Review by Christina

This is yet another really good concert from BoA. It's also the first time in awhile seeing her in a larger venue in Japan. She's overall fantastic and I love all her outfits throughout. She's still an incredible dancer and vocalist after more than 2 decades. She even mixes up some classic songs with some beautiful and fun arrangements. However, I was a tad disappointed that a couple songs (ie. Kono yo Shirushi and NO.1) she didn't sing in full. I loved seeing VERBAL & Crystal Kay appear as guests during the show. They're fantastic on stage with her. The show's ending involves a touching piece from the audience and fellow stage members, which leads to her getting rather emotional and messing up on the final song frequently missing out on staying focused on singing it properly. This is both cute yet a little irritating, and honestly a bit surprising to see her mess up after almost every second line. Nevertheless I do recommend adding this concert to your collection.

I purchased this as a gift for a loved one and she loves it. It's a lovely collection of Christmas tunes performed beautifully. The audio quality is superb and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra version of Merry Christmas Darling is just additional icing on the cake. The design of the case, front, back, inside and out is very gorgeous too. Excellent album collection for the holidays.

I rarely buy compilation albums these days, but this is a great release. The new recordings and mixes sound excellent and newly refreshing. The new songs are wonderful too. The packaging is exceptional and the booklet is quite big and printed on high quality thick glossy paper with many gorgeous photos inside of the singer. The only thing that could have made this even better is if more of the previously released tracks were new recordings or mixes as well.

The songs, while few on this release, are all wonderful. It's really rather difficult to pick just one as a favorite. The 2 MVs on the DVD are also a couple of the best ones in her career I think. The visuals for Eyes On You is especially fantastic. The CD jewel case comes inside a slip cover with a bonus photobooklet and 2 card stickers. The packaging for the CD case and photobooklet are all quite beautiful with many nice pictures and a very pretty layout. However, I'm not a big fan of the sticker featuring the singer in this particular pink outfit. Overall, it's quite a nice little EP to welcome Kanayan back from her hiatus. Hopefully we get even more real soon.

Ayu's 25th year in the Japanese music industry. The show is exceptionally well thought out and brought to life with numerous little nods to past Countdown Live New Year's concerts while still making it a completely new concert standing on its own. Also, her vocals are great throughout, and I love all her outfits, and the ones worn by the dancers and band members on stage as well. The sound and picture quality are also exceptional on the bluray as well. I very highly recommend this to any and all Ayu and JPOP fans!!

When this album first made its debut on CD I wasn't super taken with many tracks, especially #4, which features Sheena Ringo, a singer I'm not personally a fan of. The entire album has greatly grown on me. I love it in fact. Even the aforementioned song featuring Sheena has grown on me quite a bit, but I do admit that it's still not my absolute favorite track on the album, but it is still nonetheless very enjoyable. The album also sounds even better on the Vinyl LP format. Hikaru's vocals are wonderful and I love her music, and beautiful, and at times, very fun lyrics. The packaging is silky very high quality thick cardboard. The center contains all lyrics very neatly laid out with a photo of the singer in a very beautiful haunting atmosphere. And as always, CDJAPAN's packaging for shipment and delivery was fantastic. Highly recommended!!

Koshi Inaba should need no introduction. He's been in the music industry since the late 80s as the lead singer of B'z before he started doing some solo releases as well. He's a fantastic singer with very versatile vocals and creates excellent music. Sadly, all 4 of these songs (to my knowledge) were never included on any of his other releases, so I picked this CD up. It's a remarkable single with a good mix of different songs. Each one has its own charm and is difficult to pick just one as a personal favorite. The insert is just a couple pages with the lyrics and credits inside. It's got some colors inside to go with the green background on the cover though, which gives it some further character to its simplistic design. Highly recommended!!

BoA's Forgive Me isn't a solemn ballad like you might think by first glance of the title. It's a power pop-rock anthem, which is an interesting take for the singer, but she ROCKS it perfectly well. The song takes me back to older rock pieces like the classic Rock With You from the early 2000s. Every other track on this EP (aka mini album) is fantastic. The EP comes packaged as a thick book made of quality paper filled with some incredible pictures of the original Queen of KPOP. Intertwined in the pages of the book are also the lyrics to every song, and to add to it, it also includes a very cute photo card of the singer that's autographed on the reverse side, along with a bookmark printed on traditional photo paper with some more cute photos of the singer. My only disappointment and issue with this release at all is that the CD disk itself is slipped between two flimsy cardboard tabs in the back of the book. This sadly wasn't the best way to ensure that the disk would stay in good condition over time, so I removed the disk and put it in a spare jewel case I had laying around to keep from it taking any damage over multiple uses. I will also quickly add that despite all this, CDJAPAN was excellent with how it was packaged for during transit from them to me. It arrived in perfect condition.

