High-King ~ Cinderella/Complex

High-King

I'm still trying to figure out what the heck this song/PV have to do with Cinderella.  But I'll let that go for now.  When I first saw the lineup for High-King I was really excited.  To know why all you have to do is revisit my rankings from Paul's Hello!Blog...

Momusu

Berryz

Cute

Not one of the "non-eggs" in this group ranked less than #2 on my survey!  This should be a "dream group" for me, right?  Right???

First you have Captain Saki, who in my opinion is one of the most underrated members of all three core groups.  She's arguably the best dancer in H!P (Although you could make that argument for most everyone here).  And I love her breathy singing voice.  Takahashi, great singer, great dancer.  The only criticism is that in some ways she seems to have outgrown Morning Musume.  Maimi makes me wish I was sixteen again!  If Tsunku hadn't made the quip about Reina being the "closest thing to a perfect Musume", he would surely say it about Maimi!  And then there's Reina, who can do no wrong in my book, and the fact that she was placed in this group with the three leader/captains says a great deal about her popularity.  The real wildcard here is Maeda Yuuka.  Sure, she's cute!  But she seems wildly misplaced with these four "heavyweights".  And I have no idea how good she is vocally.  So lets first watch the Zapruder-style PV that appeared on YouTube a few days ago (I originally posted this on Monday, so that's all I had to work with at the time)...

My first thought was that Kawaiirrhea is going to need to do another edit on his "LaLaLa Madness" mix!  Then again, upon second listen they are saying NaNa and not LaLa.  First we had the radio rips, now we have the PV recorded from someone's television set.  I love this!  It reminds me of the old days of buying pirated videocassettes of newly released movies on the streetcorner for three bucks!

H!P is really getting into the latin vibe lately, huh?  They all look very cute!  Yuuka is actually a very good singer too.  She sounds a lot like Momoko!  And she looks more mature in the PV than she does in the promotional photos.  Kudos to Yuuka for "holding her own"!  Obviously Takitty and Tanaka are the main focus.  But in all fairness they have the strongest singing ability here.  I'm sure there will be plenty of squawking about that on the blogs.  Whatever...don't hate the playa', hate the game!  Like Nacchi before her, Reina is fast becoming the face of Hello! Project...

Tanaka is the "poster girl" of H!P?  I like the sound of that!

Okay, now it's one day later and the actual PV has debuted on Dohhhup.  I really like this PV now that I can really see it.  In my opinion, this is what the Resonant Blue PV could've and should've been.  It has a great distribution of closeups and they really look great in those outfits!  And most importantly, the color scheme makes everyone completely visible!  When I saw the bootleg version, I didn't think Saki got much face time.  But upon second look, she got quite a few solo shots.  I like this song.  I don't love it, but I like it, and it's growing on me with each listen!  I'm sure I'll buy the CD at the very least for the pictures!

Although this is probably going to be a "one-shot" group, it's lineup has huge potential for long-term success!  Oh well...

CK in California