seiyuu3

The full track listing can be found here for those who can read Japanese, I might get around to translate it later.  In the mean time just some moments worthy of mention:

*  Concert kicks off with - what??  Yukarin’s “Koiseyo Onnanoko”!  But wait, there’s one more person!  OMG it’s a duet with Nana-chan!

*  Nanoha Yukarin and Fate-chan Nana-chan than sang Nana-chan’s “Anone - mamimume☆mogacho”, wow, Yukarin doing the monkey too!

*  First solo performer is Yukarin, despite this being her first Animelo appearance.   She did three songs in her usual top performance.  She even got the entire stadium to do the melon stick wave, it’s a great act to get people to warm up for the concert.

* AAA is a very well packaged mainstream Avex J-pop young band - complete with the pretty boy singer, rapper, girl vocal formula sang to eurobeat songs topped with well chronographed dances.  Bonus for them being actually able to pull it off.

* Karen Girls were not bad, but still a very painful act to watch.

*  yozuca, Minorin and savage genius sang FictionJuction YUUKA’s “nowhere”.  That really came out of nowhere.

*  savage genius  sang a new song “Just Tune” which is the opening to one of the autumn show “Yozakura Quartet”, not a bad tune.

*  Akino!  愛してる (Aishiteru)!

*  bless4 were pretty amazing with their a cappella.   Really talented group of young people.

* GRANRODEO (lead vocal is Taniyama Kishou) replaces Takahashi Naozomi as THE male seiyuu act of Animelo.  They brought with them some pretty heavy J-Rock which is a welcome change.  While Takahashi Naozomi is by no means a bad performer, one has to admit that one thing Animelo doesn’t lack are feminine acts.

* Suara sang the only slow song for the night.  Her performance is still so perfect.

* Kuribayashi Minami covered up even more parts of her body this year, even though she’s still wearing a really skimpy skirt.  I guess the organisers still think she’s wearing too little?

*  Minorin got a big share this year, performing 3 (4 if you count Contact which IMO isn’t really a song) solo pieces.

*  Minorin Makkun Rondo Revolution duet!  But they sang it to the inferior Makkun tribute album remix of the song, so last year’s Nana-chan/Makkun duet is still the one to top.

*  Nana-chan’s super-awesome Dancing in the Velvet Moon performance complete with sexy costume.  Every year she still simply OWNS the show as she bursts onto the stage.

*  The last piece is Eternal Blaze, ZOMG it’s a Nana-chan/Arika (Ali Project) duet!  They kept their promise!

*  Mic volume level problems during the final 3 group songs.   Hope its just a live-mixing problem such that they can fix it for the DVD release.

One more day to go!

Kitamura Eri first personal single coming up?

The Animate online store has an entry listing which essentially says “Kitamura Eri 1st Maxi-single” with a serial of LACM-4513, coming out on July 23rd. Since KitaEri has released numerous character singles for anime such as Seto no Hanayome and Kodomo no Jikan already I’d take it that this is going to be her first single under her very own name. I’m pumped for this release as I think KitaEri is another power seiyuu singer that has plenty of potential to make it big. However, LACM points to the single being released by Lantis, so there’s this looming bad vibe about this which I can’t shake off as well.

Either way, this is a good time to re-visit KitaEri’s Hyakka Seiran anisong covers to see why I’m excited:

Tamura Yukari’s Budoukan Live DVD set release confirmed

Anisong site Axive has reported that Yukarin’s historical live at Budoukan “Love♡Live 2008 *Chelsea Girl*” will see a DVD release on July 23rd (damn what’s with this day?!). A DVD release is expected and anticipated by many, but the real bit of news is that they are going to have a 5.1 soundtrack - a first for King Records’ seiyuu DVD releases I believe. Due to various circumstances I actually had to pass on this concert, and while there is no substitute for physically being there, at least a nicely mastered DVD with 5.1 soundtrack can capture part of the magic. Yukarin is taking one for the team here - as I’m sure depending on how this release is recieved that a 5.1 track for Nana’s Live Fighter concert for this year would be a given. So here’s hoping that the release will be good.

I have Minorin fanclub goods

Lazy man way to finish off this entry.

Just announced on the official website today is that Yukarin is going to attend the Saturday session of Animelo 2008.

With Nana-chan (Mizuki Nana), Minorin (Chihara Minori), Yukarin (Tamura Yukari), Kurinoko (Kuribayashi Minami) on the same day the Saturday session practically has all my top favourite female seiyuu singers covered - add in ALI Project and GRANRODEO and I’m totally sold on the Saturday session now. Sunday’s session on the other hand is still up in the air. While I’m 120% certain that Ishikawa Chiaki will sing “Uninstall” and I’d love to hear that song live, the line up on Sunday doesn’t quite appeal to me on the same level.

