The Singles Jukebox

This song would be really helpful for getting through Rock Tunnel…

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[6.11]Will Adams: Perfume have recently taken to the idea of injecting drama in their music, and it suits them well. Last year’s “Pick Me Up” was a trance-pop masterpiece, and “Flash” follows it nicely. While their usual tricks are present — massive chorus, Yasutaka Nakata’s EDM build-ups, vocal lines spun into silk — the additional pathos is a natural fit. It’s immediate, urgent, and another reminder of their consistency through all these years.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Creeping at the edges of Perfume’s music but visible as the song approaches chorus is a strain of melancholy, a sigh. The video game bleeps suggest a world where the lovers will be together in electric dreams.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: Rather generic-sounding electronic pop, with added video-game noises.
[5]

Cassy Gress: A cross between “Party Maker” and any Euro-dance song you can think of from the late 90s. Their voices sound less processed than on their last few albums, but at the same time, that results in the thoroughly out-of-tune final “flash” toward the end of the song. I have a lot of feelings about Perfume, most of which were trying to artificially inflate this to a [7] or so, but that chorus doesn’t go anywhere.
[5]

Iain Mew: Perfume releasing significantly different single and album versions of lots of songs has been an interesting aspect of their career for the while. For “Flash” they were more or less simultaneous, and it’s easy to play pick and mix and imagine ways of improving on both. Better balance the swells of hopeful emotion of the album version with the drive and dynamism of the single version and its massive EDM bursts, and it could have been up there with “Spring of Life.” As it is, it’s two good songs hinting at a great one.
[7]

Jessica Doyle: Everything seems to be going just a shade… too… slow for the group’s higher pitches and the music’s invitations to dance. Which is not usually a problem for Perfume: some of their biggest hits, especially “Chocolate Disco,” have felt positively leisurely. I prefer them acting with more urgency, like in last year’s “Pick Me Up,” or the older “Night Flight” (I will likely wear out my copy of “Night Flight” before the year is out). But they can do either: they just can’t do both in the same song. At the end of the second verse, Nocchi seems to lead the others into a resolution that comes a minute and a half too early, and springing back to the chorus feels almost like a disappointment.
[5]

Brad Shoup: All this bosh summoned around a millisecond. Perfume is insistent that you pay attention; they’re pointing at the plastic bag and hollering. Yasutaka Nakata can’t present a riff that can comment or sum; they end up bearing the singers, ambulance-like, to the finish line.
[5]

Sonia Yang: For a song with lyrics mentioning “lightning speed,” “Flash” crawls at a snail’s pace. It’s a bit reminiscent of “Cling Cling” and “Hold Your Hand,” but lacking the urgency of the former and the endearing sweetness of the latter. The modern dance/stage kung-fu choreography is pretty awesome, especially towards the end when they’re wielding lightsabers, but if we’re going by music alone, this is the most vanilla I’ve heard Nakata in a while.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: The central contradiction of Perfume over their career has been that, despite consistently releasing electro-pop songs that all exist in the same joyful-and-fizzy space, they’ve never had solid footing. The trio were going to be broken up in the mid-aughts, only to have surprise success, forcing them to figure out what style would help them stick around. They finally sort of did and made an album called JPN that was a stab at cementing themselves in the J-pop realm… only to see that one catch some attention abroad, making them swivel again. “Flash” is as elegant as they and producer Yasutaka Nakata have been at balancing all of these conflicting elements, burbling EDM touches co-existing with nursery-rhyme-like verses. Yet critical to all of it is that what has always been there — the project’s ability to create big, enthralling hooks that feel like emotion broken down to molecules — comes through clearly.
[8]