WOMAN is yet another exceptional album from the great R&B singer Takako Hirasawa, aka DOUBLE. It keeps its pace really well. My absolute favorite track is "Tattoo", a very emotional song you can't help but engulf yourself in. "Count 3" is quite fun and has a definite sexy in a club type of theme to it. While I'm not a fan of Korean group 2PM, Jun.K is really excellent on this track and compliments well aside DOUBLE's vocals. "Make it hot" is just that. Really the perfect "set the sexy mood" type of track. "History of love" is a gorgeous ballad; probably one of her best. The case design is interesting as the main cover is what you see here. However the spine and back cover of the case are a mix of red and white with some purple swirl stripe thing mixed in. Kinda neat and gives a little more attention to it. The inside booklet isn't a ton of pages, but the lyrics and credits are all laid out nicely without being crammed together, and there's also a few very nice and uniquely cool pictures of the singer found throughout. Great album!! Highly recommended!!

This is honestly my favorite Ayu classical themed album that she's ever released. While it's sadly the shortest, it also flows perfectly. Each song incorporates pieces of classical works from some of the most well-known classical composers including Vivaldi, Bach and Chopin among others, which further brings every song to a new life. There's not many pictures inside, but the entire packaging is quite lovely. To anyone who enjoys Ayumi Hamasaki and has a true love and appreciation for classical music, this is definitely highly recommended!!

The UNIVERSE album is honestly among my favorites. It has a good mix of great singles like the rock "Can We Go Back", the sexy songs "Physical thing" and "ECSTACY" and the cute "Lick me". There's many other great tracks on here too. One personal favorite, "You're So Beautiful" is a classic up-tempo ballad that I often enjoy repeating a couple times before allowing the album to move onto the next track. The MVs are also fantastic as well. Only down point with them is simply that the MV for the song "Alive" wasn't included. The booklets are lovely as well. Many great pictures of Kumi and the lyrics are all laid out well. The only reason for not giving this release 5 Stars is simply the BEST album included. It's got some great songs, but it's forgettable as a disk of its own. It was unnecessary to include it packaged together with the UNIVERSE studio album. Definitely do recommend checking out Kumi Koda's UNIVERSE and even just her entire discography. An absolute amazing artist and performer.

This calendar is gorgeous. Has some lovely original animation shots of the characters in different situations, which are all too sweet. All the art is vibrant and well detailed. Plus, the paper it's printed on is very high quality, thick and super glossy allowing you to re-use these as posters even after 2024 is over. Very highly recommended to all fans of the series.

Absolutely gorgeous 2LP Set soundtrack to an equally amazing classic film!! The packaging is absolutely stunning with so much detailed scenes and artwork from the film. There's even a pull out piece in the #1 LP slot with a bunch of info (in Japanese) about the background and such about the composition etc. The LPs themselves have lovely artwork from the film in the center on each side. Then the music itself sounds even better on this format. You can really hear such precise details you can't hear on the CD counterpart. Joe Hisaishi was a genius composing something of this brilliance for Mononoke Hime. Also just to mention CDJapan was quick at delivery and packaged it extremely well so it arrived in pristine perfect condition. Extremely Highly Recommended!!

I bought this AGES ago when it first released. I've seen it soooo many times that I almost know this concert by heart. It starts with an opening movie showing random speeding clips of the outside of the venue, people being let inside etc before going to a video clip of Kuu stepping inside a HUGE old fashioned building that looks like some oversized old style library to open up the "FANTASIA" book. Honestly, the way this is presented is pretty cool and opens things up quite cool. The opening song is Butterfly and she "flies" over the crowd from one end of the dome to the main stage. She has a ton of props and incredible costumes and dances with great energy throughout the show. Her and her sister misono even makes a really cool entrance and performance for "It's all love!". Plus at one point you'll spot David King who was one of her chorus backup vocal people earlier in 2010 and came back in 2015 attending the FANTASIA show with his kid. From start to finish, this concert is over 3 hours long, and was a great way to end her 10th Anniversary. The only thing that I had mixed feelings over when I first saw the concert is her outfit from "Koi no Tsubomi" to "Lick me". It's cutesy overload. I do kinda like it a little more now, but if you're not into her looking like a big piece of fluffy candy floss you might not like the outfit. Regardless though, she does give some great performances in it. Just... she could've definitely done without the hat.