With Nana-chan, Yui and Yukarin all attending this year, this means the three top selling female seiyuu artists of the current generation are all at Animelo. With angela also in the line up this makes me wonder if King Records had decided to throw in their weight this year and stop letting Lantis gets all the glory. Perhaps we will see a DVD release by King Records this time, which may as well, since their seiyuu DVD release are better than Lantis - video quality wise anyway.

I only just realised that “Chelsea Girl”, one of the tracks from Yukarin’s upcoming album “Izayoi no Tsuki, Kanaria no Koi”, was actually made as the February ending theme song for Nippon TV’s late night variety program Shiodome Event-bu which airs on latenight Wednesdays. The show specialises in the coverage of upcoming events and programs that is related to Nippon TV. A short section from the PV for “Chelsea Girl” was shown for this week’s show.

It looks to me that King Records is applying the same formula which worked for Mizuki Nana onto Yukarin. Though I’m not so sure that Yukarin’s music style and appearance would benefit from such marketing tactics.

Mizuki Nana’s 17th single “Starcamp EP” goes on sale next week - to all you people coming in looking for downloads and torrents, check the release date first ya fools! And for the record this site does not provide downloads and torrents - anyway this means that heavy promotion is about to begin. Yahoo Japan is going to stream the PV for Astrogation starting this Friday, and Nana-chan is scheduled to appear on television program “Oto Riko!” on the 18th. In the mean time a 15 second long commerical can be found below.

On a sort-of related topic (related to Nana-chan anyway), I was made aware of this certain scene from episode 17 of Majintantei Nougaminerou:

LOLZ at the two guys that were obviously drawn to cover the two Ns of “Nana”, so this can’t be a fluke. Looks like someone at Madhouse is a Nana-chan fan. If you are wondering where the source pictures are from and for, they are from the canned sweets which were sold on the recent Live Formula tour as part of the tour goods.

Info on Tamura Yukari’s new album is now up. Titled “Izayoi no Tsuki, Kanaria no Koi”, it will be released on 27th of February, which is also Yukarin’s birthday (she’s turning 17, again). The first pressing will come with a DVD containing the PV to one of the songs in the album “Chelsea Girl”. The release of this album also means that there would be plenty of new songs to look forward to for her Budoukan live in March.

Since both King Records and Yukarin’s own homepage fails at images, it is again up to Amazon JP to save the day with a nice big image of the cover.

Chihara Minori will also be releasing a new single on 26th March. Title is not yet known. I think there’s a good chance that we might get to hear it at the final sessions of her live tour.

Horie Yui just released her highly anticipated album “Darling” yesterday. The promotional train for this album is insane - Yui was literally on the cover of every single seiyuu magazine, with hm3 running a cover special which spans 3 consecutive issues no less. We’ve even spotted a big poster ad at Akihabara station (no pictures, sorry). No doubt it is part of VIMS’ plan to get back some lost ground now that a few of the other seiyuu artists are nibbling at Yui’s heels. Will be keeping an eye on the Oricon charts to see whether the big promotional effect is going to pay off or not. sent might also have a word or two on the album later on now that his copy came in.

Finally, one release that surely fell under the radar for many people is Takahashi Mikako’s album “sweet” which was also released yesterday. Not only is the album fully produced by Mikako herself, she also wrote the lyrics and composed the music to every single one of the 10 tracks in the album. Apparently it took her 3 years to do all of this. Mikako is a decent enough singer, I’m tempted to buy it, half out of respect for her effort and half out of curiosity.

The small image is not because of bias, just that it’s the biggest image I could find.

2007 Christmas week sees two big seiyuu DVD releases - Yukarin’s concert DVD “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” and Minorin’s first music clip DVD “Message 01″. So how do they stack up and are they worth the price of admission? Read on.

First, Yukarin’s concert DVD set containing footage from the 2006 Christmas concert “Pinkle Twinkle Party” as well as this year’s summer tour “Sweet Milky Way”. After a few fumbles in the beginning, the past couple of years King Record’s concert DVD products has improved dramatically and has remained pretty solid - both in terms of the quality of the actual content on the disk as well as the presentation of the package. “Pinkle Twinkle Milky Way” keeps up with the trend, so what you get for 6,800yen is a massive 3 disk set in a 4 fold digi pack, a nice thick booklet containing pictures and interviews, and a hard cardboard box to house it all. Click on the second and third picture for large size photo.

