Buono! LIVE 2012 "R E A L"

We're used to great Buono! concerts. The latest one is a little simpler and more streamlined than the past ones, with only three costume changes, and is staged in a small venue called Zepp Tokyo. But it's got everything we want from these girls--energetic singing and dancing applied to some of the best songs from the Buono! songbook, a catalog which is arguably filled with more good songs than any other Hello! Project act can boast in the last eight years (since the glory days of Morning Musume, that is). Momoko, Miyabi, and Airi just keep getting better and better and do as good a job here as I've seen them do anywhere else in the ten years they've been with Hello! Project. Their voices are stronger, their confidence is peaking, and their onstage chemistry is as good as it gets. It helps that they have a live band onstage with them for the bulk of the act, the four-member, all-woman rock group, Dolce, which has performed with them in the past. While I enjoyed the whole concert, I would single out two sets as highlights. At the 25-minute mark, they do a fast-paced medley of nine songs (ten numbers, since they open and close it with "My Love"), including my favorite Buono! song, "co.no.mi.chi." Then, at the 64-minute mark they do a four-song set that includes some of the best songs in this concert: "1/3 no Junjou na Kanjou," "Independent Girl~Dokuritsu Joshi de Aru Tame ni," "Deep Mind," and "Juicy Heart." Maybe it's just the fact that three of these had only been performed in concert once before, but the set came off as the freshest section of the show to me. Each of them does a solo. All were in fine voice and could easily have done these solos in their sleep. The fact that they were wide awake is practically icing on the cake. Still, it got me to thinking about what Buono! can do to take it to the next level. All but one of the 30 songs in this tracklist have been performed at past concerts, six of them five times or more. (The one new song featured is "Hatsukoi Cider.") While I'm not suggesting this concert would have been improved by doing anything different, I'd like to see the girls go in some different directions in the next one. They do as good a job with these songs as I believe they can. Why not give them some new songs? Why not challenge them a little? Give them more solos, but pick songs they've never done before. Just a thought.