Well, we started out today with some sad news so why not balance that with some happy news? The veteran technopop trio Perfume announced their hiatus earlier this year (to start from the end of 2025) so maybe it's not a surprise then that one of the three, Ayaka Nishiwaki（西脇綾香）, just announced her marriage to someone not involved in the entertainment industry. Many congratulations to the happy couple!💒Hopefully, when and if they do have a ceremony, a chip tune version of "Here Comes the Bride" with vocoder singing won't be happening but that's not my call.
In commemoration of the news, I wanted to cover another Perfume single but I've posted on a number of them over the years so I went all the way back....way, way back to their indies days in the early 2000s. In fact, I'm going with the very first single they released when they went with the hiragana form of their name（ぱふゅーむ）instead of the romaji they adopted later on.
"Omajinai Perori" (Lick the Trick) might come under the category of "Weird Early Installment", that trope on the website "TV Tropes" which describes the earliest episodes of a long-running TV series or other example of media culture where the characters or settings hadn't yet coalesced into the form that viewers have become accustomed to. For one thing, there was no Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）providing the technopop oomph to the songs, and for another, Perfume in this one sounds like a typical aidoru group, with none of that angular choreography.
Pappala Kawai（パッパラー河合）, the guitarist for the band Bakufu Slump（爆風スランプ）, was responsible for words and music. "Omajinai Perori" seems to be about the girls in one particular class quietly staking their claims to the new handsome teacher within their midst. I realize that the video was taken more than twenty years ago, but it's still a shock to see the Perfume members looking so young and jumpy back then...well, looking like proper high school students before they metamorphosized into the slinky techno princesses that everyone around the world has come to know.
Also unexpected is that accordian among the instrumentation. (Probably sampled but still not what we expect from this act.)
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the early Momoiro Clover songs where, similarly, they hadn't figured out the image yet.
Hello, Robert. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating going back to the very beginning.
DeleteWWWOW I wasn't expecting this at all! They are more like morning musume however even early on they good dancers. I wonder if they every remade this song in their current genre?
ReplyDeleteHello, Brian. Yeah, it's quite the revelation, isn't it? I'm not sure whether they ever remade it but perhaps they did perform it in their later concerts as a nostalgia thing.
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