Just looking at the pictures, you can tell that King Record really knows the people they are selling to. It’s all good and well that the package is pretty, so how about the actual content? Again keeping up with their recent effort, what you get is the concert recorded in anamorphic widescreen with linear PCM stereo sound - this is about as good as they can get without moving to HD disks such as Blu-ray or HD-DVD (FWIW, Suara’s concert on Blu-ray was beautiful, so I’m eagerly waiting for a Nana-chan or Yukarin concert on a HD disk). The video compression is also good, so visually it is nice as well, check out a few screen grabs below (click for full size):

Some of you might have read my ranting against the Haruhi Gekisou DVD at other places, for reference’s sake, here’s a grab from the Gekisou DVD, again click for full size.

Compare the crispness of the screen grabs, added with the fact that the Gekisou DVD was 4:3 letterboxed (with insane overscan compensation) and I think it should be clear that the Gekisou DVD was a damn mess. Not to mention the difference in price was only a mere 800yen and I think you can understand my beef with the Gekisou disk.

As for the content’s side, we’ve talked about Yukarin’s live performance enough here but it’s worth repeating - she sings well and her MCs are fun, so you do get your money’s worth.

Moving on to Minorin’s “Message 01″

The packaging is not fancy - only coming in a standard CD size jewel case, no big deal, but my first big disappointment was the 4:3 letterbox video despite the fact that the entire disk’s video was in widescreen! On the plus side though there were no major problems with the video compression, so not all were lost.

This is the second Lantis produce DVD that I’ve bought - Animelo 2007 being the first which had bad video compression - and judging from this disk it looks like Lantis could learn a thing or two from King Record. Other than that though, the content itself was quite substantial with 96 minutes of running time, off setting the original fear of a 3,000yen price tag for 3 PV clips. The documentary section makes up the bulk of it and it will take me some time to get through the entire disk, though quickly skimming through the footage I found some nice gems in there including videos of Minorin’s street live days in Akihabara, definitely worth watching to see just how far she had came. Included with the DVD was a bonus audio CD containing one track titled “Contact 13th”. My first reaction was to ripped it and add it as the 13th track to the Contact album playlist, then I replace the mangled album version of “Shinji no Tabi” with the full version from the DVD and gave it a few play through and all of a sudden it made the album seem more complete. Surprising how one or two tracks can make or break an entire album. As a side note, Lantis collaborated with the usual anime goods stores for extra goodies and Animate was giving out special posters:

When I saw the sample on Lantis’ special page I knew I had to get the disk at Animate just for this poster, and I have to say it is one of the better free posters I’ve got from Animate for a long long time. Now I’ll just have to decide whether I want to use this poster in place of the Junpaku Sanctuary poster currently on the wall.

In conclusion, Yukarin’s DVD is another quality product that is highly recommended to anyone having a passing interest in her music career. On the other hand, Minorin’s DVD would not disappoint hardcore fans, however I don’t think it will be as worthy of a purchase to non-followers compared to the Yukarin DVD.

I guess I’m suppose to give a review of this, but I’d rather let the pictures speak for themselves. (read: I’m lazy)

Just a heads up that Yukarin’s first photo album “Sorairo” is now up for pre-order at Amazon JP. Go place your pre-orders now!

According to 声優ニュース.com, Tamura Yukari had annouced on her radio show that she will be releasing a photo album titled “Sorairo” on October 10th. Considering that Yukarin is one of the top idol seiyuu, which means being a big sales drivers for seiyuu magazines, especially hm3 which is famous for its gorgous seiyuu photo shots, it’s kind of surprising that it took them that long to come up with a photo album dedicated solely to Yukarin, as many other popular idol seiyuu such as Nana-chan, Hocchan, Enomoto Atsuko had released their photo albums already. What would be interesting though is the direction of the photo album. Yukarin’s trademark dress code - sweet lolita - is quite popular amongst the female otakus, and certainly a lot of Yukarin’s female fans does taken a similiar liking in their fashion choice. If they want to broaden the appeal of the photo album outside of the male fanbase, having a bit of a fashion angle to the photo album would certainly be a very big draw in my opinion. 　

No pre-orders are up yet at the usual outlets, but be sure to keep a look out for it all you Yukarin fans.

Just announced today at her live tour “Sweet Milky Way”, Tamura Yukari will be holding a live concert at every singer’s “holy grail venue” Budoukan next year sometime in spring. This will very likely make Yukarin the third seiyuu artist to hold a personal concert at Budoukan, after Shiina Hekiru and Mizuki Nana.