3 out of 5

Label: No Big Deal Records

Produced by: Takeshi Hakamata (mastered by)

I know I’m super cool, but I’ll fess up: I’m not so super duper cool that I just discover J-pop artists without the most general method – anime.  Vickeblanka has an incredibly emotive song over the closing credits of the 2019 Fruits Basket’s first cour, sending me down a rabbit hole of tons of youtube videos, and then fretfully trying to find a legal, reasonably affordable way to pick up his music, leaving me with one more question: what to buy?  Do I start with the newest stuff, including that Fruits Basket track?  Maybe go back to the album that has that Black Clover track?  Or maybe I risk going back to the ancient year of 2014, to Vicke’s first mini-album, Tuberculin, which doesn’t have any songs I recognize or that have (I think) video singles…

Because I’m of the fan variety that must love all of an artist’s output, I take the leap and start from the top.  追うBOY, Tuberculin’s opening track, tells me I made a fine choice.  I’d already pleasingly discovered that Vickeblanka tends to lean more toward outright pop than that slower paced track that first caught my attention, so the fast pace and twinkling piano of this song instantly make me smile: Vicke’s sense of melody, awesome vocal range, and infectious attitude are all firmly in place.  Without looking at the lyrics, I swear I’m hearing some English swearing in there, but the track is a hoot.  秋の香りis a bit less complex and intense, leaning more toward boy band-style territory (which is fine; I can accept that that’s sort of the genre we’re in); it still has some uniquely Vicke flourishes to it, and is delivered passionately.  From here on out, the album flips back and forth between these two modes, mostly successfully: bouncy, sprightly pop; boy band tunes.  The former is either fantastic – the opener; the big-band dashed Bad Boy Love – or, at worst, predictable but entertaining.  The other stuff is where the debut loses some steps, as Vicke’s piano playing gets lost behind radio friendly beats, and perhaps leaning too generically into lovey dovey crooning.  Peeking at the lyrics, this is reflected (at least in the English bits) in sing-songey choruses, still a few years off of the slightly more complex visuals delivered on what I’ve read from later lyric sheets.

And that first song does have the English snippets ‘bitch bitch girl / take a chance’ … ‘fuck you’, and it’s delivered so charmingly that my American sensibilities have no idea what to make of it, but I love it.

An absolutely worthwhile debut, and one I’m very happy to have taken the plunge on.