I finally saw Perfume!
I say finally because we missed them by twenty minutes at the last Flower Festival we attended in Hiroshima.
I have a bad habit of springing for concert tickets when I haven't actually listened to any of that band's recent albums. My record is probably the last time I went to see VNV Nation, 15 years after they released the most recent album I had actually listened to ("Empires"), and similarly the most recent Perfume album I've listened to is "Game," from eight years ago. As such, I knew basically none of the songs that they played.
Fortunately, they haven't changed their style. Perfume is technopop, or, as I think of it in my head, "What if Daft Punk was an all-female J-Pop band?" They just put out a new album, "Cosmic Explorer," and that's why they're on tour. And I didn't listen to any of it before coming, but I got to hear it live, so.
We arrived slightly late and came in to find that A-chan, Kashiyuka, and...the other one....were already on stage.
"The other one" is Nocchi, but I never remember that without looking it up.
Sadly, the drones flying in formation were only out for a single song, though they did later have an instrumental laser and patterns-on-metal-screens section that I liked a lot. There was a fairly long period after the first song where they talked about how this was their first time in Chicago and how much they liked Chicago pizza and how excited they were to bring their music to Chicago. Mostly in Japanese, with a volunteer member of the audience translating for them, and with the kind of super-genki enthusiasm that comes off as being mocking or disingenuous in America when adults do it but which is perfectly acceptable in Japan.
They also mentioned they hadn't been able to catch a Taurus in America yet, accompanied by a just-changed-enough-to-avoid-Japanese-copyright-law image on the screen of throwing a pokeball at a mangafied statue of the three of them.
Perfume is worth seeing live because, like a lot of similar groups, they have dance routines as part of their performance. And the dances are complicated enough that they take skill to perform, but not so obviously complicated that they're clearly lip-synching the whole time.
Unfortunately, I don't know the names of most of the songs they did, so I can't really point out anything specific other than Next Stage with You. That link is actually to a car commercial we saw while we were in Japan in July and doesn't have the full song, but it has the chorus and everyone knows that's the important part of the song, right?
They ended with Chocolate Disco, the first Perfume song I ever heard and the only one in this performance where I knew all the words and could sing along. And then after the encore, which I don't even remember, we left and went home. It was great.
I have a bad habit of springing for concert tickets when I haven't actually listened to any of that band's recent albums. My record is probably the last time I went to see VNV Nation, 15 years after they released the most recent album I had actually listened to ("Empires"), and similarly the most recent Perfume album I've listened to is "Game," from eight years ago. As such, I knew basically none of the songs that they played.
Fortunately, they haven't changed their style. Perfume is technopop, or, as I think of it in my head, "What if Daft Punk was an all-female J-Pop band?" They just put out a new album, "Cosmic Explorer," and that's why they're on tour. And I didn't listen to any of it before coming, but I got to hear it live, so.
We arrived slightly late and came in to find that A-chan, Kashiyuka, and...the other one....were already on stage.
"The other one" is Nocchi, but I never remember that without looking it up.
Sadly, the drones flying in formation were only out for a single song, though they did later have an instrumental laser and patterns-on-metal-screens section that I liked a lot. There was a fairly long period after the first song where they talked about how this was their first time in Chicago and how much they liked Chicago pizza and how excited they were to bring their music to Chicago. Mostly in Japanese, with a volunteer member of the audience translating for them, and with the kind of super-genki enthusiasm that comes off as being mocking or disingenuous in America when adults do it but which is perfectly acceptable in Japan.
They also mentioned they hadn't been able to catch a Taurus in America yet, accompanied by a just-changed-enough-to-avoid-Japanese-copyright-law image on the screen of throwing a pokeball at a mangafied statue of the three of them.
Perfume is worth seeing live because, like a lot of similar groups, they have dance routines as part of their performance. And the dances are complicated enough that they take skill to perform, but not so obviously complicated that they're clearly lip-synching the whole time.
Unfortunately, I don't know the names of most of the songs they did, so I can't really point out anything specific other than Next Stage with You. That link is actually to a car commercial we saw while we were in Japan in July and doesn't have the full song, but it has the chorus and everyone knows that's the important part of the song, right?
They ended with Chocolate Disco, the first Perfume song I ever heard and the only one in this performance where I knew all the words and could sing along. And then after the encore, which I don't even remember, we left and went home. It was great.