Uta Doki! - Pop Classics Vol.5

This one doesn't have many songs on it that were previously familiar to me. In fact, the only songs I'd heard before were both on one of Hello! Project's Folk Songs CDs and they're performed here by two of the singers on that CD, Yuko Nakazawa and Maki Goto (although Maki is joined by Kei Yasuda and Sugita Jirou to make a very nice trio of it). Other Uta Doki volumes had better and more famous songs, thanks to the practice of adopting "theme weeks" for picking out songs, but this one is blessed with abundant appearances by H!P's heavy hitters--Maki Goto, Aya Matsuura, Natsumi Abe, Yuko Nakazawa, Kaori Iida, Yuki Maeda, and Kei Yasuda. And they sometimes team up with each other for wonderful duets. Nozomi Tsuji turns up for a delightful solo ("Dancing Hero (Eat You Up)"), accompanied by Taisei (of Sharan Q) providing backup on keyboard. Hitomi Yoshizawa has a solo also. With this lineup, Volume 5 joins Vols. 3 and 4 among the must-have Uta Doki volumes released so far. Other H!P performers to appear here include Ayumi Shibata, Ayaka Kimura, Mai Satoda, Erika Miyoshi, and Yui Okada. Someone named Shoko Aida appears in two numbers, but I don't know anything about her. Miki Hirayama appears with Aya in one duet. Some of the great talents among the older folk-style male singers in Japan provide accompaniment in several numbers, including Sugita Jirou, Akira Inaba, and Gen Takayama, all of whom play guitars as well. Takao Horiuchi also shows up, but he appears to be more of a lounge lizard type with rock-hard hairspray keeping his coiff in place and, thanks to having no guitar, he even puts his arm around Kei at one point in a song, lightly touching her back. Which I found alarming because I thought there was a strict hands-off policy with these girls. This is the first volume I've seen in which each number is intro'd by a "DJ" from elsewhere in Hello! Project. In this case, each DJ is a current member of Morning Musume and we only hear their voices and see their pictures. They're not on camera in the segments the way DJs are in later volumes. Also, this one doesn't have theme weeks like the previous volumes did. Interestingly, both Kaori Iida and Nozomi Tsuji taped their songs only weeks before they announced their respective pregnancies in the spring of 2007. Tsuji's song was aired less than two weeks before her startling announcement.