[so_cold]

@Turtle/anyone: It's a too easy cliche to say of anyone "she made this when she was a teenager", therefore she's starting out / more simple, therefore it's not as good. But that doesn't fit with Ringo, even if simple music was somehow necessarily a bad thing.

It's also a cliche to argue that teenage emotions lead to better music - people do do that. A worldly wise person might not write a song whose emotions are pitched as precisely between happy and sad as Tadashii Machi, or at least that remarked upon sense of nervousness you get when you move to a new city for the first time. Sometimes the cleverest thing is to make something refined sound as if it's easy. Keikoku wasn't on your list of favoured MM songs (which I otherwise actually happen agree with, and Im not sure the later renditions are always better), but it's a rhythmic gem. The first part of the verse is like skipping rope, the prechorus is almost kind of funky, you could do that level-hand gesture some R&B singers do while singing, and the chorus is of course the \m/

The next two albums do get progressively more experimental, but the ways in which that happens is interesting and at no real detriment to the pure outright hitmaking of MM, which any songwriter worth their salt would respect, even if what they do themselves is more esoteric. Whatever the reason for the increase in experimentalism is, it's really, factually not about structure: she has always been about simple verse-prechorus-chorus, both then, now and all points inbetween, her bandmates pretty much fit in with that as well I think (I don't listen to Jihen much). There's a few allotted bars for a solo, max... And it's not about her melodies which have always pretty much always been complex, I seem to recall she envied Elephant Kashimashi because his melodies were simple and she couldn't write ones like that.

And obviously who would be allowed to debut with a KZK unless they're on an independent label. But if you're going to say her sensibilities aren't as refined early on, you're also putting down a various and novel set of B-sides left out for the (legitimate) reason that it doesn't fit the album/persona she was projecting. That's an argument for MM being a least favourite perhaps, but not an argument against her already being on top of her craft. Her singing might be raw on the Juwaki no Naka demo but it does something like 3 internal key changes to different parts of the circle of fifths while making it sound the most natural thing in the world. Even John Lennon and Stevie Wonder took years to write songs like that, the shades of emotions on that are like nothing else and yet the lyrics are about her boyfriend not calling her. Is her voice rough round the edges? Sure. But play one of the HF lives and watch her voice strip paint from the walls...

I honestly don't have a "least" favourite out of these three, they fit different moods and once things get to a certain level of really really good I don't do A>B any more. I'd vote KZK as a protest just because nu-fans use it to rag on MM/SS, but that's not how I feel about the music itself. MM isn't my least favourite, because it's just too much fun to cue up and the songs are timeless. Even Koko de is quite enjoyable once you let the damn song play...