At the Jukebox, we keep celebrating Hallowe’en all the way up to Thanksgiving…
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[5.83]
Katherine St Asaph: It’s not that you’re forbidden from using that ticking-clock intro. It’s just that I’ll be cross whenever “Hung Up” doesn’t follow.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: AKB48 are the most popular music group in Japan right now, and that makes them inescapable. They are all over TV, on all the magazine covers at 7-11, who they have a Christmas tie-in with, and in many ads on the trains. Most importantly, their music seems to always be playing somewhere, and I used to not like this because I wasn’t a fan of their hyper-chipper, vocally overwhelming pop. Then Halloween single “Uza” dropped, and suddenly I’m excited to hear AKB on my morning commute They’ve shifted away from unrelenting pep in favor of something darker, “Uza” opening with a wall of witch-house-aping synths before blasting off into something that’s uptempo but unsettling. A few vocal samples flash by, and in the song’s best touch the singing gets glazed with a little Auto-Tune, which gives the two-dozen voices a creepy feel that’s never been present in their singles before. Even the lyrics seem self-aware for once — “uza” translates to “how annoying,” and that seems aimed at all the people here in Japan who heap hate on AKB48 like they are a terrorist organization. This is the best song AKB48 have released to date, and I am thrilled to hear it in public, which happens a lot.
[9]
Jonathan Bogart: After what seems like months of reading about its creepiness and effectiveness, I can’t help feeling let down that it just sounds like AKB48.
[4]
Will Adams: This is the first AKB48 song I’ve listened to, and I must admit that the concept behind the group has flown far over my head. My classically trained pop mind has trouble accepting a pop figure that doesn’t — or, in AKB48’s case, can’t — have a defined persona. But perhaps I need more time to discover how the megagroup structure informs a song like “Uza.” As for the song itself, it’s just trance. Really ugly and really noisy trance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
[7]
Brad Shoup: Overwhelming, but in a different way. The giant, gloomy synth streaks beg — from where I sit, at least — for a more gauche vocal attack. I dig the baroque programming touches, the out-of-place hip-house interjections. The mood is insistent, the text is desperately single-minded; God help you if you’re in the wrong club in the wrong state.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The aural overkill is a mixing board problem: vocals pitched at the same key, with synths to match.
[3]