Music video: Perfume - Relax in the city

As every body pointed out once the single art work was revealed, visually "Relax in the city" is pretty much "Kasuka na kaori" meets descendants of Krypton from the House of El. The music video to this song was just the single art work come to life. This is pretty much the case with every Perfume music video, except the result here was pretty underwhelming and yielded few surprises. The girls looked lovely and the scenery was beautiful, but there's nothing about this video that would make you watch it twice. And as great as some of the editing trickery was at the start, it seemed to get sloppier as the video progressed and lost impact after the first minute.

As for the song, I'm not a fan. "Pick me up" is where it's at. "Rleax in the city" is not a terrible song, but it's not a great one neither. Yet again, the girls are sounding like chipmunks and the whole thing feels like a school nursery rhyme. In the wake of "Pick me up" where we finally got to hear Nocchi sing in a higher register and A-chan sing in her natural singing voice, it comes off even worse and feels regressive. Yet again, I get this feeling that Nakata is uncertain of which direction ultimately Perfume's sound should go in. When he gets it right, he nails it. But for every instance he gets it right, comes a song where you are left wondering 'What the actual fuck?'.

If Perfume's 5th studio album were to drop and "Pick me up" was the only single to make the cut, I would not be upset. Not even a little bit. In fact, I wholly welcome a new Perfume album where 90% of the material is new.