Album review - WILD FANTASY by Carnation

 °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

LADY LEMONAAADE
KIMI WA LADY LEMONAAAAADE

hi my name is monstii and OH BOY. NEW CARNATION??? IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2025????

YEAHH!!!!

well, actually, i lied! this album isn't new at all! today i shall be talking about Carnation's 13th official album, WILD FANTASY, originally released in 2006.it was just recently (as in, literally a week when i write this) rereleased on streaming services worldwide! i'm not sure if it was also rereleased physically, because this album just appeared without any official statements or anything! its wasn't even rereleased on a special date or anything, it was really just random. fingers crossed that more of their albums are made available worldwide, but i wouldn't hold my breath.

⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

carnation @ sat tower records store in
osaka, 2006.

as for the album itself, there's only one way i could describe it, and that would be the logical continuation the band's "3-man era" sound. now mind you, when i say this, i really mean that this album feels more like a LIVING/LOVING pt. 2, as opposed to a finale in the trilogy of "3-man era" albums, if that makes sense? this isn't me saying it's a bad album either, absolutely not! i'm just saying that it doesn't really bring too much new to the table.

now, you could argue that this was just kind how carnation was at the time, and you would be right! after Love Sculpture, and the departure of two of their members, carnation did make the conscious shift towards less experimental, less pop-y more straightforward rock, but LIVING/LOVING and SUPER ZOO still have distinct sounds that you can tell apart pretty well, while WILD FANTASY feels like Masahiro Naoe was trying to redo the sound of LIVING/LOVING, but ultimately i feel like it doesn't have as much of an identity as LIVING/LOVING or SUPER ZOO! which leaves some songs just feeling a little flat and not really having parts that stick to you.

♬⋆.˚

carnation performing live, 2007.

huh. i think that's the longest i've ever spoken critically of carnation. weird! i feel like i've caused some great disturbance in the force. oh well!

i have spoken my main gripes with this album, so i feel like i should also mention the things that i do like about this album!

all of the things that are consistently great about carnation are there, with great production and mixing and a great performance by all members and guest musicians, and Masahiro Naoe gives it all with his vocals as well.

the album doesn't really have any bad songs, at the worst just okay ones, and at the best we do have some standouts, one in particular that i'd like to point out.

Lady Lemonade is my personal favorite from the album, its a mellow and sentimental tune that is a nice refresher and a real standout, it also has a REALLY good (maybe even better than the studio version?) live version on the ROCK LOVE live album (that was taken down from youtube :- (...  ) 

༘⋆✿

overall, i think its an okay album. its most definitely not carnation's greatest, but its most certainly not anything offensively bad either, (i firmly believe carnation has made no bad music and you cAN FIGHT ME ABOUT THIS AND YOU WILL LOSE) 

would i recommend it? ...eehhh i don't know. if you'd never listened to a carnation album, i think this wouldn't be the greatest first impression, it barely covers carnation's versatility and creativity, not to mention its the last album of an era and sound that carnation wouldn't really go back to go after drummer Hiroshi Yabe's leaving carnation.

if i could give it a number score, it would be a 6/10! ...for reasons that i just talked about. thank you, have a good night.

if you would like a good start to carnation, i actually have no idea! all of the albums available worldwide are from different eras and all have different sounds and feels, so i think a good start would be going here  and listening to all of their singles from the 90's, because i think it gives you a good general idea of most of carnation's music, and an idea of where they kind of go from. however, i think every carnation album and song can be appreciated by itself, so do whatever you want i guess.

thank you for reading today's carnation glazing, its been a little bit since i posted something real long like this, but my motivation to make posts has come back full swing, so expect some stuffs comin soon! you can follow me i think if you press a funny button on the right, but im not really sure what that does exactly LOL.

monstii signing off!

