Like a bright morning, cracking your eyes to the clean, clear sunlight streaming in your bedroom windows. All around is a delicate silence welcoming you into consciousness. This day will be different, it will be good. Your mind isn't groggy and confused, like waking up in darkness tends to feel. This is waking with purpose and clarity. This is how mynameis makes me feel.
The album opens with a beautiful intro perfectly fitting a bright morning. Once the music comes in, it refreshes you in a completely different way. Nothing is what you would expect from a Japanese screamo band. Yes, there are the intensely good melodies. Yes, there is that bombastic dynamism that is present in the best. But mynameis is cut from a completely different cloth. The first difference you'll notice is the tinge of the melodies is towards optimism and hopefulness instead of depression and melancholy. The next difference that you'll notice is the passionately sung, not screamed, vocals that further that optimistic sound. They're shouting, almost begging, to the music gods to be something more than another band. And with those two center pieces, mynameis creates a sound that is all their own.
I got this in a package with some other CDs (Note, Bed, some others), and even though everything I got was extremely great stuff, this CD was my favorite. Even to this day, I will listen to this several times a month, simply because there's no other band that plays quite like they do. Similarities to more recent Sora songs could be made, but while Sora has forgone passionate intensity for dynamic breadth, mynameis has both. There's not much to say about this album beyond it being one of the best things out of Japan in the past ten years, in my opinion.
The band is still together. The last update on their website in September 2011 says they are writing new songs. I can't wait to see what they come out with next. Some of the members are playing in a band called heliotrope, which has put out an EP on the same label as this album (I'm pretty sure someone in the band is running it).
This still is available at a few places in Japan, so if you like it, buy it!
1. ...
2. 君に見た夢
3. 忘れた手袋 (再々録)
4. どうせ今日も同じ一日
5. カーテン
6. 言いたいことはそれだけ
7. イントロ
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