Review: Angela Aki - Kiss me Good-Bye

Released: Mar 15, 2006

Artist: アンジェラ・アキ

A very nice single. For the overseas fans, two English language songs are included. The title track is a typical love ballad with a nice orchestra to accompany Miss Angela's piano. It's a nice song, not as strong or powerful as her previous single "心の戦士 (Kokoro no Senshi/Warrior of the Heart)" but being that it is the theme song to a videogame I suppose they had to make it as mainstream as possible. Because she is a native speaker of English, her pronunciation does not suffer from the usual plagues of other Japanese artists. This is a recommended buy if you're a fan of the game or Angela, but otherwise wait for the album.

But how are the tracks?

1. Kiss Me Good-bye Her piano is simple in this song, letting her voice be the main vocal point. As far as vocal performances go, it is typical Angela, which means a very nice clear vocal. She does not strain for any notes, she controls her voice so the song has its peaks and falls. As the song goes on, more complicated instruments are added until she has a complete orchestra backing her. The orchestra does little to actually complicate the song - it's more of an added flourish. ☆☆☆☆

2. Santa Fe This song begins with a strong bass beat and Miss Angela playing jazz piano. It's not true jazz, more like a song with jazz influences, as her piano isn't complicated and the instrumental is rather simple. Her vocals are rather limited in this song, she prefers to stay in the lower range. During the pre-chorus she hits a bass chord repeatedly imitating a heart beat. It does a nice job of bringing variety to this otherwise lackluster jazz-lite song. ☆☆☆☆

3. 青い影 (Aoi Kage/Blue Shadow) After the first somewhat up-tempo number, Miss Angela returns to her ballads. Like Kiss Me Good-bye, it features a simple piano melody while her voice carries the song. Her voice isn't rich in this song, it sounds thin at parts, but never strained. The song itself is rather boring - her vocals are always drawn out after every line and the piano fails to add any other sort of movement to the piece. ☆☆☆

4. Kiss Me Good-bye (English ver. - featured in FINAL FANTASY XII-) And here we have the English version of the title track. Sometimes it sounds odd - it seems she changed the English words to fit the Japanese instead of altering the instrumental. The Japanese version sounds better due to the language being more rhythmic than English. I don't know if it is my speakers, but the orchestra sounded better in this version than it did on the Japanese - it's like they mixed her vocals and orchestra equally, whereas in the first it seemed like the instrumental took a backing to her voice. ☆☆☆☆1/2