My Mad Music Corner: To Be Continued

Monday, May 18, 2015

To Be Continued - Day Break

In the year between 1994's Beyond The Light... and this album, which was released in 1996, To Be Continued released MUSIC-aholic, which to the best of my knowledge is either a "best of" compilation of music from the first half of their career, or a compilation of remixes and re-recordings of said songs. (It includes a new song that was released on its own as a single, too.) I don't have that yet, but this seems to be the logical next step in their album chronology, so I will cover this and its followups first before reaching for a copy of that. This is also the band's final album on Sony Records; although Kohki Okada would release a solo album, Hip88, through Sony, their last two records would be released through Toshiba EMI.

Bitter Sweet Love and Beyond The Light... were perfect J-pop albums of their time-- their production was big, their vocals were tight, and they just sounded beautiful. This album is also up there, but I wouldn't consider it as good as its two predecessors. A couple songs on this, like "抱きしめるたび", feel a bit too retready of the material from those two albums, like the record company was demanding a part 2 to "君だけを見ていた" or some of the other singles from those releases, but songs like "Truth" and "今でも君を探してる" feel right at home with some of their best material. If you liked those two aforementioned albums, you won't have much issue getting into this to some extent.

While this album's packaging may not be quite as lavish in its design as Beyond The Light-- it didn't get a uniquely wide jewel case-- it does make up for it with a sweet, sweet transparent slipcover, which the album's title and tracklisting were printed on. The "true" front cover is thus mapped to what is usually the back cover for a jewel case, showcasing a nice vertically oriented picture of Kohki Okada. There was a pretty cool gold sticker on the shrinkwrap for the album, and through being extremely careful, I was able to preserve it by transferring it to the slipcover.