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.
