Perfume announce the release date of Nebula Romance: Part 2

When Perfume announced they were doing a special show at the Tokyo Dome at the end of September and that it was titled Nebula Romance: Episode Tokyo Dome — this was basically confirmation that Nebula Romance: Part 2 would be out by then. And lo and behold, Perfume has dropped the release date and the album will be out before the show.

Nebula Romance: Episode Tokyo Dome kicks off on 22 September and Nebula Romance: Part 2 will release on 17 September physically. But as was the case with Nebula Romance: Part 1, it will be available digitally a whole month prior. I still don’t get the whole ‘drop the album digitally a month ahead of the physical release’ shenanigans. Maybe Perfume want fans to be familiar with the new songs ahead of the Tokyo Dome show — but getting the album pressed, packaged and shipped for August isn’t feasible? I really don’t know. I generally think the rollout of Nebula Romance has been a bit of a mess. But that’s a whole other post.

Quite a few fans had wondered whether “Moon” would make the cut for Nebula Romance: Part 2, and…

Cipher
Reboot World
Nebula Romance
Solar Wind
Virtual Fantasy
Teenage Dreams
Human Factory - Denzo Ningen -
Moon
Exit
Megu Loop

…it did. The giant death star looking thing on the regular edition album cover for Nebula Romance: Part 1 is called ‘The Moon’, which greatly increased the likelihood of the song featuring on Part 2. Even without having heard Nebula Romance: Part 2 in full — just going by the sounds of “Nebula Romance” and “Megu Loop” alone — “Moon” is a better fit and in better company on Part 2 than it would have been on Part 1. I still think Nebula Romance releasing in two parts was a raggedy idea, given how Part 1 turned out and what I imagine Part 2 will turn out to be. But that’s a whole other post.

The official post on Perfume’s website announcing Nebula Romance: Part 2 states:

‘The sequel to last year’s concept album “Nebula Romance Part 1” is finally here!! The second part will show how the themes presented in the first part are concluded, Perfume evolving to a new dimension, and the story's ending, so please look forward to it!!’.

Gurl. What themes!?

Despite Nebula Romance: Part 1 being a step in the right direction for Perfume sonically, one (of several) issues that I did have with it was that it didn’t feel conceptual at all. There was no real story. What was on the album cover, in the album inlay and what was in the “Cosmic Treat” music video didn’t carry through into the songs, which was really disappointing. Nebula Romance: Part 1 really was just like any other Perfume album. And looking at the titles of the songs on Part 2, it looks like we’re not getting anything conceptual here either. It’s just more of the same, but Team Perfume trying to make out that it’s different. Baby. How? Just look at the song titles. “Cipher”, “Reboot World”, “Virtual Fantasy”. Perfume already done gave us “Computer City”, “Electro World”, “Polygon Wave” and “Android&”. Just based on the titles alone, I bet the songs deal with the same and / or similar topics.

It really is a shame that Perfume’s team and Nakata Yasutaka didn’t create a story for the music. It feels like Nakata had concepts of a plan for a space adventure film in his mind and he was creating songs off of that. But there was never actually a full film or story formulated in his mind. It was just fragments or flashes of ideas which informed the sounds and the titles, but nothing else.

Nebula Romance: Part 1 also didn’t feel whole enough as an album, which is why I think splitting Nebula Romance wasn’t a great idea. Perfume should have just gone the normal route of releasing singles across a 2 year period to world build and then dropped Nebula Romance as one album. It also doesn’t help that Beyoncé is out here with her 3 act shit — each with its own album and showing us some of what Perfume coulda and shoulda done.

I’m really keen to see how the Tokyo Dome show turns out. I watched a review on YouTube from a fan who attended the Nebula Romance: Episode 1 tour and they said that the energy of the tour was a bit of a problem because of the songs — which I could understand. Because — once again, to use Beyoncé as an example — Nebula Romance: Part 1 is no Renaissance. The sequencing isn’t tour ready enough to run from top to bottom. So I’m keen to see if they remedy this with the Tokyo Dome show and mix songs from Nebula Romance Parts 1 and 2 together. Or if they just do Part 1 as they did for the Episode 1 tour and then do Part 2 as Episode 2.

September really isn’t that far away, so I guess we’ll know soon enough. Thankfully Perfume doesn’t have the issue Beyoncé has of people committing crimes and violating air space to see their tour staging and hear their rehearsals to know what’s on the setlist.

Random J Pop | Pop commentary foolishness

Search This Blog

Perfume announce the release date of Nebula Romance: Part 2 — set to drop in September

Comments

Post a Comment