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Old 2007.09.08, 06:59 PM   #34
Glathannus
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Originally Posted by alleon86 View Post
To those who will rather have Izawa than HZM, get off from what ever you are smoking. Izawa is not even half of what hzm is capable.

What Hzm brings is invaluable. He brings stage presences and the WOW factor. Don’t you guys think it so fun watching dynamite out because they change up their songs with Hirami and Hzm taking turns spicing up things and keeping the songs fresh? Now, it all Ukigumo , and it gets boring after awhile.

You guys are overrating Izawa song writing, they are not bad but definitely not awesome. You guys say HZM is a bad song writer. At least HzM wrote Gunjou Biyori and it sold 200k. Anybody can replace Izawa. There are plenty of keyboardists that can replace Izawa. Infact, he shows for more enthusiasms playing the guitar than the piano.

You guys say HZM is all brute force. Hzm shows that he can play mellow or jazzy or whatever it is, depending on what kind of song he is playing. Listen to onaji from electric mole concert , or some of his work from PEZ.
My reply was the first one to go into detail about why both bands have been better off ever since HZM decided to concentrate on PE'Z. You've either ignored my comments or you've taken them out of context.

I've heard more and seen more of HZM than probably anyone else in this community except maybe lupin (who joined more to talk about PE'Z than anything else), and I'm telling you, I'm okay with HZM leaving Tokyo Jihen. But on the otherhand, I'm not exactly a Phase 2 lover, because I think the band 'lost' more with Ukigumo than they 'gained' with Izawa.

Performance-wise, *I* could replace Izawa. Heck, you could probably replace him too. I won't deny that for even a minute. But I really do like his songs better than HZM's, even if they weren't made for Tokyo Jihen.

Giving credit where it's due, none of HZM's contributions were hand-me-downs. That's what Phase 2 has become at the end of Adult and onward, you know. If Tokyo Jihen could've performed PE'Z songs (or vice versa), that would've made Izawa versus HZM comparisons more fair, but HZM kept his two roles very separated.

What I said about dynamics, I still stand by. I didn't say he was the same in most/all songs, but rather, that within any individual song, he doesn't have a lot of dynamics, even if every song is different from each other. HZM is a machine that operates in 'modes'. He can change mode in the middle of a song, just like LCD manufacturers can turn the Brightness up or down and rate the "Contrast" of their product by the two extreme you can only experience one-at-a-time, instead of a realtime co-existence of extremes. "Dynamic Range" on audio equipment is defined as the co-existence of quiet and loud noises simultaneously. Maybe that's the term I should've used. HZM can hit the keys more or less hard at different moments of a song, but never simultaneously.

For the music HZM delivers on stage, he's a genius of an engineer (the note structure), but a toddler fingerpainter of an artist (the sensitivity conveyed). Arguably that's what we 'gained' with Ukigumo, but he's nowhere near as exciting to watch, and Izawa is barely exciting, so basically Phase 2 is a borefest on stage who has to cover up their used-to-be oozing personality, with PV-like intrusions in the footage.

Keith Jarrett is the best of both worlds for things that both factions of the fanbase would want in a piano player (well, except maybe for the stage presence - he concentrates too hard on the music and sometimes makes weird noises), but someone like that is too valuable to actually stay with a band.

I still very much enjoy watching HZM's performances - he was the main reason I bought all the PE'Z DVDs and even went to a concert (and the main reason I think Funny Day & Hard Night is an awesome album), because although the rest of the band deserves some credit too, they're not quite as crazy with the instruments they play, as HZM is with the piano.

Let me just put it this way.
If Tokyo Jihen still had HZM...
then Adult would've had two brainiac engineers with no souls, Just Can't Help It wouldn't be anymore exciting than with Izawa because Shiina Ringo holds a short leash (compare Dynamite Out! to REALIVE 2005 if you don't believe me), and "Variety" (and its associated singles) would've been overwhelmed with hand-me-downs from Petrolz, with hardly any alternative source, because it's not HZM's style to write songs where the keyboard/piano doesn't have an especially crucial role, and Shiina Ringo would never allow that. He gets much more freedom to go wild with PE'Z than the freedom he ever got with Shiina Ringo. So he would've wrote maybe 2-3 songs again, and maybe if we were lucky, Kameda would pitch two songs instead of one, and then the rest would've been Ukigumo.
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