Ctrl + Z = Undo

Earlier in the year we wrote about what we perceived, at the time, to be a J-Pop fail. What we weren't getting was that not only did Utada's second proper English-language album not have anything remotely to do with 'J-Pop' but that, despite it paling in comparison to her startlingly magnificent debut effort, Exodus, it was, and still is, fantastic.

You see, Utada Hikaru, even when she's working with Stargate (responsible for "Irreplaceable" and Rihanna's "Take A Bow") is seemingly incapable of being or sounding generic. This Is The One (and, 'btw', that is not the album artwork above - the real artwork is too awful for this blog) is, even in its glorious contrivances, an oddity. And that's something to be admired.

In fact, This Is The One, to give you a brief picture of its flavour, is probably most akin to Madonna's Hard Candy. Both Madonna and Utada are unfathomably huge stars, Madonna worldwide and Utada in South-East Asia, who have both found themselves incapable of the holy grail of music: charting highly in America. In Madonna's case, it's something she used to achieve without even having to try but recently has seemed out of her reach and in Utada's case it's something she's never achieved, the US still strangely averse to 'Asian' popstars.

So thus we are given Hard Candy and This Is The One. Two albums by uber-succesful producers, contrived by their awful aim of simply doing great business in the American charts, endlessly flawed, and yet, strangely gleamingly original and fascinating. Whilst it was Hard Candy's epic dance breakdowns, original samples and fearless flouting of expectations that saved it from dire-dom, it's Utada's starkly unique vocals and gorgeously rendered lyrics that add depth and quality to a set of mostly-ballads that would, in anyone else's hands, sound dreary and derivative.

So, we apologise to Utada, for not taking the time to properly appreciate the merits of her latest album (which, for the record, charted at 69 in America, much better than most foreign artists) and we would like to take this opportunity to suggest you 'check out' This Is The One, because in amongst the ten-a-penny mid-tempo beats, and saccharine samples is an unmistakably beating heart, and a mind and imagination that feeds heartfelt and off-kilter lyrics through familiar sonic landscapes. It's not a masterpiece, like Exodus, but it's still a damn fine piece of work.