ゲスの極み乙女。- 「人生の針」 / Gesu no Kiwami Otome - “Record of Life”

~Zumi Underground

I hope you all enjoyed the first round of Gesu from a few weeks ago because I’ve got another one for you already. This one is really cool because Gesu had released the album this song is from earlier this year but just released English versions of a few tracks of the album with vocalist Sincere Tanya taking Enon Kawatani’s place.

This track is a bit definitely more pop and less funk (and generally less all over the place in terms of genre) than the last one I posted, but Masao Wada still gives us a nice, groovy bassline to bob to. I know I tend to focus a lot on sweet bass lines in general and I highlighted it in both posts about Gesu, but I also need to shout out the keyboardist, Mari Fukushige. Throughout the track, those keys are like the home base of the track to me, pulling everything together, but I especially love the accent notes in the 2nd verse right before the bridge. It’s not particularly complex, but it’s a unique, mesmerizing part of the song acoustically and I find myself repeating those 10 seconds a few times.

Lastly, I prefer the vocal rhythm of the original Japanese vocals, but I would say that’s to be expected. It’s pretty hard to translate a song and keep most of the same meaning and rhythm. While I wouldn’t say Enon’s voice on its own particularly blows me away, I do think he has some good range and Sincere Tanya does the English version justice filling in for him.

Okay last last thing…the weird Grimer/Garbodor looking thing just guzzling pills the whole time in the English version of the video cracks me up.

The whole album is amazing though. Only the Japanese version seems to be on Spotify at the moment here. But the other English tracks are in a short YouTube playlist you can find here.

If you aren’t already (and I know most of y’all aren’t because I have like 10 followers), follow RIBM on Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date on new music ^_^