1) I LOVE YOU (Album Ver.) 2) Mienai Hoshi (Invisible Star) 3) Sunao na Mama (The State of Honesty) 4) CRY NO MORE 5) ALL HANDS TOGETHER 6) DANCE WITH THE DEVIL 7) BLACK & BLUE 8) JOY 9) THE DIVIDING LINE 10) MY SUGAR CAT 11) Yogoreta Hana (Stained Flower) 12) GOING BACK HOME 13) Kinenka (Song of Prayer) 14) WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
I 1st heard about J pop/jazz singer Mika Nakashima via her single & her so far only #1 hit GLAMOROUS SKY that she did for the 1st NANA movie which she also starred in & you imagine it's a rock song & surprisely her voice blends well with Rock music .
& naturally curiousity gets the better of me & I decided to go around MySpace & also the net in search of her tunes . Managed to hear a couple which I really like & they're very catchy too so eventually I decided to buy her 5th album YES .
Her fans that have been following her since the release of her debut True commented that she doesn't sound her best in her latest record YES . Well I don't know about that since it was only recently I stumbled upon their music so let's just leave it this way.
Mika's music style consists of mostly swinging big Jazz no.s which's refreshing if you listen to her material . There're a lot of strong & catchy tracks on YES such as CRY NO MORE , the uplifting ALL HANDS TOGETHER & DANCE WITH THE DEVIL , the sexy BLACK & BLUE , Sunao na Mama (The State of Honesty).
She even did a full Eng no. in the form of JOY which I find it not bad considering that Eng's not her 1st language & it takes guts to do a song which language's Eng . There's also a cover of WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD .
I don't really respect covers unless it's done even better than the original but Mika's redition's very nice & refreshing & as a matter of fact , quite different from the original . She puts a fresh Jazz sound onto it which's great . Kudos to that.
There's also a Reggae no. in the form of MY SUGAR CAT & she sounds pretty good doing Reggae as well . It might sound weird considering that the whole album of YES's Jazz no.s & you have a reggae no. that's smacked in the middle of the tracklisting but still good effort.
The rest of the tracks on YES however , I don't find them memorable in that I cannot recall them that well unless I listen to them again unlike the tracks that I listed down eariler but I probably need to take some time in order to warm up to the whole album of YES.
But still at the end of the day , I'm glad that I came across Mika Nakashima's music . Before that I wasn't big on Jazz but hearing her material , she changed my perception on that Jazz = boring . Now I don't think that's the case anymore .
# #1 BREAKERZ fan in Singapore since 2008 debut single ♥
# My music blog consists of JPop/Rock singles & albums reviews that I put my heart , efforts & soul into writing them as I'm disgusted with the way that JPop/Rock music is being treated/written/reviewed in Singapore so to the local media (yes you TEENS , Teenage Magazine & The Strait Times) , screw you all . I basically can write better JPop/Rock reviews , period
