Not quite sure why...but my article on Kirinji's（キリンジ）2018 13th album "Ai wo Aru dake, Subete" (Having Love is All) that I had put up a few years ago suddenly got deleted which is obviously very concerning for a couple of reasons: 1) It's one of my favourite albums ever and 2) It's frustrating to having to do it all over again. Well, Reason No. 2 isn't really true because of Reason No. 1. I can write about the wonders of this album again happily. Maybe I pressed the wrong button.
Basically, "Ai wo Aru dake, Subete" has more great hooks than the tackle box of a professional angler. Case in point is the second track "AI no Touhikou"（AIの逃避行...Flight of the AI） which has Kirinji's Takaki Horigome（堀込高樹）and Charisma.com's rapper Itsuka combine their musical prowess to create this spacey good caper song of a couple of artificial intelligences fleeing from their overseers into an uncertain future. It's a very cool synthpop number enhanced by the vocals of Horigome and former fellow bandmate, Kotringo, and then Itsuka's rap.
Another observation is that although "Ai wo Aru dake, Subete" is uniformly wonderful, I also think that it does have that meat in its batting order. "Ai no Touhikou" is the first of the power trio, and up second is "Hizerowa Game"（非ゼロ和ゲーム...Non-Zero Sum Game） which (depending on my mood and the years to come) is my favourite song of the album. It doesn't only have a bit of that synthpop thing going but there is also that Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers vibe thrumming through the rhythm.
Realizing that "Jikan ga nai"（時間がない） already has its own article, I still had to include it here as the final song of the power trio in the album. Besides, it's another great song.
If I'm not mistaken, the original article for "Ai wa Aru dake, Subete" had one more song in the form of "Silver Girl". It wraps up the album nicely as this calming song with punches of steel drums as Horigome gives out these images of beautiful women and summer beaches. The video above comes from the YouTube channel of Renjiro Kaneko, the fellow who charmed the socks off of us for his salaryman dance in the video for "Jikan ga nai".
"Ai wa Aru dake, Subete" did pretty well on Oricon by peaking at No. 17 on the album charts, and as I said, it has become a favourite of mine in the heavy rotation category. In another way, it was good that perhaps that I had this "opportunity" for this do-over since I've just read on Kirinji's J-Wiki article that Kirinji in its full band form with Yumiki and his other bandmates decided to call it a day back in January 2020. Takaki is now basically Kirinji as a solo project. As much as I wish Horigome well on his own, I will always appreciate the vocal harmonies between him and Yumiki.
May 15, 2021: Well, last night had a little drama that I hadn't expected or wanted. It turns out that I didn't do anything wrong...at least in terms of the button-pressing. Blogger itself had ousted the original article for "Ai wo Aru dake, Subete" for allegedly breaking the Community Guidelines, specifically in the area of malware. I knew that the songs that I covered for the album were infectious but not in THAT way! I did send some feedback to The Blogger Team about the situation and apparently earlier this morning, I got the email from them stating that the original article has been reinstated. However, instead of sacrificing either article, I'll keep them both. Anyways, there are other articles for three other tracks on "Ai wo Aru dake, Subete".
It was a good album but not as strong as Kirinji's first several albums with Yasuyuki Horigome. Tracks 2, 3 and 4 form the power trio of songs on the album, as you mentioned, with the rest being kinda just there. There was one other track which was pretty good but don't recall offhand which one.
ReplyDeleteI think 11 holds up as is the strongest of the post-Yasuyuki Kirinji albums. Although it doesn't have any dance numbers of the same magnitude of 'Jikan ga nai', it showcases the strengths of all the band members but especially of Takaki's songwriting prowess.
Hello, Michael. Looks like those early Kirinji albums will be worthy of exploration someday. As for the incident that led to a second writing about "Ai wo Aru dake, Subete", I've added the PS above.
DeleteTruly bizarre. "Breaking community guidelines," how exactly?
ReplyDeleteJ, you should definitely check out their early albums and EPs as they feature some of the Horigome brothers' strongest songwriting.
FYI, the comments from Anonymous on your OG post were mine.
You got me on that one. Perhaps there was a glitch in their detection software. Got it on your Anonymous comments.
Delete