I've decided I'm going to try and start doing these posts every week or two instead of every month/month-and-a-half, so that it's not such a big job each time. So this is what I've been listening to this past couple of weeks:

Albums:

Kuraki Mai - Fuse Of Love
Not one of my favourite albums by her; I found it very flat and samey. I did rather like Kakenukeru Inazuma and Ashita E Kakeru Hashi, though, and P.S. My Sunshine, Love Needing, Dancing, Tell Me What and Love Sick were OK too.

Itou Yuna - Heart
This really shows how much my taste in Jpop has diversified over the past two years, because the first time I listened to this album I couldn't get into it at all and ended up deleting it. But after hearing Precious on the J-movies album, I decided to try listening to the album again and really liked it. I love how strong her voice is in ballads like Endless Story, Precious, Faith, Truth and Perfume, and I also really love Tender Is The Night, which is a softer ballad. I like those better than her faster stuff, but some of that is quite catchy too, like Workaholic, Know-How and Nobody Knows. Definitely worth listening to.

And singles/miscellaneous songs:

WaT - 36ﾟC, Seishun No Kagayaki, Shiosai No Gogo
Laid-back, acoustic-y music by two guys. Kind of pretty, but not as good as some of the stuff I've heard by them.

Bird - Summer Nude, Dancing Sister
I had always been intrigued by this singer's name, and I always loved her picture on wiki.theppn (I can't show you now as it seems to be down, but go and have a look when it's back up! It's purdy!) but never listened to anything by her, as I didn't think it would be my thing. And listening to Bird's Nest this morning showed that her earlier stuff wasn't my thing, but I really like this single. The title track is dancy R&B, while the B-side is R&B with a kind of reggaeish sound. Very, very good.

GLAY - Aka To Kuro No Matadora, I Love You Wo Sagashite Iru, Suffragette City
Not my favourite stuff by them (I think the last stuff I really liked by them was 100 Mankai No Kiss/Lone Wolf - oh God, love Lone Wolf soooo much! - and their Love Is Beautiful album) but I like Aka To Kuro No Matadora quite a bit.

Kanjani8 - Musekinin Hero, Fuka-Fuka Love The Earth
I deleted most of the requisite 34856348 B-sides this single came with (what IS it with Johnny's bands releasing 400 different versions of each single with different B-sides on each? There's clearly no music like the ka-ching of cash registers for the bigwigs at Johnny's) as they didn't do it for me at all, but I liked these tracks quite a bit, especially Fuka-Fuka Love The Earth. Musekinin Hero is pretty standard pop, while Fuka-Fuka is a slower song with a chorus that's quite pretty.

Pushim - Renaissance
Reggae is hit or miss for me, but when it's good it's very, very good.

Shizukusa Yumi - Go Your Own Way, Stay With Me
I only discovered Shizukusa Yumi recently, but I've really liked a lot of what I've heard. Go Your Own is an R&B ballad, while Stay With Me is faster R&B that makes me wish that they made B-sides into ringtones (so does Bird's B-side, actually. And I'm STILL pissed off that I couldn't use Smile by Arashi on my phone. I loved that song so, so much.)

Coconuts Musume - Tokonatsu Musume
So very, very catchy. Halation Summer and Watashi Mo I Love You, the other two songs of theirs I've been listening to, are fairly catchy too, but neither inspire the amount of love that Tokonatsu Musume does.

KAT-TUN - Keep the Faith
I don't normally like KAT-TUN's stuff much, but two of my students did a dance to this song at this year's school concert a couple of weeks ago, and I really liked it, so I ended up getting hold of it. It's pretty catchy.

Sakazume Misako - Onnagokoro
This is the theme song of Real Clothes, which any fans of The Devil Wears Prada or other fashion-related stories need to go watch NOW. (Huh, on looking at that post again it looks like they don't have the subbed version. I assumed they did. Well, if anyone likes fashion stories and watches dramas raw, go check it out. It's great!) Anyway, this is a lighthearted R&B song and quite catchy.

The Boom - Shima Uta
Something I have always found both amusing and exasperating about the English textbooks in Japan is that an astounding portion of pretty much all of them is about Japanese culture (rather than, say, the culture of some of the countries whose language the students are learning.) Sunshine English is no exception; chapter 6 of the 9th grade textbook is about Okinawan music (speaking of which, the lead-in for the chapter includes the characters saying "Where is Hamasaki Ayumi from?" "She's from FUK*." "Really? But I think a lot of Jpop singers are from Okinawa." "I think you're right." Am I wrong here, or is this complete bullshit? I don't generally pay attention to artists' personal details, but I see their home prefectures in passing when I wiki them for details on their releases and they've always seemed to be fairly evenly distributed.) Anyway, one section of the chapter was about this song, so being the insatiable Jpop fangirl I am, I decided to check it out. It's not bad, a pretty ballad with a traditional Okinawan sound.

*My name for Fukuoka, as its IATA code is FUK. See? God, I'm going to miss having an airport with a profane IATA code. XD

Ueto Aya - Namida No Niji, Save Me
Awhile before I watched Attention Please and got all obsessed with Ueto Aya, I downloaded one of her singles and promptly deleted it. I didn't remember anything about it except that I found it blah, and when I listened to her best-of album a couple of months ago I wondered how I could ever have found Ueto Aya's music blah. Now I remember. This was probably the single I listened to, and while it's not bad, it's definitely nowhere near the level of awesomeness of the songs on her best-of album. Both songs are ballads (Namida No Niji is a soft ballad, while Save Me is stronger, and the one I like better of the two) and they're quite pretty, but nowhere near as good as her other stuff.

Cherry - Set Me Free, Yesterday
Catchy Euro music. Yesterday was also done by D&D (though it was called Remembering Yesterday.)