Wotaku Now!: C-ute 'Namida no Iro'

Last week I got hold of a poor quality radio rip of this song, although I was kinda drunk and half asleep while I listened to it, I can recall thinking one thing ... 'too much Airi'.
Now that I'm just about sober I can safely say I was right, this song essentially just features vocals from Yajima Maimi and Suzuki Airi, while the other girls do obviously feature at some point it's few and far between.
It goes without saying that Maimi and Airi do have brilliant vocal ability (Airi has improved alot lately) but it would be nice for a more equal spread, I can understand that Tsunku wants to promote the better singers, but it seems such a waste not to give the other girls more opportunity.
At first the actual song itself didnt really set my world on fire, its got a nice pace and interesting instrumental sounds, it seems to lack any particular hooks or catchy lyrics, but It's slowly growing on me, I can safely say I do enjoy the song but I doubt it will feature heavily on my music playlist.
When the video starts my first thoughts were 'what the hell are all those white shapes about?' ... but upon closer inspection the white shapes seem to represent a city scape, the mini white buildings are fairly pointless ... if the girls started to stomp on and destroy them Godzilla style ... that would of been brilliant, but no they dont.
Like the song, the PV fails to provide any visual hooks, apart from Maimi's absolute stunning beauty, the clothing the girls wear is a fairly toned down affair, Erika's hat is sassy, Nakajima's bobble hat is out of place, and Maimi's incredibly tiny shorts causes me to go into cardiac arrest.
There is one thing that does worry me about this PV, and thats the various shots of Maimi layed around looking animic, did the director want this type of shot?.
Although it might seem like I'm being fairly negative about this c-ute release I can assure you that I do enjoy it, they have done better ... but I'm happy about it.
Overall it makes me wonder what direction Tsunku is pushing these girls in, after their 3rd major single 'Tokaikko Junjou' I thought they were going to continue with the more mature sound and look ... but then 'Lalala Shiawase no Uta' came out and C-ute reverted back to girly pink bouncy mode .. and now we seemed to of jumped right back into the mature style again, I guess variety is the spice of life .. and if Maimi continues to wear short shorts I dont really care what direction they head into next.

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