Honestly, I guiltily admit that I sometimes like to listen to a couple very specific songs by this singer. Those particular ones are kinda fun and catchy. Sadly though, I never understood her super popularity for all the time she was active. Some people have said to me that they dislike the change of direction with her music by this point. I truly don't see any change. All her albums I find to be the same kawaii pop music one after the other.

I originally bought the CD of this album back when it was first released 2 decades ago, and I was hesitant but decided to purchase it along with Utada's other albums on Vinyl, and soooo glad I did. Deep River is one of my absolute favorite albums from the singer, and the LP brings out so much clarity you don't hear on the CD or on a digital streaming service. All these are great songs made even better by the remastering and quality of this format. Very highly recommend you to purchase the LPs before they're gone for good.

First of all, I bought the mu-mo/FC edition which comes with much more than just this specific concert, but I'll concentrate on specifically what's on this particular disk; Ayu's 24th Anniversary show. The concert itself is ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC from start to finish. The costumes, stage props, dancers, band etc are all superb. Even her vocals are top notch during this show. Ayu's on her top game here. Plus, the special guest appearance for the performance of "One Night Carnival" was a lot of fun too. My only small complaint is that there's some performances throughout the show where the editor at avex decided to go a little crazy with some special editing effects which gets kinda weird to watch. It reminds me of how Kumi Koda's "Dirty Ballroom ~One Night Show~" was edited for her "TRICK" album release back in 2009. This editing is sometimes just nothing short of just distracting, while the editing during "Party Queen" for example was mostly just fun the majority of the time.

After having grown up surrounded by many types of music, mostly due to my own personal exploration over the years, I grew into loving and appreciating soooo many different genres of music, including classical, something too many these days seem to overlook. MY STORY Classical is gorgeous!! I love the alternate classical arrangements of every song on here. It truly does them all some beautiful justice, some sounding even more gorgeous than the pop originals. I also adore the instrumental classical bonus track version of "A Song is born". It makes me wish more of my favorite artists including Kumi Koda, Hikaru Utada, BoA, Jolin Tsai and the now retired Namie Amuro had of, or would in the future release a classical compilation of their own songs as well. This is a fantastic album and I VERY HIGHLY recommend giving it a full listen through at least a few times.

Kuu's TRICK Tour is fantastic. She brings her A-Game with every single last performance. Even her entrance onto stage is great and so unexpected after how things appear to be behind the curtain before it drops. Won't spoil anything, but it's really cool. She does a number of magic illusions and such in this tour, hence the tour's title. She also opens up just after the introduction with my favorite song from TRICK and one of my top favorites in her entire discography, TABOO. Plus I absolutely love that this is the only concert I can think of where she performs the cute Christmas song, Winter Bell. The only reason I gave this tour 4-Stars instead of 5 is that the TRICK album had her as a clown on the cover (Limited CD/2DVD edition), so of course she uses a clown for the overall theme and in the interlude movies. What bugs me is the clown itself during these interludes. Rather than have it actually speak, she has it make the most annoying squeaking sounds with a subtitle (Japanese only) underneath the squeaking to convey what the clown is supposed to be saying. I often mute the interlude videos so I don't need to listen to the clown's squeaking. As for the rest, the second disk includes some behind-the-scenes footage plus the stops of the tour where each of the special guests were that aren't in the main concert on the first disk. Fergie makes a stop in for her performance with Kuu of That Ain't Cool, a song I personally love, but Kuu FAR outshines her easily. AK-69 isn't on stage for the entire song of Bling Bling Bling but still gives a good performance with KK. Lastly, Misono is cute on stage with Kumi. You can really feel the sisterly love and connection between the two women. Overall, great show and very highly recommended!!

"stay with me" is a gorgeous winter ballad, and while I have the TRICK album, which this song was later included on, I still wanted to own this CD. Besides the beautiful "stay with me" it also includes the adorable Christmas song "Winter Bell". Plus the Orgel (Music Box) Version of the title song is just so soft and lovely to listen too. The instrumentals of both songs are also just delightful. The MVs are both fantastic. However, I do prefer the original over the alternate one. The inside packaging of the CD is also just lovely and has some very nice photos of Kumi as well. Not to mention it's printed on very high quality paper. The entire single is a definite treat, even more so for the end of the year holiday season. Very highly recommended.