Stay
名取香り
(Kaori Natori)
Stay
August 30, 2006
Didn’t Chart on Oricon
Lyricist: Kaori Natori
Composer: Yudai Suzuki
Arrangers: Shiro Sagisu, Tohru Shigemi
~~~
Stay
5:11
With an eerie, dripping water introduction we head straight into sweeping rock/pop. The opening verse is quiet and holds your attention until the chorus where my attention wanted to run far, far away. It isn’t the song, it’s a good piece of composition, but her vocals are borderline atrocious. I can tell she isn’t a singer. She doesn’t quite reach the intervals in the chorus, which aren’t terribly hard. She is like a quarter step below the note, and that causes such dissonance! Her attempts at ad. lib. are disastrous at best, off key. She remains flat the entire song and never quite delivers anything except maybe a dose of horror.
You and I
5:26
If the title track was any indication, you might think that the B-side would be just as bad. Surprisingly, it is more believeable than ‘Stay’. I won’t lie to you, it sounds like a rejected track from a random Koda Kumi album, but Kaori stays on key and actually gives the song the tiniest touch of soul. Her runs are a bit better. I enjoyed the Spanish guitar throughout the song and Bossa Nova feel. It’s almost pretty good right up until the last few seconds where she fails miserably at giving us something to remember. More like something to have nightmares about.
~~~
After the first pains of bad music left, I was able to collect myself enough to write this overview. She’s a pretty girl, but she isn’t a singer. She struggled, hell, I think the vocoder struggled to keep this girl in key. While I’ll admit that these tracks are unimaginative (except the Spanish guitars in ‘You and I’), a good artist can at least do something, anything to make them interesting. I will give the single that the cover art is stunning. That delicate orange dress against the darkness of the clearing is genius. Bravo, art direction and photography!
C-
73%
Kaori’s vocals in her pop songs aren’t that great. I wouldn’t say she doesn’t have potential, as she is quite enjoyable in her more R&B style songs, like Gentleman.