Well, yes, if you based your opinion on a quick look at a couple of pictures on her MySpace, you’d dismiss her as a Japanese school girl with short blond hair and a pair of grotesquely enormous sneakers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: she looks very cute. But AMWE is much more than a pretty girl placed behind a microphone who sings along to whatever her producer does. No, she is a whole other story.
AMWE writes, plays and produces all her songs, and she’s really good at doing all three. If you’d need to place her exactly, you could do worse than placing her on the precise border between new rave and new romantic. She seems to take production, flair and aesthetics from the first, and a taste for sweet, harmonic vocal lines from the second.
The offspring of this unholy alliance is a fantastically kick-ass bunch of romantic songs that have all the capacity to blow up a dancefloor. Songs like Friction Between The Lovers (i.e. Depeche Mode meets the Cardigans) show AMWE’s refined taste for disco flavour and heavy beats.
AMWE is from Nagoya, in Japan, but she’s already caught the interest of the French label Kitsuné that involved her in the forthcoming Hearts Japan EP with a remix of Heartsrevolution’s Dance Till Dawn. And so far, the girl shows promise: the remix is actually as catchy and powerful as the original, and maybe surpasses it. All this to say that AMWE herself is ready to release her first full-length album on October, and we’re certainly waiting for it.
Sleep Walker was the former member of MONDO GROSSO. They play Nu jazz.Thanks! I love nu-jazz! I've heard a couple of Sleep Walker songs before but never any full albums. By the way, if you like Sleep Walker then you should check out Kyoto Jazz Massive:
Yeah, and Perfume is hardly a regular girl group with their heavily computerized vocals and Nakata could probably make the sound of paint drying interesting. Can they even sing for real? Lol.Yeah, I'd say they can sing decently. You can hear it from time to time when they aren't doing lip-sync at concerts/performances. Like so many before them, PERFUME is one of those groups that doesn't really allow for much real singing, even if they could or wanted to. Just ask Mika Todd how often she got to flex her vocals in Mini Moni. e_e
But yeah, maybe I'm just comparing too much to the Korean scene, where they push out girl groups with actual talent all the time. That just isn't happening in Japan, because there's simply no demand.(http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/6370/ohnoyoudidnt.jpg) (http://img163.imageshack.us/i/ohnoyoudidnt.jpg/)
Could be worse, takku... could be China. Man they love their coma-inducing ballads down there. :lol:I actually don't know chinese scene, but yeah, everybody loves ballads. Me also.:)