Koda Kumi got that boom boom…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Iain Mew: Parent album Japonesque has a pick’n’mix approach to genre (as well as T-Pain and Omarian guest spots!) which confirms that the rock approach here is fairly temporary. The relish that Koda brings to tearing into “let’s make some noise!” is enough to make the precision guitar crunch work but there’s not enough else to the song to make it more than a fleeting pleasure. Finding out that “Boom Boom Boys” shares a co-writer with The Veronicas makes a lot of sense but it’s not quite up their with their best.
[6]

Pete Baran: A Japanglish sleezy pop track that makes a lot of running out of its Boom Boom motife. The history of the word Boom in pop is an interesting one — it is one of the softest sexual metaphors going, and after “Boomshackalack,” “Mr Boombastic” and “Boom Shake the Room,” has been almost wholly abandoned by Western pop. The effect here is from the double boom, and some borrowed stabs at Ke$ha English. Its perfectly serviceable but probably will not figure highly in any Boomology thesis.
[4]

John Seroff: Who would’ve guessed that what my life was missing was a female pseudo-Warrant cover (complete with wolf whistles!) played through the contemporary J-pop filter? Or that cymbal splashes and Auto-Tune could actually sound good once you take Weezy out of the equation? What a cool drink of water, such a sweet surprise.
[7]

Sabina Tang: The State of the Oricon in 2012: Koda Kumi, in with a bullet at #1, rocking as hard as Hide did in 1997 (and that was with a bottom end comprised of Joey Castillo from QOTSA, and Paul Raven out of Killing Joke). For the comparison’s North American cultural equivalent, insert Cobain for Hide and… Kelis? perhaps?… for Koda Kumi. It was enough to send me running, astonished, to find the rest of JAPONESQUE, which (despite the name and cover) contains no tacky geisha-girl filagree. On the T-Pain track Kumi uses Auto-Tune to do weird voices, Ke$ha-style, while the video to this one is so blatantly about club drugs I’m surprised it’s not banned in several Asian countries (or is it?). In short, there’s more to look forward to off this album.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Details are always appreciated, but straining them out is wearying. Toby Gad’s nu-metal riffwerk is a nice left-field touch from a guy I associate with ballads, and Kumi drops some of the best ESL phrase manqués I’ve heard since I started blurbing. I dunno, I guess the parts don’t cohere? Good to hear someone keeping the Ashlee sound alive though.
[6]

Anthony Easton: When Madonna talked about the homogenizing of pop music, has she listened to this? Because one could make an argument that the beats and the presentation have shadings of American excessive love of technology and European love of monster choruses and onamonapiac symbols, but how it synthesizes into something uniquely Japanese suggests that it is less of a homogenization and more of a taxonomic working through of meta-ideas about pop.
[8]

Michaela Drapes: This reminds me of something terrible from the ’90s — especially those particularly yakky moments in the chorus — but I can’t quite recall what could have possibly been this rotten to the core.
[2]

Alfred Soto: The vocals, encrusted over the guitars, aren’t alive enough to give the title/concept the electroshock I want, and in the last minute this thing is tinny as hell.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Sludgy, dirrty sleaze, coating vocals and guitars in a thick gunk of used oil. I’d certainly never let this near my spotless music library.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Let the guitars rawk and the Auto-Tune squawk. I know I’m falling head over heels into a new pop infatuation when I find myself slightly scared of her. Fat Cat, Ke$ha, and Nadia Oh are collaborating on her next album, in my dreams.
[9]