My Mad Music Corner: To Be Continued

Friday, April 17, 2015

To Be Continued - Beyond The Light...

Beyond The Light... is, by a wide margin, To Be Continued's biggest album, the absolute peak of their career. Driven by the gigantic success of their biggest single, 君だけを見ていた (Kimidake Wo Miteita), covered previously on this blog, this album ended up spending eight weeks on the Oricon Albums Chart, peaking at #4. For good reason-- this album is big, big, BIG J-pop, endlessly catchy, extraordinarily crafted, you name something positive to say about J-pop, it's here. Like its predecessor, Bitter Sweet Love, it's all killer and no filler. I can't say if its successor, Day Break, also provides songcrafting this consistently beautiful, but I can definitely say I'll be finding out soon.

The grandeur of this album also reaches out to its packaging. Beyond the typical adornment of the Japanese music disc, the obi strip, it also features a uniquely thick jewel case (so if you get a copy and it comes in broken... good luck replacing it) meant to house a feature I've never seen in any CD I've ever picked up before: a liner note booklet with a real spine. It's not visible from the CD's spine, especially if you have the obi over it, and it does make taking pictures of the inside of the booklet a bit of a pain, but its presence does add another layer of elegant sweetness to this album.

Like any of To Be Continued's output, if you go to a website like Yahoo! Japan Auctions (or any of its internationally friendly forwarding services), there's a good chance you'll be able to find it for cheap. Because of how cheap they tend to be compared to the exponentially higher shipping costs, it would be best to get several of them in bulk. From my limited experience with the band, I would definitely recommend grabbing this album and Bitter Sweet Love together, but if you wanna grab more to make the deal even sweeter, go right ahead. I'm sure you'd be fine no matter what you packed with them.