m-flo -- L.O.T. (Love Or Truth)

 

Welcome to another Hump Day in the middle of the final full week of March. We're still making our slow way to spring weather as we hover a little over 0 degrees Celsius here in Toronto, but at least we've made some progress with the sun. 

As such, why don't we lift some of those spirits up with a bit of m-flo? I haven't discussed about LISA, VERBAL & ☆ Taku in over a year, and I was able to find this nice pick-me-up which was released as the group's November 1999 6th single, "L.O.T. (Love Or Truth)". To be honest, I'd never heard of this one before since for one thing, it hadn't been included on the lone BEST collection I have of them, "Award Super Nova".

m-flo to me has usually meant hip-hop or hip-pop so to hear this one is quite the revelation because "L.O.T.", which was written and composed by m-flo with H.U.B.'s help on the lyrics, strikes me more as a contemporary Latin pop number with some jazz elements (although VERBAL has got his usual rap patter in there). It's also been recognized as the group's first ballad and it's beautifully sung by LISA. "L.O.T." was used as the theme song for a TV Asahi drama series "Best Friend".

Quite the atmospheric music video for "L.O.T." but that hotel corridor looks like it came straight from "The Shining"! I was expecting a couple of creepy twin girls to invite LISA and company to play. Anyways, the video below is of the Agape Mix of the song. The song scored a No. 24 ranking on  Oricon. It also appeared as a track on m-flo's first album "Planet Shining" from February 2000; it peaked at No. 6.

The above video from the channel Heisei Sound System is an AI City Pop version of "L.O.T." that was released a couple of months ago, and to be honest, it was the first version of the song that I had heard before I quickly tracked down the original. I have to admit that it does sound quite good, and usually I haven't been all that impressed with the AI attempts at urban contemporary.