Official PV is out and completed! Oh, and Happy Halloween, everyone!

Shiina Ringo & Hikaru Utada - Roman to Soroban

:wub:

I remember seeing a list in some EMF thread years back of Ringo's favorite albums at the time and being surprised at the amount of old-school 80s and 90s R&B - Tony! Toni! Tone! and the like. Now, less so - you can really hear her infatuation in this one.

Visually too I think there are clear nods to the aesthetic of the Vogue music video. Pretty cool. It seems like an apt connection at this point given the breadth and influence (okay obviously Madonna on a much larger scale) of their very accomplished musical careers.

It's not like she hasn't occasionally dabbled in R&B before, but this feels new for once. Truly excellent. The first time I heard the lo-res version the outro made me tear up honestly. It's been a while since I've felt something like that from a Ringo track...

If she stops doing the "release tracks over a 5 year period and then compile them into an album" cycle and makes an album with music of this caliber, I honestly think we could get a serious return to form. Like, better than Sanmon Gossip return to form, and I love that album.

Wow, is it just me or is her voice different here? It's difficult to describe but Kind of... clear tone, less nasaly and she ditched the annoying gasps she does at the end of lines in most of her recent stuff.

To be honest, I'm not feeling this song but I appreciate that it's different.

It sounds like there will be more than one version

This is called the LDN version and the strings were recorded at Abbey Road Studio by London Philharmonic Orchestra.


Me and Zero are putting bets on the other version being called the TYO (Tokyo) version and appearing at either Kouhaku or the Olympics.

I'm personally guessing she's gonna somehow fuck that one up. With like autotune or crappy Honnou remix style stuff. She can't NOT fuck it up anymore.

Also, on Natalie: https://natalie.mu/music/news/353696
Ringo makes a comment along the lines of 'being tied up for 20 years in domestic product and now has the opportunity to write more freely in the future'. Is this confirmation on the theory going around that all these releases were just contract killers?


If it means more songs like this one with Hikki, then I'm all for it.

I think on some level there was a vague consensus around that but what confuses me is the '20 years'. I think we can generally agree some of her later material - at least 2007 onward - pandered more consistently toward 'domestic product'. But what about the years before that? Was it just EMI/Universal? And what's changing about how she'll move forward, just pursuing more independent projects?

I'm happy we have something to hope for
and I hope that for her "writing more freely" means writing songs that are more different from each other and from what she released in the latest album trilogy period

I think the instrumentation and the verse bits are good, but the song kind of loses its way, I think. It's like TOKYO in that the beginning promises something better than it turns out to be.

If this plays at the Olympics I'd be pretty stoked, even if it's some kind of electronica version. No way she auto-tunes it. I'd put money down that she won't because that would be criminal given how good their voices sound. Auto-tuning Uki isn't blasphemous in any way (in some ways he sounds better, lol) but Hikki? People gon be pissed.

I also want to know what the "tied to domestic product" and "write more freely" means. My longshot, wish-fulfillment brain tells me she's going international and I could finally see her in concert without flying to Japan. My logical brain that tells me there's no way that is ever happening tells me she's ending her EMI contract and is free to write what she wants when she wants to now?

Wouldn't it be hilarious if "writing more freely" meant doing doing an entire album full of auto-tune duets with Ukigumo? :lol:

Yeah, it's a excellent song but the verse hook is so great that it promises "oh crap here comes Ringo out of her cocoon reinventing herself and it's going to be awesome" and it never gets there.

Probably would be better with a 70s Motown arrangement with the horns/strings just highlighting the rest instead of basically an orchestra + bass/HZM. Hopefully the other version is more along those lines and has some guitar in it.