Rewind: Koda Kumi - Trick

I first reviewed Trick back in 2009 and I wasn’t a huge fan of it. Spoiler. I’m still not a fan of it. But time has given me a slightly different perspective on the album. So, I want use this installment of Rewind on the 17th anniversary of the Trick to talk more about it — expanding on things which I only touched on in my initial review, or didn’t talk about at all, in addition to where I think Trick sits now that we have more albums and more of Kumi’s career to glean over.

Trick was Koda Kumi’s seventh album. By this point Kumi was established. She wasn’t just that girl who sang the Final Fantasy X-2 song or that girl who straddled a bar top and threw a glass of vodka on her titties in the “Cutie Honey” music video. She was KODA MOTHERFUCKING KUMI. And not only had she garnered herself a large dedicated Japanese fanbase, but she had amassed a sizeable international one too. And Trick was the first album where we saw Kumi flex her capital to start working with popular American artists, resulting in Fuggie Fug featuring on “That Ain’t Cool”.

Trick was the album where Kumi knew exactly who she was. It’s easy to look back and think it was Kingdom, and for obvious reasons. But to me, it that penny truly dropped on Trick. Kingdom was ‘I think I’m that bitch….? Or at least, I wanna be that bitch. Lemme manifest being that bitch.’ Trick was ‘Oh, wait. I am that bitch.’

Koda Kumi - Trick | Avex Entertainment Inc.

Kumi was indeed that bitch on Trick. But Trick is not that great of an album. But when I think about where Kumi’s career was in 2008–2009 and the landscape of music at the time — Trick being what it was makes a lot of sense.

Trick released in 2009, which was a period in music where we saw the rise of electro pop. And the way this impacted each genre wasn’t always in the most obvious of ways. We saw Hip-Hop and R&B become a bit electro by way of autotune — popularised by T-Pain, which Kanye West ran with for his album 808s & Heartbreaks. This sound became so popular on American radio that it prompted Jay-Z to release a song declaring the death of it.

As for pop, the sound of it became more dance focused. Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” was a huge hit which made a lot of women in pop take notice. But there were also songs such as Akon’s “Beautiful”, Taio Cruz’s “Break Your Heart” and The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” — which not only took over radio and defined the sound of it for a minute, but created this whole new lane for male Black artists who had previously felt confined to just Rap or R&B. And what we saw happen in the midst of this, is that pop became fun again. After years of what felt like angsty music and everybody wanting to be serious and be seen as cool — pop was a bit whimsical again. We were on the other side of the millennial chromes, whites and Y2K aesthetics. And this wasn’t just in America, but in Japan too. Koda Kumi’s Trick reflected this. It was a much more fun and vibrant album than Black Cherry and Kingdom were — both visually and musically.

Koda Kumi loves to hop on existing trends and do what the others do — but the results can vary wildly, and this has always been a problem with her music. Trick didn’t get things completely right. But it at least offered a glimpse of how things could be if Kumi actually did get it right. Where-as Kingdom and Black Cherry felt wholly derivative, Trick felt like it at least tried to push Kumi forward. It felt more like the progression from Best ~Second Session~ that Kingdom and Black Cherry both should have been. It’s still not great though.

Koda Kumi - Trick | Avex Entertainment Inc.

The first half of Trick is really strong. I said that I ‘hated’ “Taboo” in my original review. But since then, I have come around on the song. I really like the chorus. The brightness of it in contrast to the dark verses is really cool. The melody shift is nice and Kumi’s voice sounds great on it. I like that Kumi continues to sing really low, when some artists, producers and mixers would probably have had a preference for the vocals to be higher — to lift them more out of the music. But Kumi’s vocals staying low on the chorus works so well here. And the really unfortunate thing about listening to a song like “Taboo” now, is that I don’t think she could do a song like this now, because there would be a likelihood that hi-yunk would produce it, throw way too much autotune on Kumi’s vocals and make the chorus noisy. So with me having a new appreciation for “Taboo”, I can outright say that the first half of this album is strong. The intro is a mess. But “Taboo”, “Show Girl”, “Your Love”, “Stay With Me”, “This Is Not a Love Song” and “Driving” is a damn good run of songs.

From track 8 onward is where the album really starts to lose steam and lose me.

“Bling Bling Bling” is fucking awful. And whilst the Kumi and Fuggy Fug of it all for “This Ain’t Cool” is…cool. The song really isn’t that good and Kumi is completely sidelined on it. Both the music video and the song come off more like Fergie featuring Koda Kumi. None of the songs in the second half of the album are flat out bad. But they feel like copies or variations of songs we had gotten in the first half. “Moon Crying” and “Ai no Kotoba” are nice, but we already had “Stay With Me”. “Just the Way You Are” is cute, but we already had “Your Love”. “This Ain’t Cool” and “Bling Bling Bling” don’t hold a candle to “This Is Not a Love Song” — which Fergie would have been much better on by the way. The album at least ends strong, with a cover of “Venus”. “Venus” was originally released by Dutch rock band Shocking Blue in 1969, but pop heads and homosexuals were probably introduced to the Bananarama version which was released in 1985. And judging from Kumi’s cover, the Banarama version is what her cover is based on.

If Trick was just the first half of the album and “Venus”, it would have made for a pretty damn good EP. There was clearly something in the water at Avex, because ‘Girl, this LP coulda been a good EP’ was how I felt about a couple of Ayu’s albums which were released just a couple of years prior. Sometimes the incessancy of ‘record a few more songs to make up an album’ can saturate what could have made a really good EP. But it’s the music business innit. There’s more money to be made from an LP than an album. And coin is more important than creative integrity. Although applying this to Kumi might be putting something on her which she has never been about, nor wants to be about. Because looking at her discography to date, creative integrity clearly is not of any importance to her.

Koda Kumi - Trick | Avex Entertainment Inc.

Trick was onto something. But Kumi and co., didn’t realise it enough to really go all the way with it and make a good album out of it. In terms of its sound, Trick had a life and an energy to it that Kingdom and Black Cherry didn’t. Trick was also one of Kumi’s first albums to feature a really great cover — a foreshadowing of what she’d deliver with her debut cover album Eternity ~Love & Songs~. And the Fuggy Ferg feature made more creative sense to me than TVXQ on “Last Angel”. That felt very much like an Avex choice. Where-as Fuggy Ferg really did feel like Kumi’s personal choice because of how inspirational “Fergilicious” was to her during that period where she was sent to pop jail for talking about expired pussy fluid. Also, it was an instance of Kumi actually being bang on trend and on time, because the Fergie feature came at a time when The Black Eyed Peas were still huge worldwide.

It really is such a shame that Kumi is never able to see when she has a good thing going in her music and really hone in on it. Trick was not that good of an album, but it so easily could have been. And at the very least Trick was taking Kumi’s sound in the right direction. She said ‘Nah, I’m cool here’ and chose to not grow, not push, not develop, not evolve. Instead she chose to just rinse and repeat. And if anything, her music has devolved. Because these CL cosplay, K-pop wannabe, hi-yunk productions which have defined her music for the past decade are awful. I’d say they are beneath her, but maybe they aren’t. Maybe they are exactly on Kumi’s level. But I’d like to think that Trick was a sign that said otherwise.

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💿 Koda Kumi reviews: Affection | Secret | Grow into One | Feel My Mind | Black Cherry | Trick | Kingdom | Universe | Eternity ~Love & Songs~ | Dejavu | Japonesque | Color the Cover | Bon Voyage | Walk Of My Life | W Face | AND | DNA | re(CORD) | angeL + monsteR [My Name Is...] | Heart | Unicorn | De:Code