Rewind: Revisiting Natsume Mito’s first and only album, Natsumelo

Natsume Mito’s pop career was very short lived. With a discography featuring one album released in 2017, which sold around 1,500 copies and debuted at 64 on the Oricon chart. She never shoulda released an album in the first place. But we’ll get to that.

So, let’s rewind and revisit Natsume Mito’s debut and only album, Natsumelo.

Natsume Mito felt like a casualty. Because the place she occupied in music at a time of Perfume and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu was so weird. Her music had one foot in what Perfume were doing and one foot in what Kyary was doing—musically and visually. But it came at a time when Perfume and Kyary’s music wasn’t that great and their popularity was experiencing a bit of a dip. The popularity of other acts shouldn’t have anything to do with Natsume at all, but this is what can happen when you rope in Nakata Yasutaka to helm your entire album.

When Nakata Yasutaka produces your whole album, you become a part of the Nakata ecosystem, which comes with its pros and cons. The pros? Acts for whom Nakata Yasutaka produces for are on a Venn diagram, which is basically just circles stacked on top of one another. If you’re a fan of Nakata Yasutaka, then you are a fan of Capsule. And if you’re a fan of Capsule, then you’re probably a fan of Perfume. And if you’re a fan of Perfume, you’re probably a fan of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. And I guess somebody in Natsume’s team saw this overlap too and thought, ‘Well if somebody’s a fan of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, then they’ll probably become a fan of quirky lil’ Natsume Mito’. They thought wrong. Natsume Mito did not catch on at all. But the reasoning behind their theory was correct.

I think part of what prevented Natsume Mito from catching on by riding the Kyary wave, was that by 2017 everybody was kinda tired of Kyary and her brand. So another girl coming along whose music videos looked comparable and music which sounded comparable—nobody was feeling it. And circa 2016, Nakata Yasutaka fans generally seemed to be really tired of his output, which was a bit of a mess. And here be the cons of when you become a part of the Nakata ecosystem.

2015–2017 was rough in the Nakata fandom. His shit just wasn’t that good. Capsule’s 2015 album Wave Runner was welcomed with open arms, especially after Capsule’s prior album CAPS LOCK, which fans didn’t like. And despite liking it personally, I completely get why fans didn’t. But once the initial excitement of Capsule doing dance music again wore off, everybody called a spade a spade. As a Capsule album, Wave Runner just wasn’t that good. Fans were dragging the absolute shit out of Cosmic Explorer, which had released just weeks before Natsumelo did. The general public seemed tired of Kyary by this point. So there wasn’t much bandwidth to listen to this random girl with the big forehead and the short bangs whom Nakata was also producing for. And I imagine that when it came to mass audiences at large, Natsume Mito was rinsing and repeating what Kyary had done and was doing. But by 2017, what felt fresh and resulted in huge hits and wins for Kyary was losing its lustre. So the window of Natsume trying to capitalise on that was pretty much closed.

But more fool us. Because Natsume Mito’s debut album was a nice salve for fans left underwhelmed by Capsule, Perfume and Kyary’s efforts. If only more than 1,500 people bothered to give it the time of day back then. Nakata gave Natsume a better album than he was able to give Capsule, Kyary or Perfume at the time. But timing is everything for music releases. What can be a con or a pro of the Nakata ecosystem—depending on the time—is that Nakata seems to work in these concentrated bursts. So albums he produces all tend to release relatively close to one another, which can either benefit the albums or result in the cannibalisation of attention spans and sales. If the first album out of the gate isn’t good, then it creates an expectation for whatever comes next. So, given the hat trick of Wave Runner, Cosmic Explorer and the underwhelming responses to Kyary’s KPP Best singles compared to those from her previous studio albums, nobody was trying to hear Natsumelo.

But then there is the album itself. Natsumelo is a very front loaded album. A well produced album which actually feels like an album. But still, a very front loaded one. The majority of the singles are in the first half of the album, which is the best part of the album. The second half kinda just bleeds into a forgettable sludge of songs. Even the single “Watashi wo Fes ni Tsuretette”, for all its energy during a sluggish second half to an album, doesn’t quite manage to pop. And this is where I ponder the question ‘Did Natsume Mito need to release an album in the first place?’. Japanese music back then was still prioritising singles. So I think it would have been fine to have just had Natsume release a bunch of singles. How that would have worked as a recording contract which tend to be based on albums, I do not know. But whatever her deal was, Sony got nothing out of it, because Natsume’s shit can’t have mad anybody any money with how poorly it performed. Natsumelo came and went like a bus. Natsumelo would have been a tighter package as an EP. But regardless, the sales show that there just was not enough interest in Natsume Mito’s musical endeavours. So not matter what she released or how, it would have been certified tatami mat.

Generally, I just don’t think there seemed to be much of a plan for Natsume’s ‘music career’ or how Natsumelo should be packaged. ‘Why is this an album?’ aside, even just the cover art and inlay for the album was strange to me. In all of Natsume’s music videos she’s giving us kooky-friend-next-door-in-a-90s-Disney-Channel-show vibes. And yet, on the album cover for Natsumelo and the inlay shots, she’s giving us Vogue editorial vibes.

It seems as though music was trying to be used as a soundtrack to whatever Natsume was doing in other aspects of her career as a model, as was the case with Kyary and also Meisa Croaky. But Kyary was able to package this better the first time around. She had also amassed such a large global audience by the time Nanda Collection had released, so she was better set up for success. And Nanda Collection was such a huge hit, that Kyary was afforded the opportunity to keep the music thing going longer than I think she or any of us expected. There was no way Warner Music was going to let a bitch not put out another couple of albums after Nanda Collection went number 1 and was certified platinum. With Natsume, it seemed like her team wanted to try and speed run Kyary’s success path, just for none of the songs to catch on, and for her album to not be the surprise hit that I think she and Sony hoped it might be.

Trying to replicate Kyary’s success model is tough, because so much of it truly was about timing and luck. Nobody could have planned for “PonPonPon” to go as viral as it did. Especially during a period when virality wasn’t really a thing in Japanese music. This was in 2011, before the “Plastic Love” phenomenon which came about because of YouTube. Natsume and her team really did try to go viral though, by releasing 11 music videos for “Maegami Kirisugita”, just for it to peak at number 36 on the Oricon chart.

It’s unfortunately fortunate. Because Natsumelo isn’t some complete piece of shit. “Odekake Summer”, “8-bit Boy”, “I’ll Do My Best” and “Hanabira” are all fantastic songs, which really do show the sharpness and breadth of Nakata’s productions. But all of these coulda been given to Kyary or Perfume and been no worse nor better off. The way Nakata’s songs can be so easily switched between artists he produces for is another con of being in the Nataka ecosystem—but that’s a whole other post.