Music video: Perfume - Pick me up

Perfume's double A-side features one song which is pimping beer and another which is pimping a clothing store. Whenever Perfume's producer Nakata Yasutaka creates songs which are to be used in conjunction with product tie-ins, the lyrics are never subtle. This man gave Kyary Pussy Pamyu a song called "My Room", which was used in adverts for apartment renting. This same man gave Perfume "Glitter", which was used in adverts for beer and featured a lyrics which alluded to grabbing a beverage from a fridge. However, "Glitter" was pop perfection and is a song that's written in my will to be played at my funeral when my open casket is wheeled into the church amidst a laser show, so I'mma let that 'grab a sparky thing from a white box' line slide.

The video for "Pick me up" was directed by Kodama Yuichi, who also directed Perfume's videos for "Secret, Secret", "Natural ni koishite", and "Nee" - all of which were produced as product tie-ins, and you can see elements of all three videos here. The girls are not being restricted to looking like Mystic Force Power Rangers, and there being elements of the real world intermixed with surrealism.

I do not understand Japanese, so I can't speak for what the song is about or what the girls are singing aside from ♪ I WANNA MAKE MY LIFE, BRIGHT MY LIFE! ♪ But "Pick me up" is almost certainly in reference to the clothes calling out to the girls, as per the video, because Nakata is deep and meaningful like that.

Perfume are not what you would call the most fashionable group in Japan. They started out looking like shit, then got a bit fashionable and then began the decent into looking like Mystic Force Power Rangers. If it wasn't for the legs on constant display and Kashiyuka serving with the hair, they would look like utter top-to-bottom shit. So it was cool to see the girls rock practical outfits that were on trend. Their looks at the start and end of the video were particularly noteworthy because they were reflective of their own personal styles and they bucked the Perfume trend of Kashiyuka in a mini-skirt and Nocchi in a pair of shorts. A-chan looks how she always looks boring. But Kashiyuka and Nocchi looked drastically different, showing midriff and serving Olivia Pope / Pimp royalty realness between them. Then there's the girls wearing contact lenses, with Kashiyuka giving me Namie Amuro feels.

As a song, "Pick me up" is pretty much Nocchi and A-chan featuring Kashiyuka. Nocchi and A-chan took all the vocals, meanwhile Kashiyuka was looking for her vocals and solo lines like...

Nocchi was spectacularly black-balled on LEVEL3 and I don't know what she did for Yasutaka to give her so many prominent lines and moments on this song, but YOU GO GURL! It was refreshing to hear her to sing in a higher key after sounding like an auto-tuned kazoo on songs for the past two years.

"Pick me up" is the uptempo club track that Perfume needed to release about now following the disappointing release of "Cling Cling", which only had "Display" to help salvage things somewhat. The track has big Euro hit potential, and is the strongest single Perfume have released since "Spending all my time". I would like to make a call for an album mix though. The structure and the variation from section to section was nice, but it felt as though it was missing something. A strong middle-8 or a strong build / beat drop would have gone down nicely, as the song feels as though it ends prematurely and there are too many sections where the chorus melody plays and it feels overly repetitive.

Just watch how "Pick me up" becomes a club classic somewhere like Turkey, with the girls achieving cult status in a place where they would never ever take their World tour.