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

 

its yuzuru ota's birthday (janurary 20th) 

(joe ohta because thats what google translate translates his name as sometimes and its kinda funny)

Happy new years + 1 year anniversary

HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!!!!!!!

congratulationes!!!1 we survived another year!!!! anyways

in about 6 hours as i write this, its gonna be the new year, pretty cool right??? honestly, the new year doesnt matter much to me, its just time passing, the world around me and i are the same, but a little older. also, i dont do resolutions, because i dont like waiting untill the end of the year to change things in my life!!! 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

on a more personally important note, today marks the 1-year anniversary of an insomniacs dream, my first album, and also kind of the birth of monstii! i realised this like a week ago, and at the time i didnt think much of it, but when i woke up this morning it kind of hit me a little. 

it feels like its been way longer than a year, like, way way longer. it also feels like ive done so much, yet also nothing? im not sure how to explain it. i guess, in terms of big projects, i havent done that much. i put out ftel and also alien musics, (if that even counts lol) and also i started this blog. on the surface, thats not much at all (by my standards, at least.) but once i think about it a little more ive actually grown so much in the past year. 

when i say growing, i really mean figuring out who i am and what i want to do in life. last year, back when i was still working on an insomniacs dream, i thought that i just wanted to pursue music and nothing else in life. very naive of me! i guess i kind of wanted to be like a mysterious internet artist who outs a buttload of banger music and dissapears for a while, kind of like koronba or something. pretty stupid of me! keeping low like that is one way to never make it! i realized that i wanted to do all sorts of things and like i dont know, be like osamu sato or something.

ive done a lot of visual art as and other creatuve projects as well as maintain try to maintain a healthy real life, which meant dedicating quite a bit of my last few months keeping my grades up and helping out with my school theatre. ive made so many friends and have gotten a lot more comfortable just kinds of existing, i guess? being around people was pretty hard for me like a year ago but im getting quite better!!! (i would go into detail about that, but i'd rather that be kept personal.) 

but with all that figured out, it leaves me feeling confident that i can up my work output this upcoming year. i want to put out at least two or three more albums before i graduate high school (which is in less than two years!!! argh!!!) and also what ever other projects that i decide to start. and if i dont, then i have made a pact that i will disintegrate where i stand as soon as a graduate. then you wont hear from me anymore!!! (which will be a little sad but WHATEVER)

thats all i had to say.

have great day, and a great new year. 

monstii signing off.

 MERRY CRIMBUS

I MADE A PICREW

 

hi my name is monstii and i like drawing a while lot. like a lot a lot i think its becoming a problem BUT THATS BESIDES THE PONIT!!!!

i made a picrew you can go mess around with it by clicking the image aboive!!! (html magicks)

standard like rules apply dont use it for commerical purposes and if you do use the image you made crediying me would be appriciated!! other than that go wild!!! 

to be completely honest i had made this a few months earlier (ok like 1 or 2 but you get the point) BUT it got taken down because i had used a picrure of raidou kuzunoha (SMT JUMPSCARE) as the cover image as a place holder and i guess the picrew gods didnt like that and i had to make it from scratch all over again because they never responded to my appeal but WHATEVER its all in da past now!!!!!

thats it have a nice day(OR NIGHT ehehehehe >:3) 

monstii singing off 

not signing singing lalalaladeda

new single!

 

she 👽 on my 👽 until i 👽

two new songs are up on my youtube channel! 👽 <-- click him please thanks

these are two songs that have been on my back burner for a while that i finished just recently. i decided too release them together as a "single" (im just calling it that cause its just two songs) because  i dont really like realesing singular songs unless they have a music video. (speaking of music videos, im in the works of making some maybe! more like 'im kinda thinking about it' then 'in the works' but detailsss) 

thats about all there is to say on this matter. have a nice day!

monstii singing off.  👽👽👽👽👽

a follow up to the smart post!!!

 ִֶָ𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🐇་༘࿐

link to smart on spotify 

you can also find them on other music streaming platforms such as apple music and tidal.

they focus on yamanaka a lot in the okinawa live video

hi my name is monstii and ive made a great discovery!!! there is not two, but three smart albums! yes, you heard me right! i missed one :(

the album in question is Reverie Musee, released in 1993. two years before their self-titled. 

it seems as if yamanaka isnt involved in this album?
i have no concrete proof, but its just a hunch.

I found out this existed like an hour ago, when i was looking for an hd version of self-titled's cover. when i went to smart's page on apple music, there were other albums by other people with the name smart, but this one has the logo (sm:art) and is spotify (as well as other streaming platforms, but on spotify it lists suzuki as writer/producer/arranger.) when i was digging for info for my first post on smart, i hadn't thought to check on music streaming platforms. i have no idea why! i guess i assumed i wouldnt find anything or they would be region locked or something. (which they arent, thank god)

discogs doesnt have or the yt channel that posted their other two albums OR smart's official(?) yt didnt have any mention of reverie musee, so i asuumed that self titled and zai phon were they only albums that smart had realesed in its lifetime. i guess not!! i cant find anything else on this album, other than the fact that suzuki is the writer/producer/arranger and its "author" (as spotify puts it, im not actually sure what that means) is a Mayumi. i have s very small inkling of who that could be, as there is a mayumi credited as a lyricist on self-titled, so that could be them? the author for self titled, YOU, is also credited as a lyricist. im guessing that the lyricists got the rights to distribute the album? i guess??? i dont know... :B

 ⋆˚✿˖° ๋࣭ ⭑⚝

their promotional material is so cool

truth be told, i have not listened to the album yet! when i found about it, i got really excited and decided to make a post about it right away! (i am typing this instead of doing homework) i have listened to a preview of it however, and what i listened to sounds basically what i expected early smart to sound like! i will elaborate more when i listen to it, which will be an edit to this post!

 ✮ ⋆ ˚｡𖦹 ⋆｡°✩

Second-to-lastly, i would like to theorize a tiny bit! i have two educated guesses as to why smarts first album isnt documented like the others: 

the first is that reverie musee was realeased before smart officially "debuted" (basically sign on to a major label and get out of being indie, its more of a big deal in japan than in the west) i say this because there is no promotional material (that i know of) which would've been posted on the smart yt channel (probably) while zai phon and self-titled have mvs and commercials. my other piece of evidence is that it seems like there is no record label attached to reverie musee. on spotify, suzuki is listed as producer, composer and arranger, while self titled and and zai phon have other producers and suzuki is only listed as composer. the little triangle on the bottom right says smart, and while its not unusual, the other two albums dont have this little triangle. perhaps an independent label? smart's last two albums were released on eastworld and i dont have much reason to think that this was also released on eastworld.

my second theory is just simply lost/a lack of information. ive noticed that a lot of the information that ive used as sources for these posts (discogs, yt uploads etc) are just under two years old. for a band that has been around since 1993, thats kind of crazy! im not too sure what the sudden influx of smart info in 2022 is about, but most of it comes from 1995-1996 when self-titled had come out and zai phon was coming out. before or after that there is basically nothing i have gathered. (aside from the members other pursuits, but even then there there isnt much.) 

── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

as much as i can theorize, i dont think answers are coming any time soon. smart is still really darn obscure! on spotify, they have 7 monthly listeners! ive never seen anything under 1000, let alone a single digit! i hope someday smart gets a second wind in the mainstream, as there a lot of questions i have that remain unanswered, most notably:

where did suzuki go? her name isnt attached to anything not-smart related, and it seems like she disappeared off the face of the earth after zai-phon's release. while its not unheard of for artists to not do music anymore and get away from the public eye, i think suzuki is a really talented producer and songwriter, and it makes me kind of sad that she never did anything other than being in smart. 

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆

thats basically all i have to say, and after i review reverie musee, my final post about smart until i find anymore big information!

have a great day and as always,

monstii signing off. 

 *ੈ✩‧₊˚