Misc music reviews, December edition

“永遠みたいな夜だった!” ✍️🔥🔥🔥🔥 <– the first line of the song Mekakushe - Endless Lovers

mekakushe - Love After 13.8 Billion Years [album]

Mekakushe is my new Synthion. If you ask me if I’m a fan of them, I don’t think I can answer you. Their average song feels too derivative for me to love their entire discographies.

It’s about me more than them, though. It’s called having a signature style, and me not liking said style. It’s how I feel about every artist I’m not into, where I have to put in effort to see the magic. You can’t just ask every artist to be your Personal Porter Robinson.

What differs everyone from Mekakushe and Synthion is how some of the songs just hit the spot for me. I wish I could say the same about every single song from them. It’s a shame I like an artist this much, yet I cannot call myself a fan.

Mekakushe in particular has a quality that I like to call “she thinks just like me fr”. If I were writing a song¹, I would have made the same songwriting choices as them. The songs become predictable, not in a “oh my god this damn drop where’s the creativity” way, but in a way where the most satisfying option is always chosen. Which reminds me of the few Kirara songs I know. Yes, the second Korean transgender electronic artist, the second one I’m comparing Mekakushe to, very random.

mekakushe - Endless Lovers / Goodnight Beige / おやすみベージュ

The most popular song of the album is Retronym of Love / 恋のレトロニム, mostly due to it being the ending theme for Kowloon Generic Romance, which is a pretty big deal for a small artist like her. But the highlight of the album for me is Endless Lovers, or Goodnight Beige in Japanese.

If i have to describe how the song feels, it would be “colorful” and “explosive”. The song immediately greets you the varied, chaotic, yet controlled, instrumentals that contrasts the songwriting. And it continues doing so even when the vocals start, only occasionally pausing and slowing down - not to give you time to breathe, you’re so drawn in that it doesn’t feel suffocating. Eventually, it builds up to the climaxes.

My favourite part of the climax is actually the bass, it just adds so much more to the song than it already had. And the little touches, like the bass when the song ends.

interlude (sidenote)

To give credit where it’s due, shoutout to the collaborators she works with. Unfortunately if you go on “credits” on your music streaming app, you get incomplete information, so you’d have to go on the description of every song on YouTube.

yosumi, MOTTO MUSIC - Endless Lovers / Goodnight Beige / おやすみベージュ

it’s Endless Lovers again. Because I like the song that much. Fuck it.

The original version of the song isn’t released with the album, but months before in a collaboration with MOTTO MUSIC, a dance music project; and sung by Yosumi.

I’ve given up on asking “how the hell does she do that?” I loved Mekakushe’s version but this is definitely the more unique version with the way Yosumi sings. She constantly sounds like she’s about to laugh, thought I like to imagine she’s about to cry.

In the same way the cover of the two versions contrast each other, Mekakushe’s version is more mature, while this is fuzzy and intimate. It puts the narrative in a different context.

Oh yeah, the lyrics, the whole point of the song, which I’ve ignored until now².

The song is about having a crush. The world suddenly becoming more colorful, and you start overthinking trivial things; you start looking forward to each and every day, to seeing them again. You’re simultaneously so desperate to confess yet register that as impossible in your mind. As your days go by, the uncertainty grows. You yearn so much for them when they aren’t there, but seeing them never sates you, all you want to do is give them every single part of you…

That wasn’t really my writing. All of that detail is from the song, and I had to cut it down as to not become a bad lyric translation. Endless Lovers is a love song that’s not particularly deep on paper, but it’s laser focused in very specific slices of the experience, packed with subtle nuances seemingly drawn from experience.

In my opinion, the turning point starts with the final chorus, the “ふつうの日々が~~~~~ 幸せと気づいたよ”. And then you get the same “宇宙の色が何色か分かったよ” from the last chorus in a completely different context thanks to the previous lines, and the next line. And you realise the beige in the title is referring to the color of their skin.

The climax of the song is narratively, the confession, and the final explosion of colorful instrumentals…

And then.

“永遠みたいな夜だった！”³

You see why the song is peak?