Tommy heavenly6 / I’m Gonna SCREAM+ / June 07, 2006
01. I’m Gonna SCREAM+ / 02. GOING 2 MY WAY !
03. +gothic Pink+ (Melancholic Guitar Version)
I could have been more excited for Tommy heavenly6’s new single, but I wasn’t. To be completely honest, I am more of a Tommy february6 fan. I love that cheesy, 80s synth pop revival, I love the squeaky clean image, the Sweet Valley High books she totes around in the music videos, the short dances…Tommy heavenly6, in comparison, is like an angry Avril Lavigne knock-off. Granted, I admitted in my article about Th6 that I liked that she was angry, and don’t get me wrong, I do, but I failed to find any longevity in her debut album besides a few catchy songs that I enjoyed merely for the fact that they happened to mirror my own sentiments at the time I listened to them. Since those few months have passed, I have barely allowed her disc to rotate anywhere near my CD player, let alone have a digital go in my iRiver.
However, all that has changed with I’m Gonna SCREAM+. The song begins quietly with a few strummed guitar licks before crashing into your general rock mayhem. But it works. Brilliantly. I love the melody, the use of her native Japanese interspersed with piles of English lyrics, and those short breaks of the guitar, that although seem out of place with the rest of the loud raucous of the song, also tie the song together and allow the listener to catch his or her breath before it’s time once again to break into the rock. It’s also worth noting that most of the time, Tomoko Kawase’s high-pitched vocals sabotage songs, holding her back from shedding that Avril Lavigne pseudo-punk image in what is still a mostly male-dominated genre (and for good reason). In this song, though, it kind of works because the song is so heavy, the light, feminine vocals help bring it down to a nicely balanced equilibrium.
“GOING 2 MY WAY !” is the first time I’ve heard Kawase use even a semi-swear word, and it was certainly semi-shocking. Enough that after she sang “ass” (actually, it was more like “ahzz”), that’s pretty much all I could think about for the next minute while the song played. Totally threw me off. Didn’t appreciate it. However, I do like the way the verse works in this song, almost more than the chorus which is actually pretty bland and shadows her earlier work. The guitar solo is much appreciated as it spices up the song a bit, but only for its few short seconds. Valiant try, though.
“+gothic Pink+ (Melancholic Guitar Version)” is an acoustic version of an earlier single. It doesn’t do much for Kawase’s vocals which fail to bring justice to the beautifully eerie melody, but said vibe created in the background of the song is marvelous. The only additional noise to the guitar is an array of soft bells, which add to the ominous atmosphere already provided by the likes of mostly English lyrics such as “Welcome to my dark side, why don’t you have a picnic there?” I don’t know, maybe because the way you sing it implies you might cut my head off and feed it to wolves?
The A side is fantastic, I could do without the B-side, the extra track all but makes up for it. This single is so good, I actually checked my sarcasm at the door, apparently next to my total hate for whiny girl vocals in rock music. Rocker grrrls. Ugh.
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