Now for those who are unfamiliar, or staring at the screen right now with an expression that says 'what is Maark smoking right now?', Perfume are a vocal group whose music is very much the opposite of my usual fare, involving choreography, light shows, and lots of studio production.
As with most of their albums, this disc starts with an instrumental piece which actually reminded me a lot of the Baby Metroid theme from Metroid II. Following this, the title track comes in, and it's surprisingly slow compared to the opening pieces of the rest of the band's discography. It actually signalled another slight directional shift when I first heard it, as most of their album have borne. The overall sound of this album is perhaps more mature than their earlier releases, and overall it works out pretty well (you can look at the sound of this disc as a fusion of JPN and Level3).
We move on through Miracle Worker and Next Stage With YOU, both relatively soft pieces, both with a focus on repeated vocal lines. FLASH bears more instrumental focus, though again the main catch is in the sublime vocal melodies. I actually felt that STORY is a bit of a sore thumb - whilst the band have used discordance in songs before (and pretty successfully), the tonality on STORY feels more as though it belongs on a Prodigy album, with the odd marching cadence and aggressive, slightly off-key synths. Most of the other songs flow nicely into one another - my particular favourite being the late track Pick Me Up, which I would probably say epitomises where this band are at present.
There are flaws present, however. The production is foremost - there are moments where clipping is very evident on the vocal tracks (Cosmic Explorer and Miracle Worker spring to mind), and there are more vocal lines in English than on previous releases which leads to occasional mispronunciations (stage as stagey and refrain as... well, the predictable jumble of r and l happens, so let's leave it there). I'd guess that the increased crossover of language is actually in part due to the fact they're starting to break out of Asia, so we can overlook that.
The flaws don't really detract from the overall enjoyment of the album, however, and that's key. It's overall a very solid addition to their catalogue - not my favourite of their discs as of yet, but that's liable to change in the future. One slightly duff track and occasionally questionable production were the only issues I could really find to warrant marking it down, but it still gets an 8/10.
