Cute Concert Tour 2010 Natsu Aki - Dance Special!! "Cho Uranaito!!" -

In my review of C-ute's Spring 2010 concert, I said it was their best concert yet. Well, guess what? This one's even better. The girls just keep knocking it out of the park. They are solid performers who do a nearly two-hour concert here, with 22 numbers, without a moment's drop in energy or enthusiasm. And these are all dance numbers, too, with nary a slow song or solo performed at all. (We got those in the Spring concert.) Every song's a good one and there isn't a false note anywhere. There are a few lengthy MC segments and a "VTR" skit composed of slightly animated still images of the girls in male drag, but the pace is so fast and furious the rest of the time that you're not going to complain. There are six costume changes--all beautiful. In fact, they change some of the costumes too quickly, giving us fewer numbers in some of the best ones. I particularly liked the long white dresses with black twirling trim worn for two numbers and the color-coded sparkling midriff tops and short-shorts they wear for a long set (six songs) late in the show. The songs are a mix of old favorites, e.g. "Tokaikko Junjou" and "Massara Blue Jeans" (do they ever NOT sing that at a concert?); recent hits ("Dance de Bakoon!," "Campus Life"); and songs I'd never heard before, e.g. "Tachiagare Otome-tachi." "One's Life," a duet by Airi and Saki, is a highlight because it gives Saki a chance to do "patter," a kind of rhythmic jazzy rap style familiar to me from old jazz songs but something I'd never heard in Japanese before. And she's quite good. Another highlight is the Dance Medley, in which they do snippets of six songs from the Hello! Project repertoire, including "Boom Boom Boom," "Shall We Love?" and "Get Up! Rapper!" with elaborate dance routines devised just for the medley. The extras include alternate performances of two songs and 13 min. of footage from another performance on the same tour. My chief complaint is one I have about a lot of these concert DVDs. The director and camera crew frequently cut away from the best angles when the girls are dancing. Why so many closeups and extreme long shots when all we want is to see the girls dance? Also, they bathe several numbers in red light--which is very unflattering to the girls and their costumes. I take a star off the rating because of this, although the girls rate a ten out of five--they're that good. Every one of them.