Album Review: Koda Kumi – Unicorn

I went into Koda Kumi’s Unicorn knowing very little about it. In fact, I knew nothing about it other than it was releasing on the same day as a Taylor Swift album. I chose to keep myself in the dark, because it was rare that a Kumi album would release with me knowing so little about it. I didn’t even know what the tracklist for it would be. So, release day comes. I know nothing going into this album and I just press play.

The album kicks off with an introduction, which is a Koda Kumi staple at this point, and it was the usual trash. So many of these intros on Kumi albums sound the same. It would be nice if Kumi actually themed them around the titles and vibes of her albums. Then again, rarely do her albums have one vibe, even though the album cover may signify it has a specific direction.

HENNYWAY.

There was an immediate shift after the intro. Like…a very clear shift. “Heaven’s Door” sounded really good. “Tokio” sounded great. The quality of these songs was so good to the point that I said ‘These have to be covers’. And lo and behold, they were.

Unicorn is a hybrid album of covers and original material.

Koda Kumi – Unicorn | Avex Music Creative Inc.

I have long said that Kumi’s best albums are Eternity ~Love & Songs~ and Color the Cover. And one of Kumi’s best singles over the past few years was last year’s “Tooi Machi no Dokoka de…”. And I guess Kumi stops by here and runs Google Translate on my shit, because she went and put a bunch of covers on an album. HOWEVER. Unicorn taking a 50/50 approach does not work. Whilst the inclusion of covers is a good idea in theory, the original songs are collectively so…not good, that they drag the entire album down. The quality of the covers on Unicorn in conjunction with Kumi’s track record of delivering great covers, leads me to believe that were Unicorn just an album of covers, it would’ve been good. So this hybrid approach robbed Kumi of delivering a hat trick of great cover albums. One thing Kumi is gonna do is sabotage her own shit. She’s like that meme of the man on the bicycle.

The original material on Unicorn is not a complete Yamanote line wreck. But it’s all so bland and is more of what Kumi has been giving us for far too long now. Chaotic production. Flat mixing. An overuse of auto-tune which adds nothing creatively. Shout-singing. No melody. Just messy and forgettable songs. And they don’t sit alongside the covers in a way which makes this album feel like it was ever intended to be a hybrid album. The only original song on this thing which is of a quality which comes close to that of the covers is “Silence”. Everything else is bloody awful. This album feels like it was slapdashed together because Kumi had a bunch of these original songs floating around, none of which got physical releases. And Avex said ‘We need to put them on an album’. But Kumi said ‘I’m on tour, I ain’t got time to write anything new for an album right now’. So we ended up with a bunch of covers. And THAT was the album.

Koda Kumi – Unicorn | Avex Music Creative Inc.

Unicorn is one of Kumi’s shortest albums — featuring a lean eleven songs, including the intro. Avex seems to be enforcing stricter budgets on studio time, as Ayumi Hamasaki’s albums are also far leaner than they used to be. And with the money that they had to pay out for Kumi’s covers, the album budget probably got eaten up real fast, which is more-than-likely why Kumi is out here touring non-stop to make that coin. But Unicorn being short isn’t the problem here. The problem is what has long been an issue with Kumi’s releases — too constant, too frequent and never truly considered.

Kumi’s always been super loose and occasionally unconventional with her single releases. After all, her 12 Singles Project is what really helped put her on the map in a big way and cement her place in J-pop. And what did Avex do with these singles? They put them all on a ‘Best’ album. But even by Kumi and Avex’s questionable standards, Unicorn feels strange in the same way that Hamasaki’s Remember You felt strange, in that it should have been packaged differently. Remember Me and Unicorn both should have been Best albums.

It’s shocking, but unsurprising at this point just how little sense of awareness Kumi has of the quality of her music. When I listen to Unicorn, there is a clear disparity between the quality of the covers and the original material. It’s like night and day. There is a clear distinction in quality between the original songs and the covers. And yet, when Kumi and her team ran this album back, it seems nobody thought the same. Kumi’s career has long followed Hamasaki’s, and she’s seemingly followed it right down to the tee of having a team who cannot tell their musical arses from their musical elbows, and have no idea how to steer the music back on track. And this is crazy to me, when both acts have such clear styles which work for them. There are very clear paths both could take for their music to be better and showcase them in far better light than it has (not) for the past decade. Is nobody taking notes? Is nobody putting together scrap books of the shit that worked? And when it comes to Kumi, why is nobody trying to extrapolate what it is about covers which enables her to consistently deliver, and trying to apply this to her original material? This seems like the most obvious thing in the world to do, and yet Kumi and her team are not doing it. Maybe everybody knows that Kumi herself is the problem and nobody is willing to tell her that. Because the post Unicorn single “Jump to the Breeze” was an original song which was not written by Kumi herself and it was a decent song. You know it’s bad when a Tetsuya Komuro production in this day and age is better than the shit you usually be putting out. And “Jump to the Breeze” would’ve fit nicely on this album alongside the covers. So I guess everybody in Kumi’s team is just gonna keep smiling, bowing and saying that they love it to keep their jobs. Because who is actually gonna tell Kumi that she is the problem with her own songs?

Another very evident issue with her songs is producer Hi-yunk, who Kumi has worked with consistently on every single album since 2015’s Walk of My Life. His songs are routinely the worst on every album. He has absolutely got to go.

Koda Kumi – Unicorn | Avex Music Creative Inc.

Kumi has no consistent sense of self. She has always been the type of act who has latched onto the sounds and styles of others, and constantly projected what she thinks people want her to be, or what she thinks people will find ‘cool’. And the crazy thing about her covers, is that despite her singing other people’s songs, her artistry and sense of self comes through in these covers more than it does in her original material. Her musicality shines on covers. Her vocals shine on covers. She shows great musicianship and fearlessness in being able to honour the original version of a song, whilst not being afraid to make it her own. Then she records her own shit and so much of this goes straight out of the window. Ballads seem to be the only exception to this rule. Because one thing about Kumi, she is always going to deliver a good ballad. And when she’s covering somebody else’s ballad, it’s like she has a star in Mario Kart. Her cover of Miki Imai’s “Piece of My Wish” is GORGEOUS.

Unicorn feels like something which was slapped together, just to put an album out with no real consideration as to what type of album it should actually be. Given where Kumi is at with her career, Unicorn should have been a Best album of covers, with “Heaven’s Kitchen”, “Tokio”, “UFO”, “Piece of My Wish” and “Toi Machi no Doko ka de…” all being new songs on it. One thing that we have seen Kumi not be great at over the years is consolidation. She’s always had these styles which exist in pockets, yet they never fold into one or overlap. And the sounds existed in pockets for so long, that Kumi’s solution for a minute was to just pull an I Am… Sasha Fierce with her releases. W Face. And and DNA. angeL + monsteR. The Wings EP. And Kumi’s kinda done the same thing with Unicorn, with an album of covers and original material. It just doesn’t make sense. Like, girl. Pick one thing and try to do it properly.

Kumi’s 2022 album Heart really felt like she was turning a corner, delivering what was easily one of her better albums in a decade. My hopes were not up by any means. But there was a part of me that thought ‘Maybe she has finally got her shit together. Maybe she gets it now.’ But then “Trigger”, “Black Wings” and “Vroom” dropped and it was clear that her shit was not together at all. And here comes Unicorn, as further evidence of that.

Koda Kumi – Unicorn | Avex Music Creative Inc.

Kumi is talented. To this day I still think she has one of the cooler sounding voices in J-pop and she can actually sing. But she keeps choosing original material which doesn’t showcase her voice in the best way and she seems insistent on packaging herself and her music in manners which feels disposable. Nothing she has released over the past decade has felt like a classic or something which will be remembered, referenced or pointed to in the way her earlier albums were, and it’s not even like her earlier albums were particularly great. But even so, they still managed to feel like they were planting a flag in the ground and establishing something as far as the type of artist and pop star Kumi was. Unicorn, unfortunately doesn’t do that, because Kumi decided to dilute the impact it could have had as a cover album or Best cover album, by including original material which muddies the package and leaves you wondering ‘What is even the point of this and what is Kumi trying to tell me with it?’.

Album highlights:
▪ Heaven’s Kitchen
▪ Tokio 🏅
▪ UFO
▪ Piece of My Wish 🥇
▪ Toi Machi no Doko ka de… 🏅