaining regardless of units sold. She does very little differently this time around, but maybe she does it slightly better.

Everyonce in a while Koda Kumi will do something different, if this different thing succeeds she just hits the muliply button and then we have the same basic ideas reworked but packaged slightly different.

There’s the boy band collab with “Last Angel”, the overtly sexual summer blockbuster “Freaky” which was apart of another 4 track single, though thankfully for all of us who actually buy our j-pop the other three songs are omitted. And an onslaught of ridculously cutesy songs that seem to all sound like the same cutesy song remixed for each progressive album. Not to mention the tear-jerker “Ai no Uta” which seems to showcase the limitation of her vocals every time.

Maybe the biggest difference between Kingdom and Black Cherry is that Kingdom uses Gold has it’s main color scheme and Black for Black Cherry ovbiously.

She even reworks the “video for every song” that she did on Best second session. Of course, most of the videos are rather cheap and you can see the rather stretched budget of the production in an handfull of them. Still, it is nice to be able to choose between watching your favorite album or listening to it!

Several songs are almost indistinguishable between each other, much like their corresponding videos. but not all is lost.

BUT is still as awesome as when it was released as a single all those months ago, and then there’s the awesome “More” which proves to be one of Kingdom’s most standout tracks.  Channeling Aretha’s “you make me feel like a natural woman” sound that is pretty new to Koda Kumi’s line up. The video is also pretty dynamic as well.

“Last Angel” , “Freaky”, “Anytime” and “Under” are other stand out tracks.

That being said there’s a little bit of everything for everyone in Koda Kumi’s relm, ballads dance tracks, cute pop songs…even if it’s just more of the same. that’s good enough for plenty of people, myself included.

You either like Koda Kumi’s formula, or you